Chapter Three
Jacquet de la Guerre
Paris, as much as Venice, has a special place in our mythology of cities of culture. The American writer, Henry Miller, speaks for many who have visited the city in search of inspiration, or to escape the rigidities of their native land: ‘I will write here. I will live quietly and quite alone. And each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book. It is worth the effort. To know Paris is to know a great deal.’ Miller, in the early 1930s, was not the first by a long way, nor would he be the last, to launch his career in Paris and be fed creatively by Paris before returning to his own land, renewed. But what of the artist who is not a visitor, but born and bred in Paris, whose life is focused on one small island on the Seine, the Ile Saint-Louis? What of an artist who is not free to travel from her own land? What of an artist who is dependant on the protection of an all-powerful king, the epitome of the absolute monarch, a man-god whose theatre state is maintained through surveillance and repression? What of an artist whose career starts in that same king’s magnificent, if economy-breaking, palace, a ‘synthesis of stagecraft and statecraft’, and who must shape her every note to his tastes? This is the story of one such artist, the composer Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, of her king, Louis XIV, and of Paris.
Jacquet de la Guerre knew Paris, which meant she knew a great deal. More precisely, she knew a particular corner of the city. Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet, as she was named at her baptism on 17 March 1665, was shaped by the island of her birth, the Ile Saint-Louis. Élisabeth’s island on the Seine was itself shaped by the booming French economy during this first decade of the Sun King’s long personal reign, a period of ‘peace, prosperity, and cultural creativity’. As recently as her grandparents’ time, it had been the Ile aux Vaches, pasture for the cows (vaches) of the cathedral of Notre Dame on the neighbouring island. By the time of Élisabeth’s birth, the vision of successive French kings had been realized, and the masterpiece of urban construction, the grid of elegant townhouses that cover the Ile Saint-Louis today, had been created, the cows long gone. Strolling around what is today the exclusive, and unnervingly expensive, Ile Saint-Louis it would be easy to imagine that Élisabeth Jacquet was born into a Parisian elite. The reality was, however, somewhat different.
For decades, the Jacquet family had been master masons (what we would now call architects), musicians, composers and instrument makers. Jehan Jacquet, Élisabeth’s grandfather, and her father, Claude, were both master harpsichord makers, working when Paris was becoming a centre for such luxury trades. Jacquet harpsichords retained their status and prestige right through the eighteenth century, and an inventory taken at Claude’s death reveals a treasury of exquisite instruments: harpsichords (of course), epinettes (an ancestor of the dulcimer) and manichordions (a kind of clavichord), many ready to sell, some still being constructed, together with pieces of pine and beech wood, and all the tools of the instrument-maker’s trade. Claude not only made instruments, he played them as well. Indeed, he was appointed organist of the new church of Saint-Louis, the foundation stone of which had been laid on 1 October 1664, just a few months before the birth of his daughter Élisabeth.
The Jacquet family’s trades put them in close proximity to the nobility, who might require an architect for their latest project, or a luxury harpsichord for entertaining, but the family were far from noble themselves. They were, and remained, artisans, but artisans who operated within a vast web of alliances linking families and trades, facilitating business deals and creating job opportunities.* Claude Jacquet educated his sons and his daughters to survive, and thrive, in this world. Élisabeth and her older sister Anne would both become musicians. Élisabeth would go even further. She would be a composer.
Her journey started at a very young age. How young has been a matter of debate. She is often represented as a child prodigy, which neatly assimilates her into some very traditional ways in which women of ability and achievement are represented. If understood as a child prodigy, then Jacquet becomes a one-off, unique, a lone genius whose gift appears as if by magic, and who can be separated from the rest of her (imperfect) sex. The music scholar Suzanne Cusick makes the point about Francesca Caccini and her fellow female performers/composers in an earlier era, and a different setting, Italy of the 1600s, showing that these women were represented as angels or sorceresses, not truly human, ‘never what they actually are . . . formidably talented musicians’. To represent Jacquet as a dazzling five-year-old, as she is often depicted, or to talk about her in terms of the supernatural or magical world, as she was portrayed in her own lifetime, serves to diminish or distract from her status as a formidably talented, not to mention hard-working, professional adult performer/composer. This is not to say that Jacquet did not display exceptional talent at a very young age. But commentators in Jacquet’s own time, perhaps Jacquet herself, emphasized or even exaggerated her feats as a child if only to increase the glory and perspicacity of her king who, the story went, was the first to recognize the little girl’s talent when she performed at his palace of Versailles, aged five. Élisabeth was twenty-two when the journal Mercure Galant wrote that ‘she had always been regarded as a prodigy’ and, in the same year, the composer put on record her own gratitude to the king for ‘having taken an interest in her education’ and for finding in her ‘at the age of five, a certain disposition for playing the harpsichord’. There obviously was a Versailles performance from the very young Élisabeth, but other comments make clear that Jacquet’s early career unfolded steadily over a number of years, and in less spectacular ways. She spends ‘a long period of retreat’ with her father, during which time she pursues ‘continuous study’, presumably including composition. The next time she surfaces in the court records, it is a July evening in 1677, and she sings a song in praise of Louis XIV to the delight of the court, and, most importantly, the king. The lyrics consisted of the kind of sycophantic drivel that fuelled the cult of the Sun King, but Élisabeth’s freshness of performance was highly valued. She was twelve. Some eighteen months later, Élisabeth is mentioned again, as one of the musicians involved in the Thursday concerts at the residence of the lutenist, dancer and composer, Louis de Mollier. This was another stepping-stone towards a life as an adult professional musician. Mollier was well-placed at court, the master of the music for the dauphin, and of the children of the chamber and the chapel. The Mercure Galant records that the ‘young Élisabeth Jacquet took part in these performances by playing the clavecin [harpsichord]’, and goes on to suggest that it was on the basis of these performances that some of Mollier’s musicians were taken into the service of the noblewoman Gabrielle de Rochechouart, who had apartments in the palace of the Louvre. This may well have been Élisabeth’s formal entry into court service.
Neither anecdote suggests that Jacquet was a prodigy. She is simply another very talented young girl, on the cusp of womanhood, making her way as a musician in the court of the Sun King. In this, she was following a similar path to her older sister, Anne, who was employed in the service of Marie de Lorraine, Madame de la Guise, as a ‘fille de la musique’, and a ‘femme de chambre’, both traditional (and traditionally combined) court roles. Madame de la Guise, based in Paris, and, by the time Anne entered her household, the last Guise standing, was known for her love of music and her patronage of musicians. Since she had little left to fight for politically, Madame de la Guise devoted herself to the support of, amongst other things, the cause of Italian music, which set her at odds with the French musical establishment, led, of course, by the Italophobe Louis XIV. (In her youth, during the 1630s, Madame de la Guise had been exiled to Medici Florence, the same decade in which Francesca Caccini returned to her home city and La Crocetta.) The duchess’s favoured composer was Marc-Antoine Charpentier and, by the early 1680s, she had developed a group of musicians that rivalled, in the words of one contemporary, the ensembles of ‘several sovereigns’. Élisabeth’s sister was, therefore, living and working at the cutting edge of music in Paris.
It did not take long for Élisabeth to make the crucial transition from her patron, Gabrielle de Rochechouart, at the Louvre, to her patron’s sister at Versailles. She was in her mid-teens when she entered the service of Madame de Montespan, the principal mistress of Louis XIV.* In doing so, she entered a world fraught with sexual politics, as much, if not more, challenging than those negotiated by Caccini in Florence or Strozzi in Venice. All servants of that most absolute of absolute monarchs, Louis XIV, had to operate in an environment in which keeping up with, but not being caught out by, the king’s choice of mistress (or more precisely mistresses) remained a daily challenge, but Élisabeth joined the household of Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, the Marquise de Montespan, at a particularly critical moment in her mistress’s career.
Born in 1640, just two years after Louis XIV himself, Athénaïs had been introduced to the king at Versailles in the autumn of 1666, and became one of his mistresses the following year. It was a double infidelity. Both the king and Athénaïs were married: three years prior to her arrival at Versailles, Montespan had given birth to a daughter, Marie Christine, and then a son, Louis, born in 1664, by her husband. It was, of course, Montespan’s marital status that presented a problem, rather than the king’s. For eight years the situation was ignored, and Madame de Montespan’s influence grew unchecked. By the age of thirty-four, in 1674, she had been elevated to the position of the king’s official favourite, displacing Mademoiselle de la Vallière. Throughout these years she did as all Louis’s mistresses did: bore his children (a daughter in 1669, a son in 1670, another son in 1672). All three were legitimized in 1673. Madame de Montespan remained married. By 1674, the king had engineered an official separation between his mistress and her husband, much to the disapproval of the Church. If only to placate Louis’s Jesuit confessor, a temporary, strategic estrangement between the king and his mistress ensued, but by 1676 it appeared that Madame de Montespan’s position was secure. She bore her king two further children, in 1677 and 1678, the ultimate sign of her intimacy with the king.
With intimacy, came power. Her apartments were next to those of the king, a proximity that meant everything in an absolute monarchy, in which all power was invested in the body of the king. Louis XIV may not have actually said ‘L’État c’est moi’ but he might as well have done. No wonder, then, that at the height of Madame de Montespan’s power it was said she was ‘the centre of the court, and of the pleasures, fortune, hope and terror of the ministers and army generals’. Artists and musicians also depended upon her, amongst them the writers Molière and La Fontaine. If Élisabeth was taken up by Madame de Montespan, possibly via her older sister, Gabrielle Rochechouart, as early as 1677, when Élisabeth was twelve, then the young performer would have entered the service of a woman at the very pinnacle of her political and cultural power, newly freed from her marriage, and each year pregnant with a child of the king. If, as seems most likely, Élisabeth entered Montespan’s service later, when she was about fifteen, c. 1680, then the situation was very different.
Already, in the earlier period, the warning signs had been there. Madame de Montespan had hired a woman of impeccable character to act as governess to her children by the king. Françoise d’Aubigne was excellent in the role, in effect raising the children herself. She became a good friend of Montespan, and then, more problematically, a good friend to the king, who gave her the title Madame de Maintenon in 1674 in recognition of the quality of her service to his children. As the years passed, Madame de Maintenon’s influence over the king himself grew, to the dismay of her erstwhile employer, Montespan. By January 1684, the former governess reigned supreme for, although it remained a secret to the public, the king had married her some six months after the death of his wife, Maria Theresa.
It was not, however, the rise of Madame de Maintenon that was the most potent threat to Élisabeth’s patron’s security when the teenager began her stint at court. It was a young woman, only a couple of years older than Élisabeth, who did the damage: the Duchess of Fontanges, with whom Louis XIV became infatuated in the winter of 1679. The king’s behaviour with his teenage mistress was extreme even by his own standards, and both Montespan and Maintenon were horrified both by the king’s antics and the erosion of their own influence. Then, in June 1681, the nineteen-year-old duchess died.
It is now thought that she died due to complications connected with a miscarriage, but at the time there were those quick to point out not only that Madame de Montespan, in her desperation, had been directly or indirectly involved with sorceresses and necromancy, but even to suggest that she had poisoned her rival. A judicial enquiry, which had been precipitated by news of a plot to poison the king (rather than his teenage mistress), revealed, in the words of one historian, ‘a vast criminal underworld in seventeenth-century Paris made up of the purveyors of secret and supposedly magical powers. Stranger still was that this underworld was frequented by Parisians from every level of society, including some of Louis XIV’s most trusted and high-ranking courtiers.’ Sordid revelations of torture, poison, abortions and witchcraft emerged throughout the enquiry’s proceedings, but when, in 1782, the investigation seemed to implicate Madame de Montespan, Louis stepped in, and the enquiry was swiftly closed down. The damage, however, had now been done. The king, it was said, never visited Madame de Montespan alone after these revelations. Her years of power were effectively over.
Versailles was, and remains, a very special environment in which to come to maturity as a woman and composer. The palace may still have been under construction during Jacquet’s time there, since the transformation of Louis XIII’s hunting lodge had only begun in the year of Élisabeth’s conception, 1664, and Louis XIV would not transfer himself, and therefore his government, completely to Versailles until 1782, but it was already an overwhelming architectural symbol of the Sun King’s absolute rule.
Even the most functional of rooms, such as the salle des gardes du roi (the room of the king’s bodyguard) had wall hangings of leather decorated with gold, high art on the walls, chandeliers complete with the king’s monogram, all alongside the benches and camp beds used by the king’s men. At its height, Versailles would contain three thousand courtiers and functioned as an immense theatre of power, within which, some argue, women occupied a central place. Since the king’s body was the repository of royal and God-given authority, it followed that his mistresses, who had access to that body, wielded strategic political power even if they never held formal political positions. Some historians have even suggested that Jacquet’s youth was a golden age for women since, if persuasion, negotiation and ingratiation were the only means of advancement in Louis’s Versailles, then women became the power-brokers at court. Perhaps. But the Duchess of Fontanges was dead at nineteen. And Élisabeth Jacquet witnessed at close quarters the fall of her own patron, Madame de Montespan, if not her patron’s physical destruction. In fact, she was discarded surprisingly slowly. It took until 1691 for Montespan to leave the court, with a golden handshake of a half-a-million francs with which she began her new life at the monastery of Saint-Joseph in Paris.
Like Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi, in Florence and Venice, the young Élisabeth learned her trade in a world fraught with sexual politics, but Jacquet faced a further challenge since she was fated to come of age during the closing years of what can only be described as the cultural reign of the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. By any measure of success, Lully was a winner. Born in Florence, he became the epitome of French culture, the right-hand man, musically speaking, of King Louis XIV. His appointment as surintendant de la musique de la chambre de roi in 1661 signalled the beginning of a remarkable decade during which Italian opera was imported into the French court. The same year, Barbara Strozzi’s contemporary Cavalli was brought over to Paris from Venice to write an opera in celebration of Louis XIV’s marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain. Cavalli’s six-hour spectacle Ercole amante (Hercules in Love) was certainly enjoyed, although more in rehearsals at Cardinal Mazarin’s palace than in the ‘vastness of the theatre’, but it was Lully’s dance music that stole the show. Lully, already established as the foremost composer of the king’s favourite art form, ballet, swiftly moved to establish himself as the king of French opera. Cavalli returned to Venice.
From the start, Lully understood the need, Louis XIV’s need, to establish a recognizably French opera, one that catered not only to the nationalist agenda, but also to the cultural tastes of the Sun King himself. He duly injected substantial quantities of dance into the Italian opera format, together with elaborate political prologues and epilogues in praise of the monarch. Given his chance, Lully became a ruthless operator in the music world, systematically sidelining his competitors, by fair means or foul, all the time protected by his king. The founding of the Académie Royale de Musique, (created in 1669 as the Academie d’Opéra, soon to be known as the Paris Opera, and established by royal patent ‘for the presentation of French prose set to music’) merely gave Lully a new arena for his dominance. From 1673, and the king’s attendance at one of the composer’s ‘tragedies in music’ (as French opera was often known), Lully was unassailable. When the king permitted the composer to use the Palais-Royal free of charge, and Molière and his actors were removed from their own theatre in Paris, the knives started to come out for Lully but, although the hostility in Paris was such that opera performances were moved to Versailles, this merely consolidated Lully’s position further.
But even Jean-Baptiste Lully could fall foul of the king, or, more precisely, his mistress. In 1677, at exactly the time when the twelve-year-old Élisabeth Jacquet was charming the court with her unaffected singing, Lully’s most significant collaborator, the librettist Quinault, was being forced out of the court. Quinault’s mistake (not Lully’s, of course) was to insult Madame de Montespan in his ‘tragédie en musique, Isis’. As Caccini had found at the court of the Medici, libretti could be dangerous things, with everyone quick to spot a contemporary application for an old story. Quinault recovered his place fairly soon, no doubt helped by the waning of Montespan’s power. Lully continued on his way, with the king – and therefore the court – turning a blind eye to the married composer’s preference for young men as sexual partners. Only later, in the 1680s, and probably due to the influence of the morally correct, religiously minded Madame de Maintenon, did Lully’s openly homosexual activities lead to a gulf between him and his king, most notable in Louis’s absence from the premier of the composer’s masterpiece, Armide. And yet, Lully had achieved a position of such power, and remained such a ruthless businessman, that even this sign of royal displeasure could not displace him from the control of the French music world, from the Paris Opera to the Palais-Royal.
Lully’s Versaille. Lully’s Paris. This was the world in which Élisabeth Jacquet continued, and enhanced, the musical education begun by her father, and in which she made the, what is for some, challenging transition from child performer to professional adult. Like her predecessors Caccini and Strozzi, Jacquet was a brilliant improviser and, like them, she made the leap from improviser/performer to composer, probably around the year 1680 when she was sixteen. Ironically, the fact that we know almost nothing of Élisabeth’s life during these years at Versailles is a sign of her success. Despite the ubiquity of scandal of all kinds in the court of the Sun King, Jacquet flew under the radar. What is more, she continued to function as performer and composer in the entourage of a woman whose own political career was on the verge of destruction. It is possible that the certain knowledge that Madame de Montespan was on the way out, and the glimpses of Parisian (rather than Versailles) musical life that Élisabeth would have gained through her older sister, Anne, made the next step in Élisabeth’s life an easy one.
On 23 September 1684, and not yet twenty, Élisabeth was married to Marin La Guerre. The marriage returned her nominally, and then physically, to the creative and artisan dynasties into which she had been born. Within a few months, the couple were settled back on the Ile Saint-Louis, probably staying with or very close to Élisabeth’s parents in the rue Guillaume (now rue Budé). Élisabeth would from now on use both her own and her husband’s surnames. Not merely a sign of her pedigree, the double surname is a musical advertisement, an early sign of her determination to continue her professional career after marriage. Five years later, her older sister would take a different path. When Anne married a fellow servant of the Duchess of Guise (one Louis Yard, a valet de chambre) in 1689, it marked the end of her life as a professional musician. In 1684, when Élisabeth married Marin, the story would be very different. For Élisabeth’s French biographer the reason for this lies in ability and personality. Élisabeth was simply more gifted, more self-willed and more ambitious than her sister.
Far from closing the door on a musical career, marriage actually increased the possibilities for Madame Jacquet de la Guerre. Two Ile Saint-Louis dynasties were joined in the union, and some might say that La Guerre’s pedigree was even better than Jacquet’s. Élisabeth’s new husband came from a dynasty of organists. His grandfather had been appointed the organist of the cathedral of Notre Dame at the age of only fourteen and then, after fourteen years in that post, gained the even more prestigious position of organist at the magnificent Sainte-Chapelle. Marin’s father was equally successful, and Marin himself began married life as the organist of the Jesuit church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis (where Lully had learned his counterpoint) in the Marais, and then moved to Saint-Séverin, on the other side of the river, four years later. Marin La Guerre reached his highest position in 1698, when his older brother, Jerome, gave up his post as organist at Sainte-Chapelle. Jerome, of course, requested that his brother be appointed in his place, and so it came to pass. With up to eight chaplains, twelve clergy, eight children in the choir and permanent precentors, La Guerre’s life was a musically rich one. Indeed, Sainte-Chapelle has been described as almost a music college, with the Master of Music, supported by the organist, directing the singers, teaching them plainchant and counterpoint, and managing the players of the traditional church instruments of serpents, cornets and bassoons. Above all, of church organs, Sainte-Chapelle’s was one of the best in the country, recently restored to all its glory.
Marin La Guerre’s career through to his appointment at Sainte-Chapelle is visible to us now because, and only because, he held official positions within the church. Those posts, of course, were not open to his wife. But the silence of the archives is broken by Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. In 1687, at the age of only twenty-two, and three years after her marriage to Marin, she published Les pièces de clavecin: Livre I. It is tempting to speculate that, with the downfall of Madame de Montespan, and her own removal to Paris, Jacquet de la Guerre was seeking an identity outside the world of court patronage. After all, the frontispiece to the work gives the composer’s address on the Ile-Saint-Louis, and instructs the reader to go to a particular Paris bookseller.
But Les pièces de clavecin marked no simple rejection of the court and embracing of the city. Instead, the work positions Jacquet de la Guerre directly as a loyal subject of the king himself. Indeed, the music is published through royal authority, a hint that the pieces had been played, first, to the king and were now, through his majesty’s kindness, being given to his grateful public. Jacquet de la Guerre may have lost her most powerful female patron, Madame de Montespan, but Louis XIV remained alive and well, and a fountain of plenty.
This first publication from Jacquet de la Guerre presents itself as the work of a young but also a confident composer, in demand and even internationally known. At the same time, the dedication, addressed to the king himself, is an expression of abject servility from ‘the most humble, the most obedient, the most faithful, the most obliging servant and subject Elizabeth Jacquet’ [sic], as she signs herself (hinting that the works themselves were composed while she was still Mademoiselle Jacquet at Versailles). Her dedication is followed by two poems in praise of the composer and, by implication, the king. She is a marvel, in this reign of marvels. She deserves a place on Mount Parnassus, with the Muses. She is ‘learned Jacquet’, her voice and her playing exemplifying the power of music to touch the listener.
The poems are written by a cousin by marriage of Élisabeth’s, René Trépagne, and the one thing he does not exaggerate is the loveliness of this collection of pieces assembled by his relative. Unsurprisingly, as a composer, Jacquet shows herself utterly familiar with the work of both her predecessors and contemporaries (after all, she had been playing their music night after night through her teens) and as an expert in counterpoint, testament to her many years of education. Her pieces have been praised for their ‘delightful melodic lines’, the sense of balance both within and across the works, but also for their expressiveness, unpredictability and innovation. Most notably, Jacquet’s unmeasured preludes, that is, movements composed without orthodox indications of rhythm and metre, are a striking example of her ability to capture the listener’s interest. One gets the sense that this is a composer who wants to be noticed.
Was it merely coincidence that this glittering collection of keyboard pieces appeared just weeks before the death of the composer Lully, who had so dominated the Académie Royale de la Musique for the previous fifteen years? If Jacquet de la Guerre was signalling her readiness to take a prominent place in the post-Lully musical world, then she underestimated the composer’s power even beyond the grave. Four years pass in which there remains little to indicate whether Jacquet de la Guerre lives or dies, let alone works. It is hard to believe she was inactive, but the records keep their counsel. Then, in 1691, there is a glimpse of her as composer. What is more, it is a glimpse which shows that, in this very year of Madame de Montespan’s final exile from court, Jacquet de la Guerre is not merely surviving, but thriving, as the composer of an opera-ballet for the king. Sadly, the single surviving manuscript contains the libretto, the scenery, the dances, Jacquet’s dedication to the king, and even the instrumentation for Jeux à l’honneur de la victoire (Games in Honour of the Victory), but no music.*
In the dedication, the composer acknowledges that she has been delighted to serve the king in a private capacity, but, now:
[Those previous] signs of my devotion seemed to me insufficient and I longed for an opportunity to express my devotion publicly. That is what led me to compose this Ballet for the Theatre. Women have already given excellent pieces of poetry therein, which have been most successful. But so far, none has attempted to set a whole opera to music; and I take that advantage for my undertaking, that the more extraordinary it is, the more worthy it is of you, Sire, and the more it authorises the liberty I take in presenting this work to you.
Jacquet de la Guerre knows exactly what it means for her, a woman, to ‘set a whole opera to music’, and, barely concealed by her humility towards her king, she glories in it.
Jacquet de la Guerre’s reputation was growing stronger with each year. In December 1691, the Mercure Galant was once again extolling the composer’s virtues, this time in the form of a long poem ‘written’ by the ghost of Lully from the Elysian Fields, addressing himself to the ‘best musician in the world’. In response probably to Jeux à l’honneur de la victoire – although perhaps to another work, now lost, of which one has to assume there are many – Jacquet de la Guerre garners nine pages of praise, both for her ‘opera nouveau’ and for being remarkable amongst her sex. She is crowned Lully’s successor, and the king’s support and admiration for her ‘happy genius’ is noted. The poem ends with the vision of Lully, together with Orpheus and Amphion, drinking a toast to Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre.
It all looks so plausible on paper. But the events of the next few years would show that the ghost of Lully could work in less benign ways. Lully had created a ‘distinctive national opera’, primarily because of his unassailable position from 1672 at the Académie Royale de Musique (or Paris Opéra), and his mixed model was so successful that it continued well beyond his death in 1687, consolidated by the publication of the composer’s oeuvre, beginning in 1679, which ‘essentially established a national repertory and a permanent tradition’, according to one music guide. What has become known as the Lully effect was stifling upon new music. If you wanted audiences, you simply revived the works of Lully rather than commissioning new work.
In this stifling musical climate, Jacquet de la Guerre continued to compose. Seven years after Lully’s death, and three years after her opera-ballet, she turned to writing a tragédie en musique. (Again, one assumes that she was busy in the intervening years, but, again, no works have survived.) The ‘new opera from the little La Guerre’ made her ‘the talk of Paris’, according to one correspondent. The word on the ground was that it was going to be a great success: ‘I have seen two rehearsals; it will be excellent.’* In the event, the opera was, at best, a ‘semi-failure’. First performed on 15 March 1694 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, Céphale et Procris had only five or six performances. Various explanations have been and continue to be given for the disappointing reception of Jacquet de la Guerre’s one surviving opera. Perhaps the most touching can be found in the Histoire de l’Académie Royale de Musique, which recounts that, the day after the premier, Marin La Guerre ‘who tenderly loved and respected his wife’ met with several of those who had criticized the new opera, told them to be quiet, and then said: ‘Messieurs, I assure you that my wife’s opera is a fine work [est fort bon], it is merely that the overture is too long.’ More damaging was the work’s weak libretto in a musical culture, which insisted on the primacy of the text in opera, to the extent that a work such as Céphale et Procris would be known as a tragédie en musique (a tragedy put into music) or even simply a ‘tragedy’, with opera remaining, in the words of one musicologist, ‘French literary theatre recited musically’.
Jacquet de la Guerre’s contemporaries also fell foul of a French musical culture that was wary of contemporary opera. Opera might flourish in Italy ‘thanks to its ability to entertain tourists’, but the French ‘discuss Italian opera like a culinary object that was not a real alternative to proper food’. In Paris, a nostalgic cabal was devoted to perpetuating the Lully tradition beyond the grave – so much for the vote of confidence from Lully’s ghost! – with composers such as Marc-Antoine Charpentier being deemed too modern, too Italianate. Unlike Charpentier, Jacquet de la Guerre does not venture too far away from Lully in her opera, showing more musical caution in Céphale et Procris than she does in her other works from this time. Could it have been simply the presence of a female composer in the halls of the Académie Royale that was enough to ruffle Parisian feathers? If so, it is ironic that Céphale et Procris and its composer get into the music history books precisely because Jacquet de la Guerre can be noted as the ‘first woman in France to compose an opera’, or, more precisely, the first ‘tragedy in music written by a woman for the Académie Royale de Musique’.
The reception of Céphale et Procris tells us more about the world of opera, and about French music in the 1690s, than it does about the ability of the composer herself. What is frustrating for those of us who admire her music is that the lack of success with Céphale et Procris seems to stop Jacquet de la Guerre at least in her opera tracks. She would not compose another ‘tragédie en musique’, nor indeed any other kind of opera.
She did, nevertheless, take the trouble to publish the work. As before, she addresses her monarch in the most humble, obsequious of terms, drawing attention to his long-standing support for her career. There is a fascinating hint that there has been a hiatus of some kind. Jacquet de la Guerre refers to a misfortune of fate (malheur de mon sort) that has made it impossible, for a time, to give her life to the king’s service, to put her talents to work for his glory. She quickly moves on to remind the king, and her readers, that she has been active in his service for many years, indeed since her childhood, providing entertainment on many occasions. The dedication ends by insisting that the public, as much as the king, need to know the extent of her ardent and respectful zeal for the king’s ‘sacred person’, and signs off, as before ‘the most humble, most obedient, & most faithful servant and subject. JACQUET’.
What was the misfortune that prevented Élisabeth devoting herself to the service of the king? It is just possible that the preface is a veiled allusion to the fall of Madame de Montespan, whose name is tantalizingly associated in the records with the genesis of Céphale et Procris, and whose final departure from Versailles occurred in the year of the opera’s performance. Earlier, in the year after Élisabeth’s marriage, Montespan, at that time still just about clinging to her position at court, if no longer the mistress of the king, was offered three operas to consider for the winter season. One was Céphale et Procris. It was chosen, but would not be performed in 1685. This was hardly surprising, given the collapse in Montespan’s cultural influence, and the concomitant rise of her successor, Madame de Maintenon, who was far from being an opera fan. When the opera that, apparently, Madame de Montespan had wanted back in 1685 was finally performed nine years later, it would be staged at the Palais-Royal, a building that epitomized the fraught world of high politics, or, more precisely, sexual high politics, and even more precisely, a building from which Montespan had recently been very publicly excluded.
At the time of Élisabeth’s birth, Louis XIV’s brother, the Duke of Orléans, was in residence at the Palais-Royal, busy transforming the gardens and buildings into the social centre of Paris, the city that the king had by now come to fear. The Palais-Royal nevertheless worked to feed the king’s sexual appetites at Versailles. Both Louise de la Vallière and Madame de Montespan entered the court world by first joining the household of the Duchess of Orléans, before moving on to bigger and better things at Versailles. Later, the short-lived Duchess of Fontanges was in the service of the Orléans’s daughter, Marie-Louise, before she too became the king’s mistress. In 1692, two years before the eventual performance of Jacquet de la Guerre’s opera-ballet Jeux à l’honneur de la victoire and one year after Madame de Montespan’s final departure from Versailles, the king chose the Palais-Royal as the venue for the marriage of one of his children by Montespan, the fourteen-year-old Françoise-Marie de Bourbon. Her husband would be the king’s nephew, Philippe d’Orléans, only son of the king’s brother. The groom’s father did well out of the marriage: he was deeded the Palais-Royal. The bride’s mother, Madame de Montespan, did less well. She was not even invited.
Jacquet de la Guerre, in her hints about misfortune and her restatement of devotion to Louis XIV, could well be reminding the king that his favourites may come and go, but she, the composer, remains loyal to him only. This might explain why she again signs her work JACQUET, the name by which Louis XIV knew her first. However, despite the brave words in the dedication, and despite some archival evidence that Jacquet de la Guerre’s opera continued to be played, if only in the houses of amateurs, Céphale et Procris marked the end of an era. For thirteen years, the composer published nothing.
When Élisabeth emerges again from the historical mists in 1698, she is living very well. She and Marin had a large reception room, three bedrooms, a small office (cabinet), a kitchen and an attic in the Palais de la Cité, now the Palais de Justice. Their home can be glimpsed in a contemporary engraving of the Cour du Palais. They are on one side of the courtyard; on the other, the reason they were there: La Sainte-Chapelle.
The salle was the heart of the apartment for the two musicians, perhaps more so for Élisabeth than for Marin, whose main responsibilities lay in the church opposite. The room was richly furnished. Along with her harpsichord, there were at least six armchairs, four couches and four chairs. It is easy to imagine gatherings for concerts, the walls draped with tapestries celebrating the power of the king. The room also contained something of a library, including six folio volumes containing the works of the ubiquitous Lully, and numerous other works of theology, history and other equally learned subjects.
The nature of Jacquet de la Guerre’s reception room, with its instruments and seating, makes it tempting to imagine her presiding over a salon. It is probably an inappropriate vision, for a number of reasons. It is one thing to describe the literary and musical gatherings initiated and bank-rolled by courtiers such as the Duchess of Guise in their lavish hôtels as salons. It is another to describe a concert held by petit-bourgeois, artisan-class Jacquet de la Guerre as a salon. Class matters, even in the etymology of the word salon itself. It means, literally, a large reception room (from the Italian sala), but during Jacquet de la Guerre’s working life the word was first used in Versailles to connote the musical performances that took place in certain architectural spaces, specifically courtly, noble, architectural spaces. The women who did preside over salons used them to generate and maintain bonds of private patronage, whether of literature, art or music, and had the means to support and champion the work of protégé composers. Jacquet de la Guerre’s older sister, Anne, had direct experience of this in her position as a musician in the service of Marie de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise, the patron of Charpentier. Even in these noble salons, music often remained a secondary element. Musicians were hired and works were commissioned, to provide background entertainment in most cases, or interludes between conversation, as had been the case in Venice in Strozzi’s time and would be the case in many so-called salons well into the eighteenth century.
Perhaps not a salon, therefore, in the beautiful salle at the Palais de la Cité. Perhaps something even better: an apartment where Jacquet de la Guerre performs, hears others perform, where up to a point the classes could mingle, and in which she could maintain her practice and identity as performer, teacher and composer, a place to make music and connections.
Into these rooms we can, tentatively, put our image of Jacquet de la Guerre as depicted in the rather lovely portrait on the cover of this book. Tentatively, because uncertainties abound: the painter is probably François de Troy; the painting was probably exhibited in the Louvre in the summer of 1704; and it is probably of Jacquet de la Guerre.* Circumstantial evidence does link the portrait with the composer, since the instrument that appears in the painting is very similar to the ‘large Flemish dual-keyboard harpsichord’ in Jacquet de la Guerre’s possession, and, what is more, the artist, Troy, had in his youth produced tapestries for Madame de Montespan. Even if one accepts (and, believe me, I want to) that this is a portrait of Jacquet de la Guerre, there remains a final question, one provoked by the artist’s reputation. François de Troy was known for, and apparently sought after, for his ability to make ‘any woman look beautiful’. The composer in the portrait certainly is strikingly beautiful, but she is also confidently appraising the viewer, her quill ready to do its work. Whether it is Jacquet de la Guerre, or (if it is her), whether it is an accurate depiction of her, remains impossible to know. What is certain, is that Jacquet de la Guerre commissioned, for professional reasons, a number of portraits of herself, as well as other pictures, such as one showing her with her father. These have all now been lost, but the existence of such a picture gallery demonstrates that, just as her sovereign made sure that his image was circulated throughout his kingdom, so did the composer, albeit on a much, much smaller scale.
But what of the human being? The records show that in August of 1698, Élisabeth’s mother, Anne de la Touche, died. They show that Élisabeth’s father died in November 1702. Did Élisabeth mourn her parents? The records show that the floods of the winter of 1689–90 destroyed the lower windows of Sainte-Chapelle. Was she afraid? Historians note that by 1700, some two hundred ‘hospitals’ participated in what the social historian Michel Foucault has called ‘the great confinement’; ‘within their walls resided 100,000 people considered outcasts: Gypsies, Protestants, beggars, the unemployed, the transient, the insane, and those deemed to be witches, prostitutes, and juvenile delinquents’. Political historians note that ‘from 1688 until his death in 1715’, Louis XIV’s ‘ambition far exceeded his power, and his reign ended on a note of frustration’. And yet we have no idea at all of Jacquet de la Guerre’s response to the changing world around her.
The records are less mute when it comes to money. In 1702, Élisabeth and her husband received 1,666 livres and sixteen sols from her father (about £125). It was not a fortune, bearing in mind that Lully had been able to invest 10,000 livres into the Paris-Opera, but it presumably made life even more comfortable for the professional couple.
Their life together did not last much longer, for, in July 1704, Marin died. The immediate impact upon Élisabeth was the need to leave the apartment in the Palais de la Cité. Unsurprisingly, she returned to the island of her birth, signing a three-year lease for an apartment in the rue Regrattière, just a few steps from her brother Pierre on the quai Bourbon. The annual rent (300 livres, or £22 10s) suggests that she was not dependent on the legacy she had received from her father two years earlier. In fact, the widowed Élisabeth appears very well-off. Her apartment consisted of two chambres (one small, one large), two offices, a small kitchen overlooking the courtyard, a little room ‘at street level’ and a pantry. Above, on the third floor, were rooms for the servants and a small attic.
The rue Regrattière would be the setting for a remarkable re-emergence of Jacquet de la Guerre, composer. It took months, even years, but in 1707, the year of Madame de Montespan’s death, and with the composer herself now forty-two years old, Jacquet de la Guerre published her Pièces de clavecin qui peuvent se joüer sur le viollon (Pieces for Harpsichord which can be Played on the Violin). That innocuous word, ‘Pièces’, masks the commitment and audacity of their composer. The commitment is evident in the meticulous production values of the publication, which demonstrate the composer’s active supervision of the project, her determination that every performance indication, from tempo marks to ornamentation to blank pages to ensure easy page turns, would be just right. The composer’s audacity lies in the form she uses, for these ‘pieces’ are radical: they are sonatas.
Now, in the twenty-first century, we know what to expect from a sonata. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the form was still tantalizingly fluid, cutting-edge new music. The composer Corelli may have established certain key characteristics, such as the sonata’s slow–fast–slow–fast sequence of movements, but Jacquet de la Guerre did her bit for the new form, deploying the viol (or the cello) in both a melodic and harmonic role within a single piece. She was the first French composer to do so.
Jacquet de la Guerre’s sonatas are considered triumphs of the genre. Not only does the composer develop the role of the violin in important ways (she may not have played the instrument, but she knew how to write for it), but she blends French traditions with Italian innovation, the latter evident in elements such as the expressiveness of the slow movements, the innovative harmonies and the use of modulations. One of her secrets is to give the listener a conventional framework, making the formal shapes of each dance – whether the four beats of the stately allemande or the livelier three beats of the courante – easily identifiable. Within this formal exterior, Jacquet de la Guerre mixes things up, creating movement and variations through ornamentation, melodic motion, rhythmic activity or variations of phrase length.
Delightful as they are, Jacquet de la Guerre’s ‘délicieuses’ sonatas, in the words of one contemporary copyist, were explosive stuff for their time because French attitudes to the sonata made any forays into the genre at best avant-garde, at worst, unpatriotic. What made the sonata so suspicious? The form had been born in Italy (a bad start in life from the French point of view), and most official pronouncements denounced the Italian sonata as impossible to understand, and entirely against French taste. The king’s taste, of course, was the French taste, and dictated what could and would be heard in the court and beyond. To make matters worse, the violin, the vital ingredient of the new form, was viewed as a lowly instrument in France. As one contemporary wrote scornfully, ‘one sees few men of rank who play’ whilst there are many ‘low musicians who live by it’. The violin might have been good for providing dance music but the lute and the viol remained the instruments of elite choice. The sonata therefore represented a threat to those seeking to prevent the contamination and debasement of French culture by foreign influences. It was extremely exciting for everyone else.
Through the 1680s, Jacquet de la Guerre’s apprenticeship years, there had been discreet musical meetings for those who wanted to know more. It was during those years that Corelli’s trio sonatas became known in Paris, and in which many fell under the new music’s spell, and began working, in the words of one admiring contemporary, ‘in a more brilliant fashion’. One such was François Couperin, three years younger than Jacquet de la Guerre, and the composer who claimed (in work published in 1726) that he had written the first sonade français (sic) in 1692. If music history is reduced to a first-past-the-post competition, then it seems Couperin has a rival. A recently discovered manuscript shows that Jacquet de la Guerre had been working on the form long before 1707. Twelve years before, in fact.* Her sonatas, copied by hand in 1695, were some of the first in France. The manuscript’s title, Sonnatta della signora de la Guerre, with its Italian words, seems a declaration of intent. Possibly in the composer’s own hand, it consists of four little booklets, each of eight pages, with the music elegantly transcribed.
Let us for one moment consider the achievement not of the music itself, but the creation of the manuscript, for, as the scholar Heather Wolfe puts it, ‘the truth was that writing was laborious, messy and tiring for both genders’. First, Jacquet de la Guerre needed a quill, the writer’s tool for a thousand years before 1700, made from the four or five outer-left-wing feathers of a living goose, or a swan when there was money available, plucked in the spring. As a child, Élisabeth would have been taught to clean, harden and trim the shafts of her feathers, then make the five or six cuts necessary to create the nib. She would have learned how to hold the pen, how much pressure to exert, how to reshape the nib and how to avoid ‘botching’, that is, sloppy corrections. The correct posture (erect), and the correct surface (sloping but flat) all helped to enhance the quality of the manuscript. Every day, as an adult, Jacquet de la Guerre needed to sharpen her quills, or send them out to the professional ‘stationers’ on the streets of the Ile St Louis. Every week, she would have to replace her quill pens, buy paper and make her own ink, since that was traditionally women’s work, the female-compiled receipt books from the seventeenth century containing time-intensive recipes for making black ink out of rainwater (or beer, wine or vinegar), gall nuts and copperas (iron sulphate or vitriol). In addition to ink, Jacquet de la Guerre required either pounce, sandarac or Calais sand in order to prepare the paper for writing if it were too ‘spongy’ and to dry the ink on the page, whilst under her desk a coal stove would burn so that the ink dried as quickly as possible. In the seconds before the ink dried, there was a moment when the composer could erase an error, simply by wiping it with her thumb. There could not be, and there was not, anything casual or spontaneous about the process of composition. ‘Laborious, messy and tiring’: it is even more disappointing therefore that so few manuscripts survive, and equally exciting when new work is found.
Jacquet de la Guerre stayed true to form in 1707 when she, yet again, dedicated the printed version of her sonatas to the king. Many others, by that time, were looking beyond the old, increasingly withdrawn and resolutely traditionalist Louis XIV. Jacquet de la Guerre remained loyal to her original and most powerful patron. And, astonishingly, Louis XIV, who disliked new music and particularly disliked Italian music, seemed to like Jacquet de la Guerre’s sonatas. He liked them so much that over the summer of 1707 she was summoned to the ‘petit couvert’ of the king to perform. This was to enter the inner sanctum of Versailles. Tall windows provided views to courtyards to the north and south; impressive canvases depicted military victories; Jacquet de la Guerre simply added another sensory pleasure as the king took his lunch. A brave courtier pointed out to the king that he did not normally appreciate this kind of music. In response, Louis insisted that Jacquet de le Guerre’s work was like nothing that had come before: ‘Elle est originale’.
The composer’s next project engaged with a genre as Italian – and therefore resisted and contested by all true Frenchmen – as the sonata: the cantata. In one respect, the cantata had less of a mountain to climb in order to conform to French taste. As has been seen when considering opera as ‘tragédie en musique’, French music in the seventeenth century could not be conceived without reference to a text or at least an occasion, such as a victory in battle. This was yet another reason that the sonata, merely music, was resisted. With the cantata, there were at least words, and indeed for some it was understood as a minor literary, rather than musical, genre. The problem with the cantata was the marriage of Italian music with French words. As is clear from Strozzi’s work in the genre in the 1650s and beyond, the cantata was well-established in the Italian peninsula by the mid-seventeenth century but, in France, vocal music, although present in a theatrical context, still invariably shared the stage with Louis XIV’s preferred art form, dance. By composing her Cantates françoises sur des sujets tirez de l’Écriture (Sacred Cantatas) using texts by Antoine Houdar de Lamotte, the composer was therefore entering the culture wars once more.
For some, these twelve sacred cantatas surpass even her sonatas: ‘no other composer of the time handled the genre so consistently’. In fairness, not many composers were writing cantatas, but she was onto something. The king, closer and closer to death, more and more under the influence of the devout Madame de Maintenon, was the ideal audience for Jacquet de la Guerre’s sacred cantatas and, once again, the composer offered her work to her monarch, acknowledging (could there be a hint of irony?) that she does so out of ‘long habit’. She can almost do no other. In a typical display of modesty, she hopes that the beauty of the (religious) subject and her own desire to please her king will make up for the lack of genius. She remains ‘La très-humble, & très-obéissante Servante, & très-fidèlle Sujette. Élisabeth Jacquet DE LA GUERRE’.
Amongst Jacquet de la Guerre’s biblical subjects was that of Judith’s slaying of Holofernes, popular in both art and music for its intense drama and its marked eroticism, of which Veronese’s treatment of the subject adorned one of the most sumptuous of Louis XIV’s personal rooms. To create a cantata for solo voice out of such an essentially dramatic text was a challenging task for any composer. Moreover, as scholar Michele Cabrini asks, how could Jacquet de la Guerre use the form to ‘give agency to Judith’?* His answer is to suggest that the composer bypasses the libretto (written by La Motte), and instead uses instrumental ‘accompaniments and independent symphonies’ to give voice to Judith, ‘despite a text that downplays her character’. Not only that, but instrumental music is used to heighten tension, as in the passage where Holofernes is sleeping, unaware of the threat from Judith. For Cabrini, this makes Jacquet de la Guerre ‘innovative and forward-looking’ in her move away from the dominance of text that is usually understood to be the hallmark of her period. At the same time, she reveals herself as an innovative text-setter, always concerned to express intense emotion, for example underlining the violent emotions of her character with multiple changes of tempo in ‘Le coup est achevé?’ As Strozzi had done in her time, and as Jacquet de la Guerre herself had done earlier in Céphale et Procris, the borders between airs (arias) and recitative are creatively blurred. Throughout the religious cantatas, as the musicologist Mary Cyr points out, the composer’s decades of experience come into play, as she entertains her listener with sudden major–minor harmonic shifts; active melodies featuring syncopations; and brilliant runs and imaginative changes of texture all contained within a clear, but flexible, vision for the overall design of each cantata.
Once again, Jacquet de la Guerre pulls off the trick of being innovative, possibly even un-French, whilst remaining firmly traditional. What is more, there is a sense of confidence in her dedication to Louis XIV. She writes that she has composed ‘a musical work worthy, dare I say it, of YOUR MAJESTY’, that the texts contain the ‘most signi?cant deeds of Holy Scriptures’ and that she as composer has ‘tried by my melodies to do justice to their spirit and to support their grandeur’. Most commentators agree that she succeeded.
Jacquet de la Guerre had clearly not forgotten how to compose musical drama. These late biblical cantatas can be seen as creative substitutes for the operas that she did not, perhaps could not, write in her lifetime. She followed up her Cantates françoises sur des sujets tirez de l’Écriture with three secular cantatas in 1715, works that retain their Frenchness (the work is entitled Cantates françoises to leave no one in any doubt of that) but also integrate all the composer’s knowledge and practice of Italian styles: the vocality of the melodies, the harmonic developments, the diversity of rhythm and, overall, a sense of contrast and diversity. The secular cantatas are ambitious works, unusually long, which explains why she published three rather than the usual six, and use instruments prominently and powerfully: ‘compositional perfection’ according to Cessac’s notes to the 2000 recording, which also celebrate the ‘distinctly theatrical dimension’ to Le Sommeil d’Ulisse (The Sleep of Ulysses) most notable in the slumber scene (Sommeil) and the storm scene (tempête), both common scenes in French stage works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As close to opera as she would get after Céphale et Procris, the secular cantatas are Jacquet de la Guerre’s last known major works.*
There is a sense in the dedication to the published version of the secular cantatas, which appeared together with a duet, that it was time to move on. For the first time, Jacquet de la Guerre does not offer her work to King Louis XIV. Instead, she turns to the Elector of Bavaria, Maximilian-Emmanuel II, who had been offered a home in France by Louis XIV after his defeat in the war of the Spanish Succession. Despite the change of addressee, Jacquet de la Guerre’s dedication appears to use all the old familiar phrases but there is something new, something disconcerting, in the phrase or two that pick up on her earlier hints about a crisis survived some twenty years earlier. Jacquet de la Guerre writes that it was necessary to her very survival to be able to offer Maximilian-Emmanuel her music. Without the chance to do so, she would not have been able to resist some unspecified ‘maux’ (evils). A narrowly political, although rather obvious, interpretation of these maux could be the imminent or actual death of Louis XIV in 1715. He had been her supporter for over forty years. Jacquet de la Guerre’s French biographer sees melancholy in the dedication to this final work, and there is certainly a sense of lurking maux.
There is also the pragmatism of the survivor. In an Avertissement written by Jacquet de la Guerre, she not only writes about her art, but also gives practical advice to those who are going to interpret or perform her work. She highlights her commitment to variety in her music, primarily so that her listeners do not get bored. She draws attention to the ways in which she responds, sensitively, to words, but also aligns herself clearly with the French belief in the primacy of the text: her aim has been to make her music correspond to the words, since ‘melodies that don’t express the words, no matter how well-wrought, can only be displeasing to connoisseurs’. And, realistic about her audience as ever, she reassures her readers that they can detach the ‘airs’ from the ‘symphonies’, in other words that they can sing the songs without needing the orchestra. Jacquet de la Guerre shows her willingness, yet again, to adapt to the tastes of her time. God forbid she should bore anyone. Needs must, whether the king or the public drives.
Whether the composer was driven by melancholy or pragmatism in 1715, the music represents the culmination of the journey that Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre had made since her teenage years at Versailles. She was the composer who could incorporate Italian innovations but retain her Frenchness, who could balance the past and present, even for that most demanding, most conservative and most powerful of listeners, Louis XIV. She did far more than merely adapt Italian styles to the traditions of French music. As did her much more famous contemporary, Couperin, she explored, energetically, the new musical territory of the sonata. And, unlike her contemporaries, she breathed new life into the cantata, possibly as a surrogate for the operas she did not write.
After 1715, whether precipitated by the death of the Sun King, or her own old age, Jacquet de le Guerre’s public appearances slowed and finally stopped. Occasional, short pieces appear in publications until 1724. Tillot, writing some years later, claims that her last work, now lost, was a Te Deum giving thanks for the young King Louis XV’s recovery from smallpox. It was performed in the chapel of the Louvre in August 1721, a fitting symbol of Jacquet de la Guerre’s enduring place at the very heart of the French establishment.
Five years later, in the autumn of 1726, and at sixty-one years of age, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre prepared her will from her home in rue Regrattière. She was not ill at the time, and thus the will reveals a woman who sought to put her affairs in order, her order, while she was still in control. In both form and content, the document provides hints as to the character of the woman who prepared it. First and foremost, it is a lengthy document, not least because Jacquet de la Guerre has a lot to leave. The will is thorough, explicit, precise. There are lengthy expressions of a strong if con-ventional religious faith. She nominates her cousin by marriage, René Trépagne, the author of the two poetic eulogies that prefaced her first publication back in 1687, as executor. René also receives a good portion of her estate. He does not, however, receive her musical legacy, because, as Jacquet de la Guerre points out, he is no musician.
The will makes no mention of Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre’s child. Indeed, without a solitary reference in a work published some years after her death we would not know that she and Marin had ever been parents. Élisabeth’s son was apparently as talented a harpsichordist as his mother at the age of eight. Two years later he was dead. Nothing more is known: no birth date, no date of death.
This silence is only to be expected. There are no letters, because this was a family who were never apart, even if someone had thought their letters important enough to save. There are no records because the boy was not significant to his society. As has been seen, even the death of his father, organist to Sainte-Chapelle, does not get a mention. This particular gap in our understanding of Jacquet de la Guerre’s life is frustrating, even heartbreaking: how can we understand the woman if we do not know about her child? But this profoundly post-Romantic view of woman is anachronistic to early eighteenth-century Paris. Élisabeth’s status as a mother was irrelevant to her world, if not to her. She did not live in an era in which bearing children was a badge of proper femininity, nor in which the raising of children had become the raison d’être of the bourgeois woman. She could be the marvel of the age without being known as a mother. Yet to recognize this is not to dismiss the experience of Élisabeth and Marin as parents who lost their only child. Just because we have no record of their grief, just because their public identities did not, and could not, incorporate an emotional life, does not mean that neither the grief nor the family life existed.
Within a year of making her will in 1726, the composer moved to the parish of Saint-Eustache (the church at the entrance to Les Halles, the Paris market) in what is now the 1st arrondissement. On 19 July 1727, she signed a lease of five years in the rue des Prouvaires, a street now almost entirely obliterated by the modern Les Halles development. The move was perhaps not such a significant one, since she exchanged one cultural heart of Paris for another: Saint-Eustache was the church in which Molière had been baptized, and later married.
Jacquet de la Guerre did not survive the five years of her lease. As spring turned to summer in 1729, she sickened. On 24 June, close to death, Élisabeth decided to write a new will. Her writing is weak, and many of the earlier pious passages are gone, but the message remains clear. René Trépagne disappears and, instead, Élisabeth names her two nephews, her sister Anne’s children, as her universal legatees. Three days later, on 27 June 1729, she died. She was buried the following day in Saint-Eustache.
Catherine Cessac, Jacquet de la Guerre’s biographer, chooses as her epigram, words from the philosopher and moralist Jean de La Bruyère’s Les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle, first published in 1688: ‘Si la science et la sagesse se trouvent unies en un même sujet, je ne m’informe plus du sexe, j’admire’ (‘if skill and wisdom are found united in one person, I no longer inquire into their sex, I simply admire’). La Bruyère is not writing about Jacquet de la Guerre, but Cessac wants her reader to see the achievement of her female composer of the seventeenth century in terms that transcend our modern-day, and reductive, focus on her ‘sexe’. In doing so, Cessac picks up on one of the more remarkable aspects of Jacquet de la Guerre’s life. More so than any other composer in this book, Jacquet de la Guerre was understood in her own time as an exceptional individual, rather than an exceptional woman. Furthermore Jacquet de la Guerre was simply a professional musician in a world that, up to a point, permitted her to be just that.
Up to a point. Simply being born a woman meant that certain things were straightforwardly denied to Élisabeth, such as being appointed as organist, or a court post as a composer or musical director. Other aspects of life, other dangers, other constraints, were equally determined by her sexe: the very real risk of death in childbirth; the pressure for the married woman to step away from public roles; the lack of access to any formal advanced musical education.
It is only up to a point that Jacquet de la Guerre can transcend her chromosomes. When Titon du Tillet wrote his sustained eulogy of her, published in his 1732 Le Parnasse françois, he accompanies his words with an image of a medallion showing the composer, with the motto ‘I contended for the prize with the great musicians’. Tillet describes Jacquet de la Guerre’s genius for composition, her excellence in the creation of both vocal and instrumental music, her breadth of genres. So far so good. Then the house of cards tumbles: ‘One can say that there has never been someone of her sex who has had as great a talent as she for composition and the manner in which she executes her music on the harpsichord and the organ.’
For reasons best known to themselves, Jacquet de la Guerre’s nephews, who inherited her unpublished compositions, made no attempt to publish their aunt’s work. Tillot writes: ‘her last works have not yet been printed and are in the possession of her heirs’. Occasionally, and more often in recent years as people have become more aware of her work, a score is found such as the 1760 manuscript copy of the sacred cantatas, which was unearthed in 2008. This suggests that her music did circulate but not extensively, and not in print. And so, once again, a female composer’s work fades into oblivion. Once again, a female composer’s work is allowed to slip out of the classical canon because, after all, she only won the women’s race.
And yet Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre operated successfully, and for many decades, within the glittering, if fickle, world of late seventeenth-century Paris and its surrounding royal palaces. That city, where I write these words, was truly hers. Paris permitted her to be what she was, a formidably talented performer and composer, and it provided her with the possibility to have her music, whether small-scale or large-scale works, performed, circulated and published. Then again, she could not have done any of this without the direct support of the Sun King, Louis XIV. There is no indication whether she felt that the servility necessary to survive was an imposition or a restriction. There is, however, the record of her achievement as a composer of opera, cantata and, most significantly, of the new sonata. Louis XIV, Versailles and, above all, Paris, provided the opportunity to be that rare thing, a successful female composer. Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre took that opportunity with both hands.
* Élisabeth’s mother was Anne de La Touche, a widow when she married Claude. Her first husband had been in the service of the Duke of Orléans, the king’s brother.
* The prodigy stories refuse to lie down and die, with one story saying that Élisabeth was ‘given’ to the king’s principal mistress, Madame de Montespan, when she was only eight, c. 1673, and another having the young Élisabeth noticed by Madame de Montespan, and brought into her entourage, or under her protection, again at a very young age.
* Musicologists have traditionally seen the 1697 work of Antoine Houdar de la Motte and André Campra, L’Europe galante, as the first opera-ballet. Jacquet de la Guerre’s Jeux à l’honneur de la victoire was composed six years earlier, meaning that the honours should go to her.
* The opera involved first a prologue in celebration of the glory of King Louis XIV, then a love quadrangle between Céphale, a warrior; Procris, the daughter of the King of Athens; Borée, Prince of Thrace (in love with Procris and Céphale’s rival); and the goddess Aurora, in love with Céphale. Things do not end happily. Aurora, believing that Céphale has rejected her, casts a spell to make Procris believe that Céphale has been unfaithful to her, but then changes her mind and convinces Procris that Céphale has always been true to her. However, disaster awaits. Procris intervenes in a fight between her two lovers, Céphale accidentally wounds her with an arrow, and the opera ends with Procris’s death, and Céphale inconsolable.
* Dominique Brême, an art historian specializing in French portraits, is responsible for the identification of Jacquet de la Guerre. The original exhibition note has Madame de la Guette (sic).
* The 1695 manuscript was owned by the composer, lute player and advocate of Italian music, Sebastian de Brossard, the man who had appreciated Jacquet de la Guerre’s Céphale et Procris when few others had.
* Cabrini draws comparisons between the cantata and the well-known Judith paintings by Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi.
* The secular cantatas were published together with a piece that edged the composer still closer to the world of opera, but also marks a move in the direction of popular culture: Le raccommodement comique de Pierrot et de Nicole, a duet written for La ceinture de Vénus, a play by Alain-René Lesage performed at the Foire St Germain in 1715.