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Les Conversations Galantes is a tale of two styles, French and Italian.
“French music is all about nuance, elegant ornamentation, poignant discords,
gentle resolutions, and graceful melodies played with exquisite taste,” says Gwyn
Roberts, Tempesta di Mare artistic co-director. Even the instrumental music is all about
the soft elisions and rhythms of French language.
But when Francois Couperin got hold of Italian music—Corelli’s trio sonatas—
in1690’s Paris, he must have felt as excited as a New York intellectual opening James
Joyce’s banned Ulysses in the 1920’s. Couperin and his friends were captivated by
Italian music. For one thing, it was forbidden.
For more than 50 years, anything other than music in the pure French style had
been blacked out in France under Louis XIV’s rule. Louis, the archetypal absolute
monarch, demanded French and only French style. And he and his deputy, Jean-Baptiste
Lully, controlled French music jobs, music publication, and even how musicians played
the notes on the page. Either French musicians toed the line or they didn’t work.
But Italian music in all of its differentness enticed French musicians. Italian
music was exuberant where French music was refined. Italian music was big, athletic,
and extravagant where French music was gracious. Italian music sprawls through octaves
of glittering arpeggios. French melodies step demurely up and down the scale.
Couperin and his friends relished whatever Italian music they could find. They
got bolder when the Sun King got old and his hold on French culture loosened. Italian
ornaments and pizzazz started to creep into French minuets and gigues.
But the old distinctions remained. French style and Italian style spread through
Europe and continued side by side into the 18th century. Bach wrote the Overture in the
French Manner and also the Italian Concerto. Handel wrote Italian operas with French
overtures. Each style took on a life of its own, accumulating an abundance of resonances
and associations that eventually transcended national roots.
So when Couperin and his circle invited Georg Philipp Telemann to visit Paris in
1738, the German composer brought quartets in the Italian style to impress his hosts. But
after he returned to Germany, Telemann paid his new friends homage with six new Paris
Quartets—in perfectly assimilated contemporary French style. “At this point, Telemann
was more French than the French,” says Roberts.
Back in Paris, Telemann had inspired the young French composer and violin
virtuoso Louis-Gabriel Guillemain to produce his own set of quartets, Les Conversations
Galantes. “The Guillemain quartets are the end of our story,” says Roberts. By now, it
was no longer a simple dialogue of national pride and cultural repression. It had become
a many-sided conversation with all the complexity of human nature gathered under the
rubric of nationality. Guillemain scored his quartets for flute, violin, viola da gamba, and
continuo in emulation of the German Telemann’s French quartets. He dubbed the quartets
“Galante,” an untranslatable French word referring to grace, ease and sociability. And
the style of this proud testament to emerging French cosmopolitanism?
“It’s as Italian as French can be,” says Gwyn Roberts. Of course.