Program Note

Program Note Julia Doe

A day in the life at Marie Antoinette’s Versailles was filled with music. Certainly, music played a critical role in the ceremonial apparatus of the court, providing a soundtrack to the public rituals that defined the quotidian existence of the Bourbon monarchs. As the historian Patrick Barbier has documented, vocalists from the royal chapel performed sacred hymns and motets for the king’s daily mass. Instrumentalists from the Maison du roi (royal household) played excerpts to accompany the soupers à grand couvert, meals taken by the king and queen before an audience of courtiers. And actors associated with the nation’s Crown-supported theaters—known as the comédiens ordinaires du roi—journeyed regularly from Paris to Versailles to supply dramatic spectacles, which functioned as vehicles of both pleasurable entertainment and monarchical glorification. Less well-known than these “official” artistic events – though no less important to the image-making of the regime—were the many musical activities of Marie Antoinette’s private sphere. As outlined in the essay The Musical Revolution of Marie Antoinette, on the queen’s patronage, Marie Antoinette had begun her studies in voice, harpsichord, and harp during her childhood in Habsburg Austria, and she would pursue these practices with great enthusiasm throughout her time in France. The works featured on this evening’s program are, on a general level, representative of the repertory played by Marie Antoinette and her associates at her informal salons; these are exemplars of the genres most popular with French musical amateurs in the late eighteenth century, including instrumental sonatas, strophic songs known as romances, and aria arrangements from contemporary operas. Moreover, these works, reflect the output of composers and virtuosos with particularly close links to the queen. These were the artists who coached her, performed for her, and most directly benefited from her sponsorship, as showcased either in the concerts de la reine (small-scale, thrice-weekly concerts in the queen’s apartments at Versailles) or on the public stages of the French capital.

The composers featured on this program had varied relationships with the hypermusical monarch, revealing the broad scope of her cultural patronage, the diversity of styles that evoked her interest, and the multifaceted intersections between her “public” and “private” projects. Several of the musicians foregrounded on this concert served as Marie Antoinette’s personal tutors. She had the longest association with Christoph Willibald Gluck, who had been hired to teach keyboard to the Habsburg children in the 1760s; she would have her most frequent interactions with the harpist Philippe-Joseph Hinner, who gave her regular lessons

on that instrument in the 1770s. Another category of artists in Marie Antoinette’s inner circle comprised the virtuosos who accompanied her private salon evenings, including the noted pianist Jan Ladislav Dussek and the violinist Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. (Dussek and Saint-Georges were also headliners at the Concert Spirituel, the most prestigious Parisian concert series of the age, an indication of the high quality of the concerts de la reine.) Finally, several composers developed ties to the queen through their preeminence in the realm of court opera. The lyric comedies of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry were performed roughly 200 times at Versailles and Fontainebleau in the late ancien régime. Marie Antoinette was either the dedicatee (or thinly veiled allegorical subject) of several of these works; she was also named the godmother of Grétry’s youngest daughter, Antoinette. Jean-Paul-Égide Martini, similarly, enjoyed frequent court commissions in this period, with operas like Henri IV (written for the accession of Louis XVI in 1774) and Le droit du seigneur (rehearsed under the queen’s supervision in 1783).

Although the performances of Marie Antoinette’s salon and the concerts de la reine took place before limited, elite audiences, these activities cannot strictly be construed as insular. Indeed, the works patronized by the queen demonstrate her wide-ranging impact as an artistic tastemaker. Trends that took hold at Versailles provided clear impetus to the evolution of musical life in the French capital. This is strongly the case with regard to the principal instrument on this evening’s program: the harp. The queen’s well-known fondness for the instrument – and support for its leading practitioners (such as Hinner, Jean-Baptiste Cardon, JeanBaptiste Krumpholtz, and Francesco Petrini)—were critical in transforming Paris into the European center of harp production, performance, and publication in the final decades of the ancien régime. Musical almanacs list nearly sixty harp teachers working in the French capital in the 1780s, alongside numerous firms specializing in the manufacture of the instrument, including Cousineau, Érard, and Naderman. (The queen played a harp by the latter builder, similar to the instrument used in tonight’s performance.) As Sue Carole DeVale and Nancy Thym-Hochrein have noted, it was “in Parisian workshops that all the important developments in harp construction in the second half of the eighteenth century took place.” Marie Antoinette and several other members of the Bourbon family posed for portraits that prominently featured the instrument—underscoring how the harp was viewed as a symbol of feminine accomplishment, as well as wealth and prestige, more generally.

If there were notable overlaps between the musical fashions of Versailles and Paris, Marie Antoinette’s favored repertory also encapsulates how the artistic tastes of the Bourbon monarchy grew more “international” during her reign. While the official

productions of Versailles had long been dominated by French artists, the court now served as a nexus for both native and foreign talent. Of the twelve musicians whose works are programmed here, only two—Cardon and the vocal composer Antoine Dauvergne—were born in metropolitan France. Dussek and Krumpholtz hailed from Prague; Mozart and Gluck spent most of their adult lives in Vienna; Grétry was a citizen of Liège and trained in Rome; Martini was not Italian but Bavarian. (Baptized Johann Paul Aegidius Martin, he became “Martini” for marketing purposes upon his arrival in Paris—testament to the cachet of Italian music amongst French cultural elites.) And, crucially, two of the program’s highlighted composers had personal and professional trajectories that traversed the French Atlantic. The German-born Hinner had been recruited to the ill-fated Kourou expedition in French Guiana, alongside his parents and siblings, at the age of eight; when his family perished, the young harpist was entrusted to the colonial governor and sent to France, where he in short order achieved fame as a virtuoso. SaintGeorges, the son of an enslaver father and an enslaved mother, was brought from Guadeloupe to the metropole as a child to pursue his education. (Although SaintGeorges’s musical talents were exceptional, his broader circumstances were not: one of several thousand individuals of African descent to have resided in Paris over the course of the eighteenth century.) Marie Antoinette’s networks thus demonstrate the vast scope of musical circulation in this period—as well as the inseparability of metropolitan prosperity and colonial slavery, more broadly, on the eve of the French and Haitian Revolutions.