What happened in the spring of 1683, between the two rounds of the competition for the assistant masters of the Royal Chapel of Versailles?
Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who retired from competition by wearing himself pale, was he really in pain?
Or was it the Superintendent of Roy's music, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who put pressure on him to slip away, so as not to overshadow him?
But if the two composers had been rivals, why would Lully have hastened to congratulate his younger brother ten years earlier, when
Le Malade imaginaire
was performed at court to the music of Charpentier?
And conversely, if the latter retired for only medical reason, why did Louis XIV make him pay a pension just before his departure?
Almost 350 years later, the mystery remains unsolved.
This is what the exciting “Expodcast” reveals to us just published by the CMBV, the Baroque Music Center of Versailles, in partnership with France Musique and the Château de Versailles.
The marriage between a series of audio podcasts on baroque music at the Royal Chapel, and a virtual exhibition that allows you to immerse yourself, by means of original texts, numerous archive images and video interviews, in the history of the monument and the musicians who made it - and still make it - live.
"King Louis XIV wanted music all the time and everywhere
," explains the president of the Château, Catherine Pégard.
Today, digital technology brings us the possibility of bringing the château to life beyond its walls, by showing that it has once again become the place of baroque music. ”
Pierre Coppey, president of the CMBV, followed suit:
“Since 1987, the CMBV has been promoting and promoting baroque music in France and throughout the world.
Today we are in a period when the French Baroque is part of the soundscape.
This event is an opportunity for us to seek out yet another audience. ”
Read also: Baroque music in the suburbs for encounters of the third type
You don't have to be an expert in court ballets, lyric tragedies or grand motet à la française to fully appreciate this Expodcast first season (subject to finding funding, the CMBV is considering
"at least five for the five years to come, on subjects other than the chapel ”
, confides the director of the center Nicolas Bucher).
A simple taste for history is enough to enjoy the six episodes, told with an authentic sense of the story by Suzanne Gervais.
Curator of this real exhibition in augmented reality, whose alert pen, sense of synthesis and taste for storytelling make an ideal storyteller, the journalist guides us through the historical meanders of this Royal Chapel, an emblematic place of the Baroque in Versailles, with a clear pleasure.
From the construction of the monument to its influence today.
By way of the daily Mass of the King, the famous competition of 1683, the figure of
Michel-Richard de Lalande
or the advent of the Grand Motet.
His voice brings to life every jolt of this story more eventful than it seems.
Personifying - sometimes with the help of actors - courtiers and courtiers, to better flow his fluid and serene narration in the music of the time restored by the CMBV.
Here, the step of the horses and the agreement of a harpsichord remind us that before its installation in Versailles, the Music Chapel was itinerant: preceding the sovereign in each of his travels, from Chambord to Marly, via his campaigns. military.
There, the bells and the creaking doors give us the time of the awakening of the Roy, the beginning of a day in millimeter music like the staves of a score.
You can choose to listen to each of these six podcasts (a little over an hour in all) separately, or synchronize them with the different pages of the virtual exhibition offered on the site.
In addition to the engravings, plans or period paintings in which it is possible to zoom in to better observe a detail, many key figures, highlighted, allow us to understand the complex machinery that was music in Versailles.
Specific focuses on certain points propose to deepen the story: here, a web series on the Clicquot organ of the Royal Chapel.
There, a mini-investigation into the "Charpentier affair."
Above all, each episode is also the subject of a video interview which offers to go further.
The chief architect of historical monuments, Frédéric Didier, thus details the architectural richness of the monument, its
"assumed classical vocabulary", the modernity of its "free columns"
which anticipate by a hundred years a practice in vogue at the end of the 18th century. , and at the same time the
“Gothic freedom”
of its slenderness, seen as a response to the Sainte Chapelle.
It also reveals the major challenges of the restoration project to which it is currently the subject, from the repair of bas-reliefs damaged by water leaks to the undercover resumption of the original framework.
King Louis XIV wanted music all the time and everywhere.
Catherine Pégard, President of the Estate and of the Palace of Versailles
Further on, it is the conductor Sébastien Daucé who guides us through the Grand motet and explains
"the perfect balance between the sense of harmony, counterpoint and voice"
at work at Michel-Richard de Lalande, as with Charpentier or, much later, with Ravel.
Or Olivier Schneebeli, the musical director on the departure of the Pages and the chanters of the CMBV, who explains the unique functioning of the chapel-music in the time of Louis XIV, with its four top lines (performed by young boys as well as falsettists called "above mute", a few young girls and, for a time, castrati called "Italian tops).
But also its high-cons typical of France, these sizes, low-sizes and concordant: heterogeneity which responds perfectly to the richness of the registrations of the organ of the chapel.
A visual and sound immersion in one of the most secret gems of the Palace of Versailles, to discover without further delay, and to share without hesitation with the youngest, from 12 years old.
The CMBV Expodcast has also been designed for both mobile screens and to be able to be projected in the classroom.