Hunted, or Charpentier’s Mythic Appropriations

David Martin (daim3@cam.ac.uk)

“I am he who, born in another age, was known during the last century.”

So begins a despairing Marc-Antoine Charpentier in his Epitaphium Carpentarii, or musical epitaph. For much of his life, he believed that he was little more than a glorified chorister for the Duchesse de Guise, despite his training in Rome and having a fairly appreciative ear in the Louis XIV, the Sun King. Indeed, his posthumous fame (or lack thereof) seemed to confirm his suspicions that his was not a stellar career. And yet, it was his music that opened the 2024-25 season for the Academy of Ancient Music (the AAM) in London and Cambridge, over three-hundred years after his death. What was it that gave Charpentier a decent (enough) career in the seventeenth century and then rapturous applause in the twenty-first?

The crux lies in his numerous tragédies mises en musique, or French tragic opera, most of which draw liberally from the massive corpus of Greco-Roman mythology. These tales of gods and mortals were hot commodities in seventeenth-century France, which still basked in the afterglow of the Renaissance. Stories of Actaeon and Medea were brought into the homes of the powerful (and tasteful, if one is to believe the chatter around a certain hunting lodge) to demonstrate the vintage of one’s wealth and learning. Charpentier himself spent much of his time in the palatial estates of the Marie de Lorraine, or Mlle de Guise as she was affectionately styled at court.

Read more: Hunted, or Charpentier’s Mythic Appropriations

Charpentier’s premiers were not society affairs in the twenty-first century sense, having rather more restricted audiences within the homely acres of the Duchesse. Indeed, public acclaim was hard to come by, as the old composer bitterly bemoaned. His curious statements that he was regarded as ‘good by the good’ and ‘bad by the bad’ speak to a situation where he was known by reputation far more than by his works, works which nonetheless smacked of the Imperial Zeitgeist.

One of his most well-known works is Actéon, a tragédies mis en musique, which tells the story of a hapless mortal trapped in the machinations of the vindictive Queen of Olympus — Juno. Her imperious aria at the very end echoes the old shakespearean line ‘as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport’, a sentiment which Charpentier and many of his listeners past and present still recognise. Trapped in the glittering halls of Versailles, or the steaming (and recently illumined) streets of Paris, the life of the upwardly mobile in seventeenth century France was shot with a certain uncertainty, given that their lives hinged on the whims of an absolute monarch.

Thus, as France started its march down global imperium, two separate impulses were at work where ‘foreign’ culture was concerned. On the one hand, knowledge and appreciation of the ‘other’ (initially mythology, and eventually every non-Western culture that they encountered) was not just a sign of good breeding or education, it became a symbol of a certain vision of the national — one that lays claim to histories and cultures. While on the other, the French populace, through its musicians, writers and artists, began to forge strong emotional attachments to those verdant cultures-turned-object.
To Charpentier, being the herald of the Zeitgeist meant investing heavily in a world which would never fully accept him. His works, especially pieces like Acéton, presented instantly recognisable and relatable stories which spoke to audiences then and now. Coupled with France’s geopolitical ascendency, this cultural metabolism meant that the world of Greco-Roman mythology had a new owner, and the mechanics of appropriation were being woven through crowds of eager consumers, looking for understanding in a world where a Juno or an Apollo could tear them to pieces with a snap of their caky fingers.

Further Reading:

1. Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Epitaphium Carpentarii, Translated by Catherine Cessac, 2000. http://www.classicalacarte.net/HarmoniaGold/Goldberg/PDF/cessac(en)_goldberg.htm
2. Catherine Cessac and Patricia M.Ranum, Les Histoires sacrées de Marc-Antoine Charpentier : origines, contextes, langage, interprétation : hommage à Patricia M. Ranum, 2016.
3. Richard Wilkinson, Louis XIV, Routledge, 2017.

Image: Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Actaeon.