Les foyers artistiques à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (1682–1715): Musique et spectacles ed. by Anne-Madeleine Goulet

Abstract

Reviewed by: Les foyers artistiques à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (1682–1715): Musique et spectacles ed. by Anne-Madeleine Goulet Beverly Wilcox Les foyers artistiques à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (1682–1715): Musique et spectacles. Edited by Anne-Madeleine Goulet in collaboration with Rémy Campos, Mathieu da Vinha, and Jean Duron. (Series "Épitome musical.") Turnhout: Brepols, 2019. [446 p. ISBN 9782503586199 (paperback), $150.] Illustrations, bibliographical references, index. This collection of essays comes from a 2015 colloquium at Versailles sponsored by the Université de Tours and the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles for the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Louis XIV, King of France. It concerns the concept of "foyers" for the arts from 1682, when the king moved his court to the new palace of Versailles, until the end of his reign. As he grew less interested in ceremonial display, new venues arose in the courts of his legitimate and illegitimate children and his nephew, the duc d'Orléans. Musicologists generally view music and theater in these satellite courts as political resistance to royal power; the conference organizers—but not all the contributors—take a revisionist view that such courts were a system of artistic competition, with a certain amount of collaboration (pp. 12–13). The result is a diverse group of essays that proposes a continuum with political competition at one end, interchange and collaboration at the other, and a mixture of motives in between. The French word foyer, in medieval times, meant a hearth or fireplace, and by extension, a home: a place where people shared warmth and conversation. Here, it serves as a metaphor for musical exchange. Given an itinerant court that moved around between several palaces, and princes or nobles who did the same with their châteaux, town houses, and provincial seats, the foyer was really a household, and itinerance made it simultaneously a propagator and concentrator of art, in a way that led to new forms of musical patronage and the beginnings of galant style in music at the turn of the eighteenth century. Part 1, "The Court, the Courts," begins with a general comparison by David Hennebelle of the old tool of statecraft—noisy and expensive magnificence—versus the new princely tool of "good taste." The members of the Musique du Roi composed and performed in both types of venue, and the newer mode—good taste—created a foyer for musical experimentation (pp. 29–36). The other chapters are case studies. Don Fader writes on the Orléans family [End Page 252] at St. Cloud and in Paris at the Palais-Royal, who created a fun-loving alternative to Versailles to woo the Grand Dauphin in the expectation that he would one day become king. Architectural historian Tarek Berrada documents new designs that took music into account: a central music room in the Hôtel de Guise so that sound could drift into nearby billiards and dining rooms; a hunting lodge at Saint-Germain-en-Laye that allowed placement of activities closer to or further from two music tribunes ad libitum; and a cabinet de musique at the Château de Chantilly, purpose-built furniture needed for the household musicians. Thomas Vernet writes about Marie Anne, princesse de Conti, who maintained a théâtre de société (a private theater) in her residence across the street from the Château de Versailles for the youthful companions of her half-brother, the dauphin, but still avoided alienating the religious sensibilities of the king and Madame de Maintenon. Catherine Cessac shows how the humiliation of a marriage between a granddaughter of the Grand Condé (Louis, prince de Condé, 1621–1686) and a royal bastard was countered by parodying Versailles: sixteen grands nuits de Sceaux, over the course of a year, each with its own "king" and "queen" who chose or commissioned divertissements performed by members of the Paris Opéra. Oddly, the final paragraph suddenly concludes that this celebration of the glories of the night in the waning days of the reign of the Sun King was not a "foyer of opposition to Versailles," but rather, evidence of "the exceptional personality of the...