Between the final decades of the reign of Louis XIV and the dawn of a taste already inclining towards galant grace, the transverse flute and the lute, with the theorbo in the background, delineate one of the most subtle landscapes in European music. The programme of this disc, bringing together Robert de Visée, Pierre Danican Philidor, Jacques-Martin Hotteterre, Ernst Gottlieb Baron, Jacques Gallot in the version by Charles Mouton, and Joseph Bodin de Boismortier, follows an itinerary in which courtly dance, pastoral song, memorial portraiture and chamber conversation are gathered within a single idea of eloquence. It is the history of a sonic civilisation that transfers into chamber music the ceremonial of the court, the dream of Arcadia and the taste for a cultivated intimacy, destined for enclosed spaces and entrusted to breath and to the resonance of strings.
Robert de Visée, guitarist, theorbist, viol player, singer and composer, was musicien de chambre to Louis XIV, guitar master first to the Dauphin and later to the King himself. His Pièces de théorbe et de luth belong to that moment in which French writing for plucked instruments attained a supreme polish, capable of uniting dancing dignity and harmonic refinement. The Suite in G major chosen here presents an exemplary succession, Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Gigue, Menuet, Chacone, in which the order of the suite appears as a small theatre of the affections. Each dance bears within it a sharply defined character, and the concluding Chacone, with its solemn and insinuating tread, broadens the horizon until decorum is transfigured into splendour. The sources further remind us that the Pièces de théorbe et de luth could also assume an ensemble guise, a sign of a flexibility characteristically French, averse to rigid fixity of scoring and attentive instead to the nobility of melodic profile.
Within the orbit of that same court moves Pierre Danican Philidor, member of a dynasty that left a profound mark upon French musical life through royal service, the arts of wind playing and archival practice. His Quatrieme Suitte in A minor belongs to a repertory in which the flute emancipates itself with full assurance, while remaining bound to the language of dance and to the elegance of ornament. One feature that distinguishes the suites of Philidor is the minute care bestowed upon the agréments, often indicated with a precision that still astonishes today, through battements and flattement invoked with unusual frequency. This imparts to the line a continuous vibration, almost an inward tremor of sound. In the Courante such refinement sustains the movement, in the Air en Musette the pastoral allusion becomes explicit, and the pair Sicilienne and Paysanne leads the court towards an idealised image of the countryside, in accordance with a convention that French taste cultivated with tireless predilection. To this Philidor joins a harmonically alert and at times surprising writing that renders his suites more mobile than much of the contemporary flute literature.
With Jacques-Martin Hotteterre one enters the very heart of French flautistic modernity. Hotteterre was the most celebrated member of his family of makers and performers, he served in the Chambre du Roi, and he left the first true method for the transverse flute, a text of capital importance for the understanding of graces, articulation and taste at the opening of the eighteenth century. His name defines a moment in which the flute becomes, in his own words, one of the most agreeable and fashionable of instruments. The Premiere Suitte from the Pièces pour la flûte traversiere op. 2, dedicated to the King of France, offers a sequence of dances that also serves as a symbolic gallery of the court. La Royalle, Le Duc d’Orléans, La d’Armagnac, La Meudon, Le Comte de Brione, and finally the lively La Folichon, construct a constellation of names alluding to patrons, admirers and courtly spaces, fixing the character of each movement with magisterial economy. In this music the flute inhabits a world of nuance, of appoggiaturas, of slight inégalité and of ornaments that belong to syntax itself.
To that same sphere belongs the brunette Le beau berger Tircis. To apprehend its grace, one must recall that late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century France cultivated with passion the myth of country life. The brunettes, derived from the great stock of the airs de cour, translated into miniature form the sweetness of the pastoral, the lexicon of shepherds, musettes, streams and light loves which aristocratic society delighted in contemplating as an elegant fiction of itself. Hotteterre gathered such melodies into a rare collection for two and three flute parts, thus offering precious testimony to the passage from voice to instrument. In the private concerts of royal apartments and of the chief courtiers, the repertory of the flute included precisely brunettes, noëls and airs accompanied by lute and other instruments; within that world Le beau berger Tircis preserves the imprint of song, yet transfigures it into an instrumental design of supreme naturalness. The breath of verse continues to live beneath the surface of the line.
If the brunette preserves the smiling aspect of Arcadia, the Tombeau de Madame de Fontange introduces its shadow. The tombeau is among the noblest and most inward genres of the French lute tradition, a memorial form that entrusts to slowness, to harmonic gravity and to the gathered quality of the writing the task of commemoration. Jacques Gallot, among the foremost lutenists of seventeenth-century France, contributed decisively to the development of this language; Charles Mouton, an eminent figure and among the last great masters of the lute in France, also transmitted pages of his in reworked form. The reference to Madame de Fontange, final official favourite of Louis XIV and a name that became emblematic of a fashion at court, places the piece in that borderland where private memory intertwines with public symbol. Musically, the tombeau suspends the time of dance and converts it into meditation. The lute speaks here in a language that seems to consume itself in the very act of remembering.
With Ernst Gottlieb Baron the itinerary moves towards the German world, yet without relinquishing its thread. Baron was among the most authoritative lutenists of his age, author of an important treatise on the instrument and a musician esteemed by theorists such as Mizler and Marpurg. His music belongs to the galant horizon, and the Concerto a flauto dolci, au luth shows how fully the lute could still aspire, in the heart of the eighteenth century, to a concertante role. In Baron’s ensemble pages the lute at times enters as a true obbligato interlocutor, endowed with technical prominence and a precise thematic physiognomy. The order of the movements, Adagio, Allegro, Siciliana, Gigue, preserves the memory of the suite and bends it towards a freer logic, more inclined to clarity of design and to a melodic utterance already looking beyond the severe ceremonial of France. It is a precious moment in the programme, for it shows how the inheritance of the court could be absorbed and returned in a broader European idiom.
The conclusion with Joseph Bodin de Boismortier carries this itinerary towards a more open luminosity. Active in Paris, Boismortier was among the very few composers of his century capable of living solely by the publication of his music, without the protection of patrons or prestigious appointments. The success of his pen arose from his capacity to unite invention, elegance and a perfect understanding of the amateur market, above all around the flute, an instrument beloved throughout Europe. The 6 Suites de pièces op. 35 already declare on the title-page the possibility of performance even without continuo, and such elasticity says much about their world. The Premiere Suite chosen for this disc retains the opening Prélude. Lentement and then unfolds a series of movements in which French dance grows lighter and is coloured by character pieces. Les Charités and L’Emerveillée belong to that taste for affective titles which summarises in a single word a bearing, a tint, a disposition of the soul. One term recurs often in Boismortier, gracieusement, and it could well stand as the seal of the entire collection.
Heard as a whole, this programme tells, then, a dual history. On the one hand, it follows the progress of the flute, which from emblem of delicacy and conversation becomes a fully autonomous protagonist. On the other, it restores to the centre the world of the lute and the theorbo, a living presence capable of determining the atmosphere, sustaining the discourse and guarding the secret of memory. Between suite, brunette, tombeau and concerto there emerges a France at once real and imagined, Versailles and Arcadia, the aristocratic salon and the private chamber, the elegance of gesture and the melancholy of recollection. The implicit title of this music is perhaps precisely conversation. A lofty and exquisitely refined conversation, in which breath and string mirror and discipline one another, leaving in the air the image of a world in which the civilisation of sound and the civilisation of living still coincided.
Giuliano Marco Mattioli © 2026
Le beau berger – Airs, Suites and Dances
