In April 1683, Charpentier, hoping for just recognition, presented himself with thirty-five other musicians at the recruitment contest for assistant masters of music for the Royal Chapel. Unfortunately, illness prevented him from finishing the tests. Some months after the competition, the Queen of France, Marie-Thérèse, died. In order to commemorate her, Charpentier wrote three superb pieces: a kind of extended sacred history, In obitum augustissimæ nec non piissimæ Gallorum reginæ lamentum followed by a De profundis, and the petit motet Luctus de morte augustissimæ Mariæ Theresiæ reginæ Galliæ. Charpentier was also musically present with the royal family in order to celebrate the healing of the fistula of Louis XIV. In February 1687, he received a commission from the Academy of Painting and Sculpture for the performance in the church of the Priests at the Oratory of the rue Saint-Honoré of a Te Deum and an Exaudiat “for two choirs of musicians” of his own composition in order to “give thanks to God for the restoration of the health of the King.”
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In all the genres in which Charpentier wrote, he showed the same mastery of composition. He was able to be profound and serious in his religious music, moving or light in his theatre music.
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Music for the Convents
During the 1680s convents such as Port-Royal, Paris, and the Abbaye-aux-Bois requested pieces from Charpentier. For the first, he wrote a Mass and some motets (Pange lingua, Magnificat, Dixit Dominus and Laudate Dominum), for the second Tenebræ Lessons with Responsories. In the 17th century, the Office of Tenebræ was one of the high points of the liturgy. It took place during Holy Week. The lessons, three per day, occurred during the first Nocturn of Matins. The texts are drawn from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, in which the prophet mourns the destruction of Jerusalem. As with many other genres, Charpentier was the only French composer of his time to have left such a large number of Tenebrae lessons. In his first lessons, for from one to three voices, Charpentier developed a specifically French style inherited from the air de cour, highly ornamented, while remaining faithful to the Gregorian tonus lamentationum, and bringing to it the richness of his harmony. The later lessons abandon this style of writing for that of the concertato petit motet, with instruments.
On the death of Mlle de Guise in 1688, Charpentier entered the employment of the Jesuits at two of their Parisian establishments. He became master of music of the college of Louis the Great, rue Saint-Jacques, then of the church of Saint-Louis, rue Saint-Antoine. In his Catalogue of musical books, Brossard explains the choice of the Jesuits, Charpentier having “always been known to the taste of all true connoisseurs as the most profound and learned of modern musicians. It is doubtless this which made the Reverend Jesuit Fathers of the rue Saint-Antoine take him as master of music for their church, then a splendid position”. During the course of six years, Charpentier composed a significant number of pieces which reflect the great diversity of the Jesuit ceremonies: psalms, Magnificats, hymns and antiphons for Vespers, Masses, Tenebrae lessons, motets for the Virgin, for the saints, for the Holy Sacrament and so forth.
From the installation of the Jesuits in France in the mid 17th century, and the foundation of the first colleges, school theatrical presentations were quickly integrated into their educational programme. These were written in Latin, on a religious theme. Very quickly, interludes, danced or sung in French, were inserted within these tragedies. In fact, in the face of the success of Lullian opera, Jesuit theatre found it necessary to be present in this field too. Thus, the musical interludes increased in size, so that they became true tragedies in music. The finest example of this evolution was David et Jonathas by Fr Francis Bretonneau and Charpentier, given on 28th February 1688, together with the spoken Latin tragedy, on the same subject, entitled Saül. One year before, on 10 February to be exact, Charpentier had put on another work, Celse martyr, whose music is lost. Fortunately, David et Jonathas has come down to us thanks to a copy compiled by the King’s librarian, Philidor the elder. As with tragédie lyrique, David et Jonathas comprises a prologue and five acts. The proportions of the work allowed contemporaries to consider it a genuine “opera”, which one may even regard as a challenge to the monopoly of the Royal Academy, even though it distanced itself from the official model played at Court in the originality of its conception and its language: there is an almost total absence of recitative, no great effects “with machines”, a concentration of the dramatic interest on the characters (the importance of monologues) and on their psychology, emphasized particularly by the expressiveness and refinement of the music. David et Jonathas is an unique work of its kind, a masterpiece by the great Charpentier, and a valuable testimony to the dramatic musical art of the Jesuits of which so few traces remain.
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