À la croisée des arts: Sublime et musique religieuse en Europe (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles). Ed. by Sophie Hache and Thierry Favier

Abstract

When Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux released Du Sublime (1674)—the first rendering of Longinus’ treatise in French, accompanied by several remarks on the translation—the satirist opened the door to a heated debate in the European Republic of Letters, in which Edmund Burke, John Dennis, and Immanuel Kant, among others, made their voices heard. Since then, scholars have appropriated the concept and have variously attempted to apply it to their discipline. However, this very concept has long remained neglected by French musicology, in spite of the pioneering studies on the musical sublime in the eighteenth century by Alexander Shapiro (Music & Letters, 1936), and then Luca Zopelli (1990), Michael Fend (1993), Ruth Smith (1995), Michela Garda (1995), and James Webster (1997). Thierry Favier can be credited as the author of the first article in French on the impact the sublime had on the sacred musical style at Versailles (‘Lalande et le sublime: Doctrines rhétoriques et tradition oratoire dans ses premiers grands motets’, in Lionel Sawkins (ed.), Lalande et ses contemporains (Paris, 2008), 119–14), and on Michel-Richard de Lalande’s motets in particular. Together with Sophie Hache, who has written on the use of sublime eloquence in the Gallican church (La Langue du ciel: Le Sublime en France au XVIIème siècle (Paris, 2000)), Favier organized an international conference on this important subject in November 2012. Its proceedings are published here, in the first volume of its kind to have been issued in France. Its aim is to investigate the sublime not only in the sacred music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in several sister disciplines (literature, philosophy, fine arts, history, liturgy), so as to provide useful keys to better understanding an ‘aesthetical notion that relates to transcendental experience’ (p. 45).