The Sun King at worship

Alexandre Maral, La chapelle royale de Versailles sous Louis XIV: cérémonial, liturgie et musique (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2002 ), €58

This study serves a long-felt need for more detailed background to the distinctive repertory of sacred music for the messe basse solennelle that was the musical highpoint of daily worship at Versailles in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Whereas in almost every other Catholic court chapel, composers were expected to provide settings of the Ordinary of the Mass as well as motets of various kinds, the preference of the king of France (the custom was continued under Louis XV and Louis XVI) was to attend a daily low Mass where the service was said, while, simultaneously, soloists, chorus and orchestra performed a grand motet (not too dissimilar from a Lutheran church cantata), most often a setting of one of the psalms. Then, at the elevation of the Host, a petit motet (appropriately termed an élévation) was performed by solo voices and continuo. The full musical forces concluded the service with a brief setting of the last verse of Psalm 19, Domine salvum fac regem ('Lord, save the king'). This apparent dichotomy between worship and music is visually underlined by the internal layout of the last of Louis XIV's chapels, finished in 1710, only five years before his death, and the building we see today: at the lower level, the priest at the high altar, the side chapels and the congregation; on the upper level (nearer to heaven than the priest), the king and his consort seated in the rear gallery, facing the organ, choir and orchestra at the opposite end, directly above the high altar. The king would have heard the grand motet perfectly, but probably not the priest's words at all, except when the music stopped.

Thus the royal chapel composer's first duty was to provide a steady stream of new grands motets and élévations, and it was left to composers outside the court or in the provinces to compose Mass settings. But royal fashions often prevailed outside Versailles, and over a thousand grands motets by French composers of the period, and an even greater number of petits motets are extant alongside relatively few Mass settings.

Alexandre Maral has set out to provide as full a picture as possible of the ceremonial, liturgical (and architectural) framework of which, as it turns out, the spectacle of the king's daily divertissement sacré was only part. Although the wealth of liturgical and ceremonial detail makes for heavy going, Maral marshals his material well in the best French archivist's manner, providing many striking illustrations (several hitherto unpublished), documents and other annexes which together occupy some 25 per cent of the book's pages. Unfortunately these annexes do not include a comprehensive index, except one of proper names, another of places, and a short 'index liturgique'. That leaves plenty of topics frequently discussed that fall outside these three lists: the reader wanting to check out, for example, the many references to castratos, or to 'femmes chanteuses' who sang in the king's chapel will just have to wade through the entire text of some 400 pages.

The text proper is divided in two: 'Un lieu et des hommes', which details the various earlier chapels and the ecclesiastical structures that governed them (occupying roughly another 25 per cent of the book), and then the central 50 per cent, entitled 'La vie quotidienne à la chapelle royale'. This core of the book is itself divided into ten sections, of which one of the most substantial (but not the only one concerning musical matters) is entitled 'Musiques de chœur'.

One of the most significant documents cited by Maral, and which does not seem to have been noticed by earlier scholars, is the massive four-volume manuscript Cérémonial historique commenced in 1692 by the Abbé Chuperelle, and today in the Archives Départementales at Rouen. Among much other information...