Sébastien de Brossard ed. by Jean Duron

Sébastien de Brossard (1655–1730), a crucial figure of the late French baroque period belonging to the generation between Lully and Rameau, has received much musicological attention within the last thirty years. Known primarily through his Dictionnaire de musique (1703), a pioneering work of its kind in France, Brossard gained a reputation throughout his life as a music theorist and music collector. There is little evidence that his own music was much performed during his lifetime, a few exceptions notwithstanding. This situation changed in the last two decades of the twentieth century, when the performance of Brossard’s music experienced a renaissance in France, thanks to the renewed interest in his compositions resulting from the groundbreaking scholarly work by Jean Duron, Yolande de Brossard, and Catherine Cessac. While these scholars have all greatly contributed toward Brossard’s thrust into the scholarly limelight through catalogs, biographies, editions, and articles, much of the merit of editing Brossard’s oeuvre goes to Jean Duron. Duron’s expertise as editor of both Brossard’s music and of his theoretical writings has yielded a wealth of publications, which include a thematic catalog (Jean Duron, L’œuvre de Sébastien de Brossard (1655–1730): Catalogue thématique, Domaine musicologique II, Publications du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, CMBV-a 1 [Versailles: Éditions du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles; Paris: Klincksieck, 1995]) and four of the eight volumes that comprise the collected edition of Brossard’s works, published by the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles over the last twenty years. The volume under review—edited by Duron—features Brossard’s dramatic works, and completes the series devoted to the composer.

One of the chief issues facing Duron with this volume was the paucity of Brossard’s dramatic works. The most important source of Brossard’s own music—his personal collection he bequeathed to the Royal Library, carefully detailed in his own Catalogue des livres de musique théorique et pratique (see La collection Sébastien de Brossard, 1655–1730: Catalogue (Département de la musique, Rés. Vm.⁸ 20), ed. Yolande de Brossard [Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1994], hereinafter, Catalogue; the original document is available at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b550059643)—does not contain all of his works, and this makes the task of gauging the composer’s operatic output particularly difficult. Duron surmises, “in the area of dramatic music, it is probable that the three works edited here represent only a part of his production” (p. xxxix [page references are to Buford Norman’s English translation of Duron’s introduction]). The three works in question include the dramatic divertissement Typhon et les Géants (Typhoeus and the Giants, 1691), the Concert sur l’Alceste de Lully (Con cert based on Lully’s Alceste, 1691–95), and a collection of thirteen pieces, both instrumental and vocal—eight of which are by Brossard—entitled Intermèdes (ca. 1699). In his introduction (p. xxxix–xlii), Duron also details the historical background to the opera Pyrame et Thisbé, composed by Brossard for the 1685 festivities at Reuil, organized by the 2d Duke of Richelieu for Louis XIV, which is unfortunately lost. The opera was probably never performed because the Reuil festivities were cancelled on account of the king’s more pressing project—the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

In order to understand Duron’s choices for inclusion in this edition, some background on Brossard’s knowledge of French opera is in order (discussed in Duron’s introduction, pp. xxxv–xxxvii). Much of Brossard’s familiarity with the...