New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier (review)

The collection of essays in New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier is both a final echo of the "Charpentier year" 2004 (the tercentenary of the composer's death), and a new example of the lively interest in the composer and his music. It comes as the third such collection, after Marc-Antoine Charpentier: Un musicien retrouvé, ed. Catherine Cessac (Sprimont, Belgium: Mardaga, 2005) and Les manuscrits autographes de Marc-Antoine Charpentier, ed. Catherine Cessac (Wavre, Belgium: Mardaga, 2007). The book is the product of a conference, "Charpentier and His World," organized at the Birmingham Conservatoire in England by the volume's editor and Charpentier specialist, Shirley Thompson. Its contributors reflect the geographical breadth of interest in Charpentier, represented by scholars from France, continental Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. The variety of contributions to the volume also underlines the special problems Charpen tier's music presents, and it is a sign of the current state of Charpentier studies that work on the composer's autograph manuscripts, the Mélanges, continues to yield new discoveries and insights into Charpentier's music and "his world." However, the volume also reflects a number of other avenues of research: establishing links between Charpentier's works and their contexts, coming to terms with his unique style and its relationship to the broader French musical language, and understanding the composer's influence on that language. Besides thirteen essays, the book also includes a transcription with commentary of the "Mémoire des ouvrages de musique latine et françoise de défunt M.r Charpentier": the listing of the contents of the composer's manuscripts drawn up for their sale to the Bibliothèque royale in 1726. As a whole, the book makes a significant contribution to Charpentier research.

Two of the book's essays focus on the organization of the Mélanges. The first, by Catherine Cessac (" 'Une source peut en cacher une autre': Added Preludes and Instrumental Cues in the Mélanges") takes up a problem revealed in handwriting studies: the question of which pieces, or portions of pieces, represent reworkings of older music. The new versions thus "hide" older ones, as the essay's title indicates. Cessac notes that a large number of such reworkings involve the addition of instrumental pieces or indications of instrumental performance. Her survey of these additions concludes that some were added directly to works when there was room in the Mélanges to notate them; others were included in later volumes with directions indicating the pieces to which they belonged. More problematic are pieces that refer to accompanying instruments but include no music for them, presumably references to sets of parts, now lost. The second of these essays, by the volume's editor, Shirley Thompson ("Charpentier's Motets melêz de symphonie: A Nephew's Tribute"), is an exhaustive study of the sources for the motets published by Charpentier's nephew, the inheritor of his manuscripts. This essay makes a major contribution in tracing the fate of the manuscripts used as sources for the print. Through careful comparisons of the current contents of the Mélanges with the Mémoire created shortly after the composer's manuscripts were sold, Thompson concludes that some autographs taken from the Mélanges were replaced in their original positions after the Mémoire was written. Some were placed in the "Gros cahier," which is described in the Mémoire but is no longer extant; these pieces were either lost or bound into new positions in the Mélanges. This reordering took place at the time of the manuscripts' binding in 1752, meaning that they underwent fairly extensive reorganization at that point.

A number of essays apply particular methodologies to the Mélanges as a springboard for understanding various aspects of "Charpentier's world." Herbert Schneider's contribution ("Observations on Charpentier's Compositional Process: Corrections in the Mélanges") takes the route of "sketch studies," noting that while the pieces...