Hands-off Charpentier

There is one paradox that especially afflicts the worlds of early and contemporary music. A given composition may be unpublished, in that no score is commercially available, yet 'published', in that it has been recorded or broadcast. The reasons for this are mainly economic: publishers may consider potential demand too small to justify the outlay, while performing groups may prefer to hire out their material to recoup the costs of preparing it. Whatever the reason, this situation can prove frustrating to anyone who hears a piece on CD and wants to perform it, or who simply wishes to follow the recording with a score.

All the more welcome, then, is a project launched by Éditions des Abbesses in association with William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants, who plan to issue critical editions of the many unpublished works in this ensemble's pioneering repertory. The editions will be organized in two collections, one French, the other Italian, each subdivided into three series: works for the stage, sacred music, and secular.

The project begins, appropriately enough, with music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, the composer with whom Christie is probably most widely associated. Indeed, one of the first two volumes includes the work from which his ensemble derives its name, the 'opéra' or 'idylle' Les arts florissants (H487), the other volume comprising La descente d'Orphée aux enfers (H488). These two 'pocket operas', as Christie dubs them, are among the composer's most attractive and affecting secular works. Written for performance by the musicians of Mademoiselle de Guise (Louis xiv's cousin and Charpentier's patron), they require a mainly one-to-a-part ensemble of eight or nine singers plus a small group of obbligato and continuo players.

Many readers will be familiar with Christie's outstanding recordings of these works (see EM, x (1982), pp.565–7, and xxv (1997), p.155). Some will have access to the Minkoff facsimiles of the composer's autograph manuscripts with which to follow these recordings. The prime motivation behind the present editions is, however, to encourage performance. It was thus a bold decision to present these works with minimal editorial intervention. Christie argues that a generation or more ago, when this music was unfamiliar, wholesale modernization of the notation was essential; but now that we have reached a greater maturity and understanding of Charpentier's idiom, the time has come 'to challenge the practice of modernization in favour of the most faithful reproduction possible of the source material'. He urges all musicians, amateur or professional, 'to immerse themselves in this style of writing (period clefs, period notation, old French etc.) so as to better understand its workings and meaning and to ask themselves the essential questions of interpretation'.

To be sure, editions already exist which retain 'obsolete' features such as colouration or void notation (croches blanches). But this series goes a stage further than most in presenting what at first sight seems little more than a diplomatic transcription, even to the extent of retaining the direction of stems. On closer inspection, however, the user is given much on-the-page assistance. Footnotes discreetly show where errors have been corrected and explain the implications of unusual repeat structures, potentially obscure autograph annotations and suchlike. 'Redundant' flats and sharps are retained (Charpentier does not use the natural in these works, though he does elsewhere), but editorial accidentals above the stave remove any doubt as to where 'cancels' are required. Period spelling and diacritics likewise remain largely unmodernized, though syllables have been consistently hyphenated, abbreviations or contractions expanded, 'u' replaced by 'v' where appropriate, and missing apostrophes indicated spatially (e.g. lempire becomes l em-pi-re).

In short, musicians used to performing from facsimiles—a growing band—should have little difficulty in coming to terms...