Five Lives in Music: Women Performers, Composers, and Impresarios from the Baroque to the Present

2. Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre: Versailles and Paris in the Twilight of the Ancien Régime

chapter two Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre Versailles and Paris in the Twilight of the Ancien Régime If you know something of the palace of Versailles, the city of Paris, and the landscapes of Jean-Antoine Watteau, you have glimpsed the world of the French composer, harpsichordist, and organist Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre (1665–1729).1 She was the first woman to have a work, her opera Céphale et Procris , staged at the Académie Royale de Musique, the prestigious opera house in Paris. An older contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel, Jacquet de La Guerre was baptized on March 17, 1665, according to her church records.2 No birth certificate has been found (fig. 8). Catherine Cessac, Jacquet’s chief biographer in recent years, concludes that her baptism occurred only a few days after her birth, a common occurrence owing to the high infant mortality rate.3 It should be noted here that besides Cessac’s monograph and articles, substantial contributions to Jacquet’s life and works have also been made by Mary Cyr,4 Carol Henry Bates, Catherine Massip, Wanda R. Griffiths, and Adrian Rose, to name a number of the most prominent scholars. The seminal study of Jacquet de La Guerre in English is Edith Borroff’s 1966 work: “An Introduction to Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre.”5 Credit for even earlier research into Jacquet de La Guerre’s accomplishments also goes to Michel Brenet (Marie Bobillier), her work (in French) on Jacquet dating from the first decade of the twentieth century. Jacquet de La Guerre’s professional successes—and they were numerous—were not altogether unpredictable. She grew up in a family, both immediate and extended , of active and respected musicians; and she lived amid the rich cultural environment of Versailles and Paris. It was a time when musical life flourished at the court of Louis XIV and among the French capital’s urban bourgeoisie, who were gaining considerable power and influence in cultural affairs. Jacquet de La Guerre’s life and art fit neatly into the prosperity, splendor, and turbulence of the grand siècle, when Louis, the “Sun King,” reigned (1643–1715) as an absolute monarch. During Jacquet de La Guerre’s lifetime, the thriving musical life of the French court also extended, to some degree, into the Regency of Philippe, Duke d’Orléans (1715–1723) and the early reign of Louis XV (1723–1774). In 1682, Louis XIV finally realized his dream of moving the court officially from Paris to Versailles—once merely his favored hunting lodge, then vastly expanded to serve as his court. At Louis’s death in 1715, the regent, Philippe, returned the royal establishment to Paris; but by 1723 Louis XV had resettled the court at Versailles, where it remained until the revolution of 1789. Figure 8. Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, c. 1694–1695. Oil portrait by François de Troy (1645–1730). Jacquet de La Guerre holding a blank sheet of paper with empty musical staves and a feather pen at the ready. She is seated at a two-manual harpsichord made in Antwerp. Her elegant appearance gently hints at her comfortable living circumstances. Like the composer, the painter was a protégé of Mme. De Montespan and a leader in French portraiture in his day. One, therefore, could reasonably assume that Jacquet de La Guerre and de Troy knew each other. The portrait dates from the same time period as the composer’s opera, Céphale et Procris. Private collection, London. Courtesy of the owner. 40 chapter 2 Versailles and Paris Only twelve-and-a-half miles southwest of Paris, the Versailles palace speaks of noble grandeur further adorned by finely carved sculpture and stately tapestries. Even today, these highly visible features resemble a gigantic baroque stage set tempered by rococo embellishment and idealizing a cosmic sense of fantasy, delicacy, and artificiality. As more fully examined later in this chapter, the interplay between the surroundings and music of the city and court substantially influenced Jacquet de La Guerre’s life and musical achievements. With the same visual extravagance as that vested in Versailles, the bucolic paintings of Jacquet’s younger contemporary Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) idealize the France of Louis XIV, as, for example, in the artist’s Country Dance, 1706–1710 (fig. 9). Watteau’s painting underscores a delight in fantastical...