“Francesco Cavalli truly has no peers in Italy, in the perfection of his singing, in the worth of his organ playing, and in his exceptional musical compositions, of which those in print bear witness to his merit.”

The Venetian chronicler Ziotti’s effusive praise of Cavalli, published 1655, reflects the universal acclaim the composer enjoyed at the height of his long and robust musical career. The son of the organist and composer Giovanni Battista Caletti, Cavalli was born in the small but prosperous town of Crema near Milan but still within the borders of the Venetian Republic in 1602. At the age of 13 Francesco’s exceptional voice and prodigious musical talents drew the attention of Frederico Cavalli, the Venetian governor in Crema. Cavalli offered to take the boy to Venice where he could benefit from exposure to the rich musical life there – a proposal only reluctantly accepted by the boy’s father.

Within months of his arrival, Cavalli was engaged as a singer at the Basilica of San Marco under its newly appointed maestro Claudio Monteverdi, who was in the midst of restoring the musical institution of the Basilica to its former heights under Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli. For the remaining six decades of his life, Cavalli would remain in the employ of the Basilica, where he would work with the most esteemed musicians of his age. Additionally, his status as musician in the Cappella Marciana, together with his undisputed gifts as a singer, organist and composer, insured a steady flow of outside work at the many well-endowed churches, scuole grandi and in the noble palaces of The Most Serene Republic.

While musically and professionally the situation at San Marco could hardly be matched, Cavalli’s early separation from his family and the pressure of professional responsibilities at a young age had an impact on his first years at San Marco. He lived first with Federico Cavalli, whose surname he later adopted, but appears to have moved frequently, most often living by various other wealthy patrons among the Venetian elite, some of whom bailed him out of gambling debts and otherwise supported the brilliant, but occasionally reckless young prodigy.

Like all Venetians, Cavalli’s life was profoundly impacted by the “The Great Plague of Milan”, which arrived in the winter of 1630. Historians have suggested that a strain of bubonic plague was brought to Lombardy the previous year by foreign soldiers engaged in the catastrophic siege of Mantua and gradually moved from city to city. Over 80,000 Venetians perished in 1630 and over the next two years the plague would claim over a quarter million lives as it spread across northern Italy.

At the height of the plague, Cavalli was married to Maria Sosomeno, the recent widow of wealthy patrician Alvise Schiavina. The marriage proved to be as successful and affectionate as it was financially beneficial and Cavalli readily adapted to his new role of landowning businessman. In addition to relieving him of the financial anxieties characteristic of the life of a professional musician, his new prosperity, coupled with his outstanding musical talent, positioned him perfectly to get in on the ground floor of one of the most momentous developments in music history: the advent of public opera.

In 1637 a small troupe of singers and instrumentalists had staged Andromeda, an opera by Francesco Mannelli, at the Teatro San Cassiano. The newly conceived notion of entirely sung drama, until then the exclusive privilege of the nobility in the courts of Mantua, Florence and Rome, proved sensationally popular among the relatively broad spectrum of Venetian society that could afford the price of admission. Mass media music was born.

Cavalli was quick to recognize opera’s commercial potential and joined with a group of investors and artistic collaborators to emulate the success of Andromeda and within a year began presenting regular operatic production at San Cassaino, beginning with his own Le Nozze di Teti e di Peleo. Over the next three decades, in the roles not only of performer, director and composer, but also venture capitalist and impresario, Cavalli would be the dominant figure in – and most powerful influence on – the first generation of opera as the musical theater establishment we know today. Between 1639 and 1669, Cavalli wrote 32 works for the stage. At the peak of his career he received the exceptional honor of a commission to write and stage an opera for the occasion of the marriage of the Dauphin, Louis (later to be Sun King) to the Spanish Hapsburg Maria Theresa in 1659.

Throughout this time, Cavalli continued in the service of the Cappella Marciana first as a singer and later as organist. As early as 1625, a Song of Songs setting by Cavalli was included in a sacred anthology along with works by Monteverdi, Grandi and other musical luminaries. In 1650 he edited a posthumous collection of Monteverdi’s sacred music in which he included his own six-voice Magnificat. But it was not until 1656, at the height of his operatic fame, that he published his first collection of sacred music, Musiche Sacre, from which the eight voice concertato setting of the Mass ordinary on our program was drawn.

Dedicated to Cardinal Giovanni Carlo de’ Medici, to whom Cavalli’s opera Ipermestra had been dedicated two years earlier, Musiche sacre is monumental even in the context of previous magisterial publications by Monteverdi, Rovetta, Rigatti and other Venetian masters. With no fewer than 28 compositions, the volume included, in addition to the Mass, grand-scale settings of several Vespers psalms, intimate hymns and motets and a set of six ensemble sonatas. The Mass setting exudes a confident brilliance and solemn grandeur well suited to the celebration of the Holy Nativity, though it was most likely composed initially to mark the occasion of a 1644 peace treaty between Rome and Parma.

The Mass also displays the innovative theatrical styles that Cavalli had explored and in his music for the stage, and he effortless incorporates the dramatic gestures and sharply contrasting textures found in his operas into his concertato settings o the liturgical text. There are even passages of secco recitative, the most idiomatic feature of early opera. Perhaps the most striking echo of Cavalli’s operatic style is his use of sequences and transpositions to extend the melodic structure and the harmonic clarity found in his articulation of the musical architecture.

After his return from France in 1662, Cavalli again wrote for the Venetian theater, but the financial rewards of his Royal commission and changing operatic fashions resulted in a more relaxed compositional pace. In 1668 Cavalli was unanimously chosen by the Procurators to succeed Giovanni Rovetta as maestro di cappella, a position he held until his death in 1676. Cavalli would publish one more collection of sacred music in 1675: a somewhat austere set of psalms and Magnificats required for the “Cinque Laudate” feasts unique to the liturgy of San Marco. With Cavalli’s death, Venice lost one of the musical giants of the seventeenth century and one the last of the direct links with Monteverdi.

Acknowledged by his contemporaries as the greatest German composer of the seventeenth century, Heinrich Schütz served for over fifty years as Kapellmeister of the Court Chapel of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden. He was instrumental in introducing the modern Italian styles of composition into Germany during the first half of the century. Over the course of his life Schütz wrote in a wide variety of genres, including the first German opera, settings of the Passions and several collections of sacred chamber music for voices and instruments.

Studying with Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice as a young man left an indelible mark on Schütz, and nowhere is his debt to the Venetian polychoral tradition more evident than in his Opus Ultimum, known as Der Schwanengesang (Swan Song.) There is a satisfying sense of completion in Schütz’s decision, for his final work, to return to the style so strongly associated with his beloved mentor. Like Bach in his Art of the Fugue, Schütz seems to have chosen an exhaustive exploration of a clearly circumscribed genre as his legacy.

Der Schwanengesang is actually a setting of three separate texts. The first eleven parts, or motets, set Psalm 119, by far the longest of the psalms, totaling 176 verses. Like several other Old Testament texts, including the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Psalm 119 is an “acrostic” poem. The entire psalm is divided into twenty-two stanzas of eight verses each, with all the verses in a stanza beginning with the same Hebrew letter. Schütz pairs the stanzas into eleven sixteen-verse motets. To these he appends a setting of Psalm 100 and the Magnificat Canticle. All the motets conclude with a doxology, making them suitable for liturgical use, although the work doesn’t seem to have been composed with any such use in mind.

There appears to be no specific occasion or commission that prompted Schütz to compose Der Schwanengesang. Rather Schütz seems to have devoted himself to a setting of Psalm 119 as part of a deep spiritual study in the last years of his life, following the example of numerous Lutheran theologians. In his Preface to the Psalter, Martin Luther himself refers to Psalm 119 as “a small Bible wherein everything is stated most beautifully and concisely, making them as it were an elegant enchiridion or handbook within the Bible as a whole.” Similarly Johannes Bugenhagen in writing about Psalm 119 asserts, “the contents of the entire Holy Writ are contained in this one psalm.” Musicologist Wolfgang Steude (whose reconstruction of the missing second soprano and tenor parts we will be performing) suggests that Schütz chose Psalm 119 for his “swan song” knowing that “in a sense it encompasses both Old and New Testaments – the whole Bible. In so doing, he created a landmark work and a personal, spiritual, religious, and artistic testament in what was avowedly to be his final opus.”

It is unlikely that the first eleven motets were ever performed before the twentieth century. At the time of its completion in the 1670s, Der Schwanengesang must have seemed very archaic indeed, completely out of step with the Neapolitan operatic style then in favor in Dresden.

Though Schütz had title pages printed, the work as a whole was never published and was assumed lost when the first complete works edition was published in the 19th century. In 1900 six of the eight manuscript partbooks were discovered in the town of Guben. The second soprano tenor partbooks, along with the continuo part, had been previously separated. The organ part was acquired from an antiquarian bookstore in Guben and was later purchased by the writer Stephan Zweig. The vocal partbooks were held in a library in Berlin and assumed lost in 1945 but were discovered in 1970 in a collection of uncatalogued manuscripts in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek in Dresden. With this discovery, together with the organ part, now housed in the British Museum, an edition was completed in time for the 400th anniversary of Schütz’s birth in 1985.

Der Schwanengesang is set for double choir with continuo, and such a performance is entirely adequate. In his dedicatory comments to the Elector of Saxony, Schütz even recommends such a performance “by eight good voices with two little organs in the two fine choir lofts that were constructed opposite each other on either side of the altar in your Highness’ Court Chapel” However, Schütz also asked his colleague at the Dresden Chapel, Constantin Christian Dedekind, to expand his work by adding instruments. It seems that Dedekind, rather than carrying out the master’s request, made his own setting of Psalm 119, which he published several years later.

For these performances, I have assumed the task of carrying out Schütz’s request. For guidance, I turned to the extensive writings of Schütz’s predecessor as Dresden Kapellmeister, Michael Praetorius and to the many polychoral compositions of Schütz himself, as well as those of his colleagues Samuel Scheidt and Johann Hermann Schein. For this project I am deeply grateful to the advice and encouragement of Jeffrey Kurtzman, Herb Myers, Wolfgang von Kessinger and Nika Korniyenko.

The recording is dedicated to the memory of Judith Nelson. While Judy’s voice is not heard on these recordings, her spirit – the honesty of her artisrty and the warmth and sincerity of her musicianship  – is present throughout. It was Judy who introduced me to Donna Chiara and the performance of O quam bonus es with her in 1997 was the catalyst for all the love and energy we’ve shared with Cozzolani in the years that followed, for which we are all deeply grateful.

Sixteen of the tracks on Concerti Sacri have been available digitally for over a year, while nine tracks are available now for the first time. For those who have purchased the digital recording without the new tracks, or for those who would like to hear only the new tracks they are available independently here. As always those pre-ordering the CD will receive the digital tracks as well as the CD.

Published in 1642, Concerti sacri was Cozzolani’s second collection, her first, Primavera di fiori musicalifrom 1640, is sadly lost. Cozzolani dedicated the collection to the single most important patron of singers in northern Italy, Prince Matthias de’ Medici, who seems to have heard Cozzolani’s pieces in winter 1641 while on a stay in the city. While this is the only dedication of sacred music to Matthias, he was a generous patron of singers and composers associated with early Venetian opera and established a troupe in Siena in 1646. In the absence of music theatre in Milan until after mid-century, the prince could well have visited the institutions best known for singing – the convents.

The wide variety of topics in the collection point to no single specific occasion for the performance of its contents, other than Matthias’s putative visit. The motets represent the most modern style of Lombard vocal writing of the the 1630s and 40s, while the setting of the mass ordinary displays some of the most elaborate imaitative writing found in her music. The recording features Elizabeth Anker, alto; Meg Bragle, mezzo-soprano; Hugh Davies, bass; John Dornenburg, violone; Jennifer Ellis Kampani, soprano; Ruth Escher, soprano; Andrea Fullington, soprano; Laura Heimes, soprano; Suzanne Jubenville, alto; Jennifer Lane, alto; Linda Liebschutz, alto; Deborah Rentz-Moore, alto; David Tayler, theorbo; Hanneke van Proosdij, organ; and Catherine Webster, soprano. It was recorded by Musica Omnia at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere with Peter Watchorn, producer and Joel Gordon, engineer.

This recording could not have happened without the generous support of Kristine Holmes, Valerie and Paul Crane Dorfman and Donna Curling. Robert Kendrick, whose excellent research has brought Cozzolani’s music to the attention of musicians and musicologists, has been extremely helpful throughout this project. I am forever grateful to Dr. William Mahrt for sharing his knowledge of chant and liturgy. Special thanks to Michael Barger, Edgar Breninnkmeyer, Stephen DeLapp, Margriet Downing, Meriel Ennik, Richard Fabian, Katherine Gavzy, John Golenski, Michael King, Dorothy Manly, Peter McGrath, Dorothy McMath, Benjamin Netick, Charles Thiel, RuthE Wells, My Dutch Uncle, San Francisco Grants for the Arts and to all the friends of Magnificat who have supported this project. I would also like to thank Brandy Leigh Mow, Jeffrey Kurtzman, John Hirten, Robin Burger, Miriam Lewis, Ronald Chase, John Dornenburg & Louise Carslake, David Smith & Andrea Lappen, Doris & Joe Willingham, Robert Friedman and Tchocky. And my deepest gratitude to Nika Korniyenko for her love and inspiration and for making us look good all these years.

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Few events had a more profound influence on the music of the 17^th century than the changing of the guard that took place at the Basilica of San Marco with the death of Giovanni Gabrieli in 1612 and the arrival of Claudio Monteverdi from Mantua the following year. Though they never held the post of maestro di cappella at San Marco, Giovanni and his uncle Andrea nevertheless dominated the musical life of the Serene Republic for three decades. Their brilliant polychoral style was appealing and effective and they pioneered the use of obbligato instruments in the service of what we would now call orchestration to give their concertos color and affect in a way that was imitated across Europe. One of Giovanni’s many students from north of the Alps in his final years was Heinrich Schütz, who studied in Venice for four years and returned to Dresden shortly after his teacher’s death, missing Monteverdi’s arrival by a matter of months. But more on that in the next program.

In his old age Giovanni began to incorporate some of the techniques associated with the ‘secunda prattica’, specifically an independent basso continuo and florid writing for solo voice. This is especially evident in some of the compositions included in his second volume of Symphoniae Sacrae, published posthumously in 1615. Similarly, while Monteverdi is most closely associated with the new music of the new century, he nevertheless took pains to demonstrate his mastery of the old polyphonic techniques, for example in the Missa in illo tempore, published along with his famous Vespers music in 1610 and the stile antico masses in his 1641 collection Selva morale et spirituale.

The blurring of compositional style represented by these two titans of Venetian music is central to Magnificat’s program on the weekend of December 20-22, for which we will join forces with The Whole Noyse in a co-production with the San Francisco Early Music Society. The program is built on a frame provided by the liturgy for the Christmas Mass but the music we will perform was unlikely to have been assembled for any specific event from the time. Rather we will combine the grandeur of Gabrieli with the passion and virtuosity of Monteverdi in a way that displays both the continuity and innovation reflected in the music of Venice at the beginning of the century.

In August 1628, Heinrich Schütz escaped war-ravaged Dresden and travelled to Venice, where he had studied with Gabrieli almost twenty years before. In a letter written after his return in late the next year, Schütz recalled “staying in Venice as the guest of old friends, I learned that the long unchanged art of composition had changed somewhat: the ancient rhythms were partly set aside to tickle the ears of today with fresh devices.” During his visit, he certainly heard such fresh devices in the madrigals and motets of Monteverdi and Grandi and in instrumental sonatas by Biagio Marini and Dario Castello. Marini’s eighth set of sonatas, subtitled “Curiose e Moderne Inventioni,” was published in Venice during Schütz’s stay in Venice, as was the Dresden Kappelmeister’s own collection of motets, his first set of Symphoniæ Sacræ.

The spirit of the “new music” Schütz heard in Venice continued to resonate in his music throughout his life and Magnificat’s program will reflect that resonance in a program that also features music of other composers who shared in the stylistic exchange. Schütz ‘borrowed’ (with full acknowledgement) some of Monteverdi’s music in his owncompositions, notably in the motet Es steh Gott auf, which appeared in the composer’s second set of Symphoniae Sacrae published in Dresden in 164_. But beyond direct quotations, much of the music Schütz wrote after his return to Dresden sparkles with the sunny brilliance Italy, though always with a marked German accent.

The program for our concerts on February 14-16 2014 centers on another generational exchange and the extraordinary tradition of the Bach family inherited by Johann Sebastian. Throughout the seventeenth century, so many of the organists and instrumentalists in the small towns of central Germany were Bachs that in the province of Thuringia the name ‘Bach’ was synonymous with the trade of musician. Bach’s obituary notice in 1750 observed that “Johann Sebastian Bach belongs to a family that seems to have received a love and aptitude for music as a gift of Nature to all its members in common.”

In October 1694, the nine-year-old Johann Sebastian travelled to Arnstadt for the wedding of his cousin, the highly respected Eisenach organist Johann Christoph Bach. The Bach family gathered frequently, but this occasion was exceptional in that Christoph’s teacher, the renowned organist and composer Johann Pachelbel was present and likely performed together with members of the Bach family. 1694 also saw the publication of a set of sonatas by the Dresden violinist Johann Paul Westhoff, in whose orchestra Bach would later perform as a teenager before accepting his first position as an organist in Arnstadt.

In this program Magnificat will explore the music of Bach’s ancestors that the young Bach may have heard during the wedding festivities and will feature cantatas and instrumental music by Sebastian’s cousins Johann Christoph and Johann Michael Bach as well as Pachelbel and Westhoff. The program is framed by cantata based on the chorale Christ lag in Todesbanden, opening with Pachelbel’s setting, which may have served as the model for the young Johann Sebastian Bach’s first masterpiece, which will conclude the concert.

Two cantatas on the program are preserved in a collection of manuscripts known to musicologists as Das Altbachisches Arkiv, or the “Archive of the Elder Bachs.” Sebastian treasured these manuscripts throughout his life, making annotations in the scores and performing some of the works as late as 1749, the year before his death. The archives passed on to his son Carl Phillip Emmanuel and later became part of the library of the Berliner Singakademie, which was so instrumental to the revival of Bach’s music in the 19th century. Thought to have been destroyed in the Second World War, the archives were recently re-discovered and Magnificat will be performing from editions based on these manuscripts.

I look forward to working with an extraordinary cast of musicians and friends including Peter Becker, Hugh Davies, Rob Diggins, John Dornenburg, Jillon Dupree, Jolianne von Einem, Paul Elliott, Katherine Heater, Laura Heimes, Dan Hutchings, Jennifer Ellis Kampani, Chris LeCluyse, John Lenti, Anthony Martin, Clifton Massey, Jennifer Paulino, Andrew Rader, Clara Rottsolk, David Wilson and The Whole Noyse,

In many ways the program that Susan and I developed in 1993 to frame Charpentier’s Pastorale sur la naissance de Nostre Seigneur with arrangements of traditional French noëls served as the model for many other Magnificat programs. The juxtaposition of sophisticated art music with contemporaneous folk music, the ideal of balance between vocal and instrumental music and each individual musician, all became hallmarks of Magnificat programs.

The Nativity Pastorale program was also our first encounter with the “vaux de villes” the popular melodies that served equally well for Christmas texts and less solemn lyrics. Many of these melodies re-appeared in the opera parodies that we staged in the 90s. The noels, in Charpentier’s instrumental arrangements and in settings by other French composers of the period, have featured in many Magnificat programs over the years, and in some ways have become even more strongly associated with Christmas than O come All Ye Faithful or Silent Night to me.

The program for those first performances in 1993 captures some of the scrappy enthusiasm of the early Magnificat years. The woodblock images in one of the 16th century Bibles de Noelz perfectly captured the folk roots of the noël melodies and I was keen to use them in our program. But these were the days before PhotoShop and so the program cover was literally cut and pasted (with scissors and tape) at a Kinko’s. It is gratifying to be able to include these same images (much more beautifully rendered by Nika Korniyenko) in our program again this December.

In addition to the many wonderful friends who have taken on the roles of angels and shepherds in earlier revivals of this program, the Nativity Pastorale is strongly associated with two very dear colleagues who are no longer with us and there are several passages in the music that will always bring their memories to mind.

Magnificat’s first performances of this program in 1993 were also the first of many collaborations with Judy Nelson. Her haunting rendition of the noël Une jeune pucelle with Marion Verbruggen was unforgettable. Also joining us for those concerts in 1993 was French Canadian tenor René Boutet, who also passed away earlier this year. His shining voice and sincere spirit shone throughout the performances and touched musicians and audience alike. Both Judy and René will be in my heart during our performances in December.

The first thing that comes to mind when I remember Judy is how influential she was and how much everyone tried to sing like her but the second thing I think of is how, in fact, no one ever sounded like Judy except Judy. Of course, she sang exquisitely in every style and genre and yet it was always undeniably Judy. Her great gift to me (and to all of us) was in embodying the ideal of using your talent and ability to express who you are with integrity and conviction, which she did as well as anyone I have ever known.

In rehearsals Judy was always a model of professionalism but she also had a sharp wit and everyone who worked with her has plenty of memories of her playful sense of humor and well-timed rejoinders that always contributed to an atmosphere of camaraderie and common purpose. Judy had a uncanny ability to surprise through her vocal artistry and the depth of her understanding of the historical and musical context of the music she was performing, but also through her disarming candor.

It was Judy who introduced me to the music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. Judy had invited me to join her at a music festival outside of Manilla in the Philippines in 1996 and she brought with her an extraordinary motet – O quam bonus es – that we performed there. I was overwhelmed, not only by Cozzolani’s extraordinary tonal palette but by the strikingly emotional-laden text. Judy sang in Magnificat’s first performances of Cozzolani’s music in December 1999 and while her voice is not heard on the recordings that we made subsequently, her spirit – the honesty of her artistry and the warmth and sincerity of her musicianship  – is present throughout.

A memorial concert to celebrate Judy’s life will take place on Monday September 10 at First Congregational Church in Berkeley. The program will feature many of the musicians and ensembles that shared music with Judy over the years including Magnificat co-founder Susan Harvey. The free concert will begin at 7:00 pm and I encourage everyone to join in remembering a truly remarkable musician and friend.

The first music by Charpentier that I had the chance to perform was the Messe de Minuit(Midnight Mass) – a charming work that seamlessly weaves the folk melodies of noëls, already centuries old during the composer’s life with a rigorous contrapuntal ideal. While the Nativity Pastorale does not incorporate noël melodies like the Midnight Mass, there are striking similarities in the poetic imagery of the noëls and their musical character. In Magnificat’s first production of the Nativity Pastorale in 1993, we included several of Charpentier’s instrumental settings of noëls in addition to the Pastorale and I had the chance to learn about these remarkable melodies. I found the noëls especially intriguing because they provided a rare glimpse of the 17th century from a non-aristocratic perspective. Noëls were everyone’s music – nobility and peasants alike shared the joy of these infectious melodies and the often strikingly poignant poetry that these melodies set.

The program notes from Magnificat’s earlier performances of this program note that beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, the words for these simple songs were published in inexpensive, sloppily produced editions called bibles de noelz, and were circulated throughout the provinces by colporteurs or itinerant peddlers and booksellers.  Contemporary writers describe these bibles as being found on the hearth in every peasant cottage: greasy, yellowed, and dog-eared. The melodies were pre-existing, anonymous, orally transmitted vaudevilles.  Sebastian de Brossard in his music dictionary of 1703 defined noëls as “certain songs in honor of the birth of Jesus Christ set to vaux de villes, or common tunes, that everybody knows.” The melodies were never notated in these popular bibles; it was enough to mention the first few words of the original song, called the timbre, at the beginning of the poem. The best known noël to English audiences Un flambeau set to a timbre that was originally a drinking song Qu’il sont doux, bouteille jolie, attributed variously to Charpentier and Lully.

Although some significant poets contributed to the genre, the poems were usually anonymous, written by schoolteachers, priests, or organists in every town, often in dialect and most probably spontaneously improvised to include the names of friends and neighbors. The texts are often wonderfully exuberant, describing the earthly festivities that accompany the divine birth, including recipes for food to be brought to the party, and a certain amount of practical joking. These noëls increased in popularity throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and made their way into liturgical services, to the displeasure of church authorities.  In 1725 the Council de la Province d’Avignon prohibited the singing of noëls in church on the grounds that they “debased the holy mysteries by mixing them with comic things and profane chattering and games.” This disapproval did not stem the popularity of the noëls and bibles de noelz continued to be produced even after the Revolution.

Many of the noël melodies also served for different sentiments at different times of the year – with different words of course. For it was the melody that was ancient – the words were adapted to fit the occasion and indeed, some of the tunes I had first encountered as the equivalent of Christmas carols appear in the slapstick operas parodies that Magnificat performed later in the 90s. No reason to limit a good tune to one season of the year after all!

We have used some of the images found in these mass-produced noël collections for earlier productions of the Nativity Pastorale and while for our first production in 1993 the program was assembled (by me) using a photo-copier, scissors, and tape, we now have the benefit of digital editing programs and the talents of our creative director Nika Korniyenko. The images reminded me of the first mass produced playing cards, also a 17th-Century French phenomenon. In both cases, while the wood-cut images are somewhat crude they are nonetheless extremely expressive and even mannerist in their exaggerated gestures and symbolism. The Tarot images have also featured in programs and brochures over the years, for example the “Star” from the Tarot de Paris, published in the early 17th Century, which served as the image for our 2000-2001 brochure. In fact, the gesture on that particular card is similar to the shepherd from the noël woodcut.

The first music by Charpentier that I had the chance to perform was the Messe de Minuit (Midnight Mass) – a charming work that seamlessly weaves the folk melodies of noëls, already centuries old during the composer’s life with a rigorous contrapuntal ideal. While the Nativity Pastorale does not incorporate noël melodies like the Midnight Mass, there are striking similarities in the poetic imagery of the noëls and their musical character. In Magnificat’s first production of the Nativity Pastorale in 1993, we included several of Charpentier’s instrumental settings of noëls in addition to the Pastorale and I had the chance to learn about these remarkable melodies. I found the noëls especially intriguing because they provided a rare glimpse of the 17th century from a non-aristocratic perspective. Noëls were everyone’s music – nobility and peasants alike shared the joy of these infectious melodies and the often strikingly poignant poetry that these melodies set.

Noëls began to be compiled for mass publication almost as soon as the printing press technology reached France. For the first time books could be printed at a ost that made it possible for at least a large portion of the emerging middle class to purchase. Of course these ‘Bibles des noëlz” as they were often called contained only the words of the carols. Very few people who might buy such a book could read music notation and in any case everyone already knew the tunes, which were as familiar as the tunes of Old MacDonald or the National Anthem are to us. While Luther’s Bible may have been a common book in middle and working class households in Lutheran Germany, no such translation of the Roman Bible was widespread at the time in France.

Many of the noël melodies also served for different sentiments at different times of the year – with different words of course. For it was the melody that was ancient – the words were adapted to fit the occasion and indeed, some of the tunes I had first encountered as the equivalent of Christmas carols appear in the slapstick operas parodies that Magnificat performed later in the 90s. No reason to limit a good tune to one season of the year after all!

We have used some of the images found in these mass-produced noël collections for earlier productions of the Nativity Pastorale and while for our first production in 1993 the program was assembled (by me) using a photo-copier, scissors, and tape, we now have the benefit of PhotoShop and our creative director Nika Korniyenko. The images reminded me of the first mass produced playing cards, also a 17th-Century French phenomenon. In both cases, while the wood-cut images are somewhat crude they are nonetheless extremely expressive and even mannerist in their exaggerated gestures and symbolism. The Tarot images have also featured in programs and brochures over the years.

The Nativity Pastorale was also my first encounter with the musicians of the household of Mlle de Guise, Charpentier’s patron upon his return from his studies in Rome with Carissimi. In Charpentier’s manuscript from these years he meticulously notes which of his colleagues at the Hôtel de Guise sang each of the parts – of course noting himself (“Charp”) for the haute-contre line. Knowing that this music was written to be performed by and for the composers’ friends was particularly satisfying for me and seemed to have a parallel with Magnificat as we grew over the years. Each of our three productions have included some new faces along with old friends, both in the ensemble and in the audience and it is with a sense of returning home to visit the family (in the best sense) that I look forward to coming to California for our performances in December.

Simon Vouet, Self Portrait (ca. 1626-1627)

Vouet’s paintings–The Presentation in the Temple, the Apotheosis of St. Louis and a depiction of the Virgin mourning Christ’s suffering on the Cross–were all gifts to the new Jesuit church from Cardinal Richelieu upon it’s completion in 1641.

Like Charpentier, Vouet spent his formative years in Italy, mostly in Rome, where his patrons included the Barberini family, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Paolo Giordano Orsini and Vincenzo Giustiniani, He also received a pension from Louis XIII summoned to return to Paris in 1627. Upon returning to France, Vouet was made peintre de Roi and adapted his very Italian style, influenced by Caravaggio Carracci, and Reni, to the grand decorative designs of Cardinal Richelieu. This melding of Italian style and French taste parceled the role that Charpentier would later play in fusing French and Italian musical styles.

Vouet enjoyed more prestige and success during his lifetime but like Charpentier his posthumous reputation was initially overshadowed and it was only in the 20th century that his contribution to French Baroque art has been fully appreciated. William R. Crelly published a monograph and catalogue in the 1960s and there have been several important exhibitions devoted to his work in the years since the quadracentenary of his birth in 1990.

The gallery below includes the five paintings that graced the altar of L’Eglise Saint Louis during Charpentier’s tenure (those that survive are no longer in the church): the three Vouet paintings along with a depiction of Christ delivering the souls in Purgatory by Philippe de Champaigne and Resurrection of Christ by Claude Vignon.

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When Magnificat began presenting an annual concert series in 1992, the Charpentier revival was still at a relatively early stage. Though he had been “re-discovered” by the French musicologist Claude Crussard over a half century before and championed heroically in the intervening decades by H. Wiley Hitchcock, there were still relatively few recordings and even fewer modern editions of his works at the time. Since then, a tremendous amount of research has been published by Catherine Cessac, Patricia Ranum, John Powell, and many others, and the composer’s complete manuscripts have been re-printed in facsimile, all of which has allowed a much deeper understanding of Charpentier’s life and art.

Magnificat has dedicated entire programs to Charpentier’s music in twelve of our nineteen seasons, more than any other composer (Schütz and Monteverdi are tied for second place.) Along the way, we have explored many aspects of this prolific and multi-faceted master’s work: the charming divertissements and pastorales composed for the Hotel de Guise, the farsical intermedes written for the stage works of Moliere, Corneille and others, the intimate petits motets for the “Dauphin’s Music” and the sublime histoires sacreés from his time at the Jesuit Church of St. Louis and later at the Sainte-Chapelle. It has truly been a privilege to offer our audiences the opportunity to hear so much of Charpentier’s music.

Magnificat’s first season (1992-93) concluded with a program that showcased both sacred and secular music by Charpentier. The first half of the program included three sacred works representing three different genres: the psalm Super flumina babilonis, the oratorio Le Reniement de St. Pierre and the five part motet Oculi omnium. After intermission it was time for something completely different – a series of comic intermedes written for Moliere’s plays. The highlight of these quite silly vignettes was surely the hilarious “doctors scene” from Le Malade Imaginaire, which included some extemporaneous diagnosis by real-life doctor Gerald Gaul and a fair amount of champagne splattered across the stage.

Program from Magnificat's December 1993 concerts - literally cut and paste (with scissors and tape)

Somewhat less raucous was the program for the Christmas concerts in our second season. Charpentier’s Pastorale sur la naissance de notre Seigneur, was performed at the Hotel de Guise, with some variations, on three successive Christmases during the 1680s. Magnificat’s program drew from each of the three versions and integrated some of the infectiously charming noëls (some of which will appear again in this season’s Christmas concerts) in the mix. One of Magnificat’s most beloved programs, we have revived it twice: in 1997 on the San Francisco Early Music Society concert series and on our own series in 2005.

Noëls would not only be included in many of Magnificat’s subsequent Charpentier programs but they also contributed to an interest in voix de villes (or vau de villes), the source for the tunes of many noëls, that featured prominently in two opera parodies presented by Magnificat in 1996 and 1998.

Charpentier was featured again in Magnificat’s 5th season (1996-97) with performances of La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers, composed in 1686 for one of the musical evenings at the Guise establishment. Derived from an earlier cantata on the same subject, this dramatic work, like so many pieces from the 17th century, defies classification, being neither pastoral, nor cantata, nor opera, yet having some characteristics of each. Above all, Charpentier’s setting of the Orpheus myth displays the influence of his formative years in Rome, where he encountered the music of Carrisimi, Luigi Rossi and others.

Beginning with Magnificat’s 9th season (2000-01), Charpentier’s music has been featured almost every year. That season we presented a program that included two dramatic works, also written for the Hotel de Guise: Actéon and Les Arts florissants. Both works fit into the loosely-defined genre of the divertissement, a term used in seventeenth century France to refer to a wide range of musical works, from interludes in comedie-ballets and tragedie-lyriques, as well as entertainments that resembled the English masque. Some divertissements, like Actéon, were short independent operas on mythological subjects. Others, like Les Arts florissants relate more specifically to the pastorale, originally a literary genre that, over the course of the 17th century began to incorporate music and ballet in the manner of opera.

In the 2002-03 season, working together with musicologist John Powell, Magnificat assembled a program of music that Charpentier composed for stage works of Thomas Corneille (Circé, 1675 and La Pierre Philosophale, 1681) and Raymond Poisson (Les Fous Divertissants, 1680.) With these theatrical works – ranging from pastoral airs to lunatic raving, we returned to the entertaining world of the Le Malade Imaginaire. John’s informative program notes for these concerts can be read here.

In the 2003-04 season, Magnificat performed Charpentier’s cycle of seven motets setting the texts of the Magnificat antiphons for the seven days preceding Christmas. In the Roman breviary these seven antiphons each begin with the acclamation “O” and are therefore known as the “O Antiphons” , “The Great Antiphons”  or, as Charpentier refers to them in his title “The Seven Os following the Roman.”  In accordance with the composer’s instructions, each of the antiphons was paired with one of his instrumental arrangements of noëls. The program also included the Dialogus inter Angles et Pastores, which we will perform again this season.

Two of Charpentier’s oratorios, or histoires sacreés –Filius Prodigus and Sacrificium Abrahæ–were performed in the final concerts of Magnificat’s 2004-05 season and the Nativity Pastorale was revived for the Christmas program in the 05-06 season. The 35 or so works by Charpentier that can be classified as oratorios form a significant if isolated repertoire nearly unique in France, a country that seemed to have little interest in dramatic settings of religious subjects. Like those of Carissimi, Charpentier’s oratorios are non-liturgical, and freely mix scriptural excerpts with dramatic and poetic interpolations.

A program of music from Charpentier’s tenure at Sainte-Chappelle at the end of his life–Oculi Omnium, the Motet pour une longue offrande, and Judicium Salomonis–opened Magnificat’s 15th season (2006-07.) The Sainte-Chapelle was situated in the heart of a walled enclosure of what was formerly the palace of the king and, during Charpentier’s tenure, the Parlement. The reconvening of the Parlement, which took place annually on November 12, the day after the Feats of St. Martin, was commemorated by the celebration of a grand ceremonial mass, called the Messe Rouge (Red Mass) because of the magistrates scarlet vestments.

The following season (2007-08,) Magnificat explored another genre of Charpentier’s music – the petits motets – in a program of small chamber works written for the major feasts from Christmas to Purification. Four sacred works follow successively in Charpentier’s manuscripts: Pour la Feste de l’Épiphanie (for the Feast of Epiphany), In Circumcisione Domini (for the Circumcision of our Lord), In Festo Purificationis (for the Feast of Purification), and Pour le Jour de Ste Geneviève (for the Day of Saint Geneviève). Earlier in the notebooks is the Canticum in nativitatem Domini. The similar musical forces required – two sopranos, bass, violins and continuo – imply that they were performed by the same ensemble of singers and instrumentalists. Their placement in Charpentier’s Mélanges autographes suggests that these works were composed during the Christmas season of 1676-1677. Read more here.

Program from October 2008 - graphic design standards have certainly improved!

Most recently, Magnificat a program of Music for the Dauphin  – La Couronne de fleurs and Les plaisirs de Versailles – opened Magnificat’s 2008-09 season. From late 1679 until mid-1683, Charpentier composed music for the establishment of the eldest son of Louis XIV and Queen Marie-Thérèse. Both works on the program are examples of the operatic divertissement: a short entertainment that is sung throughout in the manner of an opera, though much shorter than the operas of the time. Read more here. An excerpt from those performances, featuring soprano Laura Heimes can be heard here.

I am very grateful to all those who have supported Magnificat over the years and given us the chance to perform so much of Charpentier’s music. In particular, Magnificat Artistic Advisory Board member John Powell has been very generous in preparing scores, writing program notes and articles, and offering great ideas over the years. Most of all, I am grateful to the splendid musicians who have given their love and talents to Magnificat’s performances of Charpentier’s music. I only wish we could perform each of the programs again!