Representing Jacquet de La Guerre on Disc: Scoring and basse continue Practices, and a New Painting of the Composer

Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre was, by all accounts, a remarkable musician. As harpsichordist, organist, and composer, she was recognized and honoured in her own day as 'the marvel of our century',¹ the first woman to compose an opera for performance at the Académie Royale in Paris, and a gifted performer on the harpsichord from an early age. In 1985, when Adrian Rose published an overview and appreciation of her cantatas in this journal, her contributions had begun to receive attention from scholars, but few of her musical works were then available in modern or facsimile editions. Rose contributed valuable insights into Jacquet de La Guerre's compositional style, and drew attention to her secular cantatas as some of her finest works. Since that time several important scholarly works have been devoted to her life and music, most notably the excellent monograph by Catherine Cessac.²

Within the past decade performers have also shown considerable interest in Jacquet de La Guerre's music. Her opera, Céphale et Procris (1694), has been revived,³ and a recent performing edition of that work also contributed to renewed interest in her music.⁴ Several facsimile and performing editions of her cantatas are now available,⁵ and her vocal and instrumental music frequently finds its way onto the concert stage. At least seven compact discs, nearly all of which were issued within the past five years, have been devoted in all or in part to her cantatas.⁶ These recordings offer an opportunity to review some of the issues and challenges that arise when performing early 18th-century French cantatas and to compare the ways that modern ensembles have solved them. Before discussing the discs in detail, it will be useful to survey briefly Jacquet de La Guerre's contribution to the genre and to outline the issues that vocal and instrumental scoring andthe basse continue raise when performing early 18th-century French cantatas.

Jacquet de La Guerre's first two books of cantatas, Cantates françoises, sur des sujets tirez de l'ecriture; a voix seule, et basse-continue ... livre premier (Paris, 1708) and Cantates françoises, sur des sujets tirez de l'ecriture; a I. II. voix, et basse-continue ... livre second (Paris, 1711), belong to the early period of the genre in France. Nicholas Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Stuck, Jean-Baptiste Morin, André Campra and Thomas-Louis Bourgeois also published cantatas during the first decade of its existence, beginning in 1703. Jacquet de La Guerre's first two books (illus.1, 2), printed in moveable type by Christophe Ballard, each contain six cantatas with texts by Antoine Houdar de La Motte. Her cantatas are unusual inthat the texts are based on stories drawn from theOld Testament rather than mythological or amorous subjects. Jacquet de La Guerre's cantatas follow the pattern established by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau of three recitatives and three airs in alternation, usually ending with an air that gives the narrator's statement of a moral or axiom. When she departs from this formal plan, she usually does so in order to add an arioso passage that provides a bridge between a recitative and subsequent air. These passages often add dramatic emphasis at moments of action or revelation in the story. With her third book of cantatas (Semelé, L'isle de Delos, Le Sommeil d'Ulisse—Cantates francoises aûquelles on a joint Le Raccommodement Comique, Paris, n.d.; illus.3), engraved from copper plates by Henri de Baussen about 1715 (the date is not specified on the title-page), Jacquet de La Guerre turned to three secular texts and added a short comic dialogue written originally for the Parisian Fair Theatre (Théâtre de la Foire) at St.-Germain. The dialogue, entitled Raccommodement Comique de Pierrot et de Nicole, was first performed there...