Tanglewood Recital Series: Les Arts Florissants

Director's Note

To play Les Arts florissants again
by William Christie

The adventure of Les Arts Florissants began in 1979.

We had a dream: to restore the eloquence of a little-known and neglected heritage, that of French music from the 17th and 18th centuries, drawing on the works of Michel Lambert, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Jean-Baptiste Lully, André Campra, and Jean-Philippe Rameau, to name but a few of the greatest. Of course, our repertoire came to include the great figures of the Baroque era—Italian, German, and English composers such as Bach, Handel, and Monteverdi—who were better known to musicians and audiences. But French music remained the neglected child of this repertoire. Giving it a voice once again, reviving its flavor after several centuries of oblivion, became my ensemble’s specialty—and the beginning of a wonderful adventure for us.

Why was French music the last to be touched by the wave of rediscovery of the Baroque repertoire? Quite simply because it takes particularly knowledgeable and specialized musicians to know how to complete the scores of a Lambert or a Charpentier. Unlike Bach or Handel, French composers deliberately left their scores unfinished so that the performer could add their own phrasing and interpretation of the text, using the necessary ornamentation and rules of interpretation.

Today, I believe I can say that our pioneering work has achieved its goal. Over the past few decades, we have brought French music to the world’s greatest stages. The operatic works of Charpentier, Lully, Campra, Mondonville, and Rameau are performed every year at the greatest opera houses in Europe and elsewhere, which is cause for celebration.

For this new production, we have chosen to combine two of our earliest discoveries, made more than 50 years ago: Les Arts florissants—“opera or musical idyll,” to use Charpentier’s own words—which was to give its name to our musical ensemble; and another short opera, La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers. These two pieces were written in the 1680s by Marc-Antoine Charpentier for his Parisian patron, Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise. A cousin of Louis XIV, she owned a mansion in the Marais district of Paris, where concerts were regularly given by young musicians for her illustrious relatives and friends. There is no doubt that it was in this setting and for this elegant social gathering that Les Arts florissants and La Descente d’Orphée were performed for the first time—perhaps even by the same singers and musicians, given that these two works require more or less the same number of performers.

But there is more. In the early days of our ensemble, these pocket operas also served as a laboratory for what is now recognized as the “Arts Flo style.” They encapsulate all the ingredients that make French music so unique: finely crafted dramaturgy, expressive emotions conveyed through the score, and above all, a particular emphasis on language and diction. It was from this starting point, from the in-depth study of these little gems of music and theater, that we were then able to tackle the great lyrical tragedies such as Charpentier’s Médée and Lully’s Atys.

Performing Charpentier’s Les Arts florissants is therefore more than a simple exploration of our repertoire: it is a return to our roots. Not only to celebrate the past, but to reaffirm the relevance of our project and its future. By entrusting the interpretation to the laureates of Le Jardin des Voix, we are putting into action our project of transmission, both of this repertoire and of the expertise we have acquired. Now these young singers from all over the world want to train in this music, they love it: that shows how much it has regained its eloquence, beyond borders!