Marc-Antoine Charpentier

Marc-Antoine Charpentier was born in 1643 in or near Paris, the very year the four-year-old Louis XIV became king. His father was a master writer, a calligrapher and drafter of documents, a profession that may explain the remarkable beauty of the manuscripts Charpentier copied in his own hand all his life. Very little is known of his youth; he probably received a good education, perhaps from the Jesuits, with whom he kept close ties.

Around 1667 he went to Rome, where, by his own account, he studied music with Giacomo Carissimi, the great master of the Latin oratorio. The stay was decisive: Charpentier brought back to France the Italian taste for dramatic expression, bold harmonies and expressive dissonance. For a long time he was one of the few French composers openly cultivating this style, at a time when Lully was imposing a purely French taste at court.

Back in Paris around 1670, he entered the service of Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise, known as Mademoiselle de Guise, a very devout princess and great patron who maintained a renowned ensemble of musicians in her mansion in the Marais. Charpentier sang there as a haute-contre and for nearly seventeen years composed a great many works for her: motets, oratorios (which he called “histoires sacrées”) and small chamber operas such as Les Arts florissants and La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers.

Alongside this he worked for the theatre. When Molière fell out with Lully in 1672, he turned to Charpentier, who in 1673 composed the music for Le Malade imaginaire, Molière’s last play — the playwright died shortly after a performance. Charpentier then continued to work for the Comédie-Française. Lully’s monopoly on the Opéra, however, prevented him from making a career on the great stage, and he never obtained an official post in the Chapel Royal, despite the favour of the Dauphin, for whom he composed in the 1680s.

In 1688 he became music master of the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis on the rue Saint-Antoine, one of the most frequented churches in Paris for its music. There he composed the sacred opera David et Jonathas (1688), performed at the Collège Louis-le-Grand. After Lully’s death he was finally able to stage his tragedy Médée at the Académie royale de musique in 1693, to a libretto by Thomas Corneille: a powerful work, admired by connoisseurs but not a public success, partly because of Lully’s partisans.

His sacred output is immense: more than four hundred pieces, including masses such as the Messe de minuit pour Noël, built on popular Christmas carols, Leçons de ténèbres and four Te Deums. The most famous, the Te Deum in D major H. 146, composed around 1690, opens with a brilliant prelude with trumpets and timpani. Charpentier considered D major a “joyful and very warlike” key, as he wrote in his Rules of Composition.

In 1698 he was appointed music master of the Sainte-Chapelle du Palais, one of the most prestigious posts in Paris after those at court. He died there on 24 February 1704. He left twenty-eight volumes of autograph manuscripts, the “Mélanges”, which his nephew sold to the King’s Library and which are now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Largely forgotten for two centuries, he was rediscovered in the twentieth. The prelude to his Te Deum was chosen in 1954 as the Eurovision theme, making it famous throughout Europe.