This week’s theme is…Chaconnes and Passacaglias! Chaconne and Passacaglia, frequently partners in music history studies, rose from mysterious origins during the recorded history of the sixteenth centuries. Rumored to have originated in Peru, the two forms sprang up more or less simultaneously in Spain and Italy for different purposes, eventually assuming all but identical characteristics in European art music. While they originally referred to dances with different features, they gradually grew to be essentially interchangeable. Loved by Baroque composers, musicians of later eras looked at them as novelties to be used for anachronistic effect and exercises to develop their compositional technique. This week we examine examples from across history.
Chaconnes and Passacaglias, Day 1 – Les Elemens by Jean-Fery Rebel
If you don’t know the fascinating story of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s innovation and dominance in French music, you really should. It’s interesting for its personal, political, aesthetic, and economic dimensions. You can read about it here. But to put it briefly, Lully was originally Giovanni Battista Lulli, a Florentine musician, dancer, actor and comedian, who emigrated to France in the 1640s as part of the entourage of a French aristocrat. But he was ambitious, and had within his sights a much larger fish, a king-sized fish in fact, the Sun King himself, Louis XIV.
Lully became the King’s friend and artistic collaborator, with the two dancing together in ballets he wrote to satisfy the monarch’s passion for dance, elevating the art to a national cultural icon for the French. It is largely because of this that France and ballet came to be so closely associated. The French passion for ballet would affect practically all music written there during Lully’s career and beyond. Lully also solved a problem that the French had struggled with for about a half century. The emerging art form known as opera, an extravagant and moving genre which set drama to music, had been steadily winning over Europeans of all stripes since its invention in 1600 at its epicenter, Florence. It quickly spread its magic to all the major centres of Italy – Rome, Venice, Naples – developing distinctive characteristics in each, and the Italians exported their wonderful art to major cultural centers outside of Italy. Antonio Cesti, for example, scored his greatest success with The Golden Apple, presented in Vienna (learn more in this post). Europe loved the Italian operas, and the French were no exception.
But, the original operas were uniquely suited to the Italian language, and French is a different animal. Italian, while lyrical, has a heartiness and a boldness. French is dainty and slight, and the musical devices of Italian opera would have crushed the delicate strokes of French. French composers had been searching for ways to successfully set dramas to music since shortly after the turn of the seventeenth century, when Italian opera began to catch on, but no one had quite cracked the nut satisfactorily. Until Lully. Lully was the first composer in the history of France to convincingly create large-scale musical dramas entirely in French, which he called tragedies-lyrique.
It was a long road – the tragedie-lyrique was not born overnight. Lully had worked in several related genres prior which had helped him to hone his skills and refine his sensibility in setting French text to music. But steadily, starting in 1673, Lully dutifully turned out a new French opera each year until his death, 14 years later. And in these magnificent and elegant masterpieces, Lully was actually resolving two other issues in addition to the setting of the French language: the use of opera as political allegory, and the melding of musical drama with ballet to satisfy the French hunger for dance spectacle. The tragedies-lyrique are brilliant and complex cultural artifacts with beaucoups moving parts.
To turn every opera into a ballet show, Lully and his librettist Quinault settled on a regular structure for their dramas which cast the story in five brief acts, each about twenty minutes or so. And then there was a prologue before the first act in which mythological characters sang praises to an allegorical hero (I’ll give you three guesses as to whom the hero was, and the first two don’t count!). Each act moved the drama forward a little with a significant event central to the plot and, once that was done, presented a divertissement, which translates to something like “diversion” or “entertainment”. Because, you know, entertainment is just not entertaining enough without some additional entertainment thrown into the entertainment.
Quinault eventually developed the knack for placing convincing opportunities for dancing and choral singing within each act. So, for example, the protagonist Phaeton goes to see his god mom in a cloud and cry to her that he doesn’t get to drive his dad’s sun chariot across the sky. God mom commiserates with Phaeton and “Hey, as long as you’re here, why not stay for lunch and a show? My clouds will do a little song and dance number for you.” It actually doesn’t tend to feel much different than that. But, hey, opera is artificial anyway because, c’mon, people don’t walk around singing their feelings, right? This is just a little more artificial than most. As long as you know how it works it’s quite forgivable, and Lully was such a good craftsman that he makes it work quite well. And, after all, if you’ve ever seen a Broadway musical, you’ve certainly seen similar phenomena. That’s what a “show-stopper” is. Lully and Quinault simply put a show-stopper in every act. And this impacted French opera for the next few centuries. In the 1800s Wagner was annoyed that he was expected to insert ballets into his operas in order to have them performed in Paris in accordance with French taste. But he acquiesced, and the ballets aren’t half bad – the one in Tannhauser is actually pretty famous.
One of my favorite breed of divertissement in Lully’s operas are the massive and stately chaconnes and passacaglias. Sometimes, the entire divertissement would consist of a 10-minute plus series of variations in triple meter, and they are just splendid. You can find such massive, sprawling examples in Armide, Amadis, and Roland. But sometimes they were shorter, and presented along with other small dances and a chorus or two. Here is the intoxicating chaconne from Lully and Quinault’s first tragedie-lyrique, Cadmus et Hermione of 1673:
In their very first full-scale production, Lully had already fully engineered the tone of his great variation form dances. All of the subsequent ones feel about like this one with their inspired succession of variations, accelerating and relaxing the tension, by turns tender and austere, and always graceful and charming. I can listen to these great chaconnes and passacaglias of Lully all day. Their original audiences must have found them entrancing.
Subsequent French composers continued to create chaconnes and passacaglias in Lully’s vein, with his original formula largely untouched. But sometimes they made changes. Here’s one of my favorite chaconnes, written by Lully’s student, the violinist and composer Jean-Fery Rebel, from an eccentric ballet called The Elements. This odd work depicts the creation of the world in rather platonic terms, with the elements rising out of a breathtakingly chaotic first movement, as dissonant as much twentieth century music. Here are the second and third movements, a triple-meter loure called The earth and the water, which leads seamlessly into the chaconne, representing Fire. One odd twist is that, unlike the conventional chaconnes, including Lully’s, which were unconditionally found in triple meter, this is, I think, the only chaconne I have encountered in quadruple meter. But it’s still gorgeous and sublimely stately, one of the first chaconnes I ever got to know (before I even knew what a chaconne was!), and still one of my favorites:
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