(An-twan’ Bün-wa’) c. 1435–92 French composer Busnoys was a younger contemporary of Ockeghem and worked alongside him in Tours in the early 1460s, when he may already have been serving the future Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy in an unofficial capacity. His association with the Burgundian court probably continued after Charles’s death in 1477, though evidence for this is ...
(Märk An-twan’ Shar-pont-ya’) 1643–1704 French composer Charpentier studied in Italy during the 1660s. There he familiarized himself with the instrumental and vocal forms of Carissimi and, above all, that of the oratorio. When he returned to Paris he joined the musicians of the Duchess of Guise and in 1673 became associated with Molière’s Comédie Française. In 1687, Charpentier composed ...
c. 1645–1704, French Marc-Antoine Charpentier, a Parisian, was on hand to step into the breach after Lully quarrelled with the French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622–73), whose works Lully had been setting to music. As a result, Charpentier wrote the music for Molière’s Le mariage forcé (‘The Forced Marriage’, 1672) and Le malade imaginaire (‘The Hypochondriac’, 1673). ...
1671–1748, French Librettist Danchet was born on 7 September 1671 at Riom in Auvergne. His first theatrical text, Vénus (1698), was privately performed at Paris. This was also his first collaboration with composer André Campra (1660–1744). Between 1698 and 1735 Danchet and Campra produced several pastorals, ballets and opéra ballets, and 11 tragedies lyriques including Hésione (1700), ...
(Zhel Bansh-wa’) c. 1400–60 Franco-Flemish composer Binchois spent his formative years in Mons (now Belgium) and appears to have led a remarkably static life. In the late 1420s he joined the itinerant Burgundian court chapel, and served there with distinction until his retirement in the early 1450s, continuing to draw a pension until his death. Although he left a substantial ...
(Pe-âr’ de La Rü) c. 1460–1518 Flemish composer Like Isaac, La Rue joined the Habsburg court after spending some years working in Italy. He served under four rulers: Maximilian, Philip le Beau (La Rue may have composed his Requiem for him), Margaret and Charles (the future Emperor Charles V). His works do not show the influence of Italian music, ...
In the second half of the twelfth century, the new cathedral of Notre Dame was the focus of an extraordinary effort by Leonin and others to create a whole new musical liturgy. Thanks to their efforts and to the presence of the increasingly independent University of Paris, whose curriculum was aimed towards ecclesiastical careers, the city became a ...
The dominant style in art at the start of the classical era was the Rococo (from rocaille, ‘shellwork’). Created in early eighteenth-century France, its leading figures in the graphic arts were Antoine Watteau and François Boucher. The closest musical analogue is not Mozart (as once was traditionally argued) but François Couperin (1668–1733) – the late Baroque generation, in ...
The years 1826–28 saw the deaths of the three greatest composers of their respective generations, Weber, Beethoven and Schubert. Only in the years that followed could early Romanticism really forge its own identity. The 1830s saw the flowering of a new generation of great composers, including Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for ...
Du Fay’s Mass L’homme armé was one of the first of several dozen Masses of that name composed between the years 1450 and 1700. ‘L’homme armé’ (‘The Armed Man’) was a popular, probably satirical, tune which may have been aimed at the less-valiant members of the French army during the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Attracted by ...
The cornet is very similar to the trumpet in looks and playing technique. It is thought to have been invented by the instrument maker Jean-Louis Antoine in the 1820s. Antoine, who worked for the Parisian firm Halary, was one of a number of makers experimenting with the new valve technology that was revolutionizing brass instruments at the time. His ...
The first known examples of the recorder date from the Middle Ages. It became hugely popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and then, surpassed by the concert flute, it largely fell out of use in the professional arena. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, it was redesigned by Arnold Dolmetsch and subsequently enjoyed a ...
Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...
The schools of naturalism and realism had an immediate effect in Italy. With scant literary tradition to draw on from this period, Italian writers in the second half of the nineteenth century seized upon Zola’s beliefs as a potent dramatic source. The style they developed came to be known as verismo and was exemplified by writers such as Giovanni Verga ...
Mozart had long admired the inspired synthesis of French and Italian opera in Gluck’s ‘reform’ works. His greatest opera seria, Idomeneo, premiered in Munich on 29 January 1781, draws much from Gluck, especially the hieratic scenes of Alceste (another opera concerned with human sacrifice). Yet its harmonic daring, orchestral richness and lyrical expansiveness are entirely Mozart’s ...
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