Rex Burgess explores the life of Delalande.
Among the many rich periods in French music few are more absorbing than the one that starts with the arrival of Lully in Paris in 1646 and ends with the death of Leclair and Rameau in 1764. The two are the last great exponents of the glorious French Baroque.
Numerous other composers were also linked with Paris and the courts of the famous rois fainéants: Louis XIV (1638-1715) and Louis XV (1710-1774). Among them are Lully’s father-in-law Michel Lambert, Henri Dumont, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, three generations of Couperins, and Michel-Richard Delalande, the acknowledged master of the grand motet, who took it to the very pinnacle of its development.
The son of a tailor, Delalande was born in Paris in 1657 and died there in 1726. Little is known of his early life, except that at nine years old he entered the choir of the royal church of St Germain l’Auxerrois, staying there until his voice broke. He then went to live with his brother-in-law, who, to introduce Delalande to the public, gave concerts at his house at which some of his early compositions were performed.
Originally favouring the violin, which he apparently abandoned when Lully rejected him for the Opera orchestra, he turned to the harpsichord and organ and quickly became proficient at both.
Delalande’s court career began with his appointment as organ teacher to the king’s daughters: apparently Louis thought him too young to be formally appointed as organist du roy. Instead, he took up posts at various Paris churches, continuing in some till 1691, when increasing duties at court forced him to relinquish them.
These court duties had begun in 1683, when a competition was held for the four quarterly positions of sous-maître in the royal chapel, with the king intervening to ensure Delalande’s appointment to the fourth quarter. Thenceforth each of the other quarters was allotted to him as it became vacant, so that by 1714, and for the first time ever, the entire music for the royal chapel was under the control of one person. By a similar process, by 1709 Delalande had also become the sole court composer of chamber music.
In 1684 he married the sister of the composer Jean-Fery Rebel, with the king apparently paying for the wedding. Their two daughters both became singers, before both dying in the 1711 smallpox epidemic, which also claimed the life of the dauphin, events which seem to have forged an even closer link between Louis and his lowly-born music master.
With its origins going back to the 11th century, the so-called ‘grand’ or Versailles style of the Latin motet dates from around 1650, passing through several phases before its full flowering in the hands of Delalande. The earliest of about 75 motets dates from around 1681, with about 20 written up to 1690. He largely followed his forerunners in exploiting the vertical sonorities and syllabic treatment of the Psalm texts.
A further 20 or so were written up to 1700 and a similar number during the early part of the new century. At this point Delalande seems to have experienced something of a stylistic crisis: as with other French composers, he needed to adjust to recent changes in the format of stage music and the influx of a deluge of Italian cantatas.
As a result, despite his absorption with the classical French style, his writing perforce went through a transitional phase. Among the changes were the elimination of the opening ‘symphonie’ and the gradual substitution of concerto-style arias with instrumental obligato for soprano recitatives with string accompaniment.
While a couple of grand motets date from the 1720s, after about 1705 the writing of new ones largely gave way to revising and ‘modernising’ his earlier ones, which explains why some exist in two, three and occasionally even more versions.
In addition to his sacred works, which included a number of shorter or ‘petit’ motets, Delalande also wrote secular music for the entertainment of the court: ballets, divertissements, pastorales, and 12 sets of Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy, undoubtedly the enduring collection of ‘table music’ in the French repertoire.
A gifted composer, Delalande had a great feeling for rhythm, melody and instrumental colour. There is ample evidence of the high regard in which his music was held, both during his lifetime and afterwards: witness its continued performance in the royal chapel, at the Concert Spirituel, and elsewhere in France for 60 years after his death, something quite exceptional for those times.
Listeners can hear several of Delalande’s motets in Musica Sacra at 9am on Sunday 4 May.