Fidèles echoes de ces bois

The French and Italians have not always gotten along in music history (to say nothing of larger political battles) despite long traditions of contact and mutual influence. Pergolesi’s comic operatic style was very influential in French musical culture. He was valorized by one side of the debate known as the querrelle des bouffons, which raged throughout Europe in the mid-1700s. At its most basic, this argument divided those who favored elaborate (read “artificial”) melodic style in the Italian manner over a simpler (read “natural”), French manner. Composers of instrumental music, like the Parisian Louis-Antoine Dornel (1685-1765), managed stay just slightly above the fray as they worked to merge elements of the Italian violin school (brilliant texture, alternating slow-fast tempo patterns) with the older forms derived from the French dance suite. Others, as in the case of Louis-Nicolas Clérambault (1676-1749), were directly caught up in the stylistic war. Clérambault pioneered a genre of French secular cantata, using a descriptive and vibrant instrumental approach for setting mostly classical stories from the Greco-Roman tradition. The French cantata derived from an older Italian model, but it insisted on subtle changes in the approach to text and made more accessible by being less melodically ornate. “Fidèles échos de ces bois” from Orpheus (1710) remains one of his most beloved airs, rich in emotion and sensitivity to text, and using a gentle flute accompaniment to comment upon the vocal line.

(c) Jason Stell