Music From the French Revolution

Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s harmonic vision, his ability to create splendid contrasts between his vocal and instrumental forces, were part of a revolution in French music that took place a century before the more celebrated (and bloody) social and political Revolution of 1789.

The glories of Charpentier’s style are exemplified in his 1692 “Te Deum,” at once music with the trumpets-and-drums swagger we associate with the Court of Versailles and a work of the sweetest Italianate lyricism.

The performance of the “Te Deum,” as centerpiece of a program of the composer’s liturgical works (on Harmonia Mundi France 901298), is by the vocal and period-instrumental forces of Les Arts Florissants under the direction of William Christie, who produced results that are both admirable for their scholarship and irresistible for their joyous energy.

Among the music that was making the rounds at the time of the storming of the Bastille was that of Etienne-Nicolas Mehul (1763-1817), whose four symphonies are played by the Gulbenkian Foundation Orchestra of Lisbon under Michel Swierczewski on a pair of Nimbus CDs (5184/5).

On present evidence, Mehul’s most noteworthy quality, aside from the aimlessness of his slow movements, is his general disdain for French models in favor, variously, of Haydn, Weber, Rossini and particularly Mozart and Beethoven, whose G-minor (K. 550) and Fifth Symphonies, respectively, are tediously constant--if not necessarily conscious--points of reference.

It was as a composer of operas that the Italian-born Luigi Cherubini found favor in his adopted French homeland around the time of the Revolution. But while there are occasional revivals of his ‘Medee” and “Anacreon” in Europe, Cherubini’s broader reputation today is based on Beethoven’s admiration for his works (the feeling was not reciprocated), for his having instructed an ungrateful Berlioz in the rigors of counterpoint, and for writing a series of powerful, if severe, works for chorus and orchestra.

The best known of these is the Requiem in C minor commissioned in 1817 to commemorate Louis XVI’s execution by guillotine a quarter-century earlier. It is scored for mixed chorus (without soloists) and a late-Beethoven-sized orchestra with the addition of bass trombone and tam-tam, both used to stunning effect in the “Dies Irae.”

The Requiem, which has past identifications with Arturo Toscanini and Carlo Maria Giulini, has now been entrusted to the less exalted hands of the young East German conductor Claus Peter Flor, who nevertheless leads it with commanding sensitivity. His Berlin Symphony makes a brave sound, and the Berlin Radio Chorus is well balanced and accurate. The live-performance recording is gorgeously lifelike (RCA 60059).

Unlike Cherubini, Berlioz did not disdain martial pomp, as witness his “Symphonie funebre et triomphale,” written in 1840 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the July Revolution that toppled the absolutist regime of Charles X.

In his memoirs, Berlioz recalls the disastrous premiere, which found him conducting a military band of 200 musicians while walking backwards--Berlioz, not the band--along one of Paris’ main boulevards toward the Place de la Bastille.

“As we were marching,” Berlioz writes, “nothing could be made out more than 10 yards away. Finally, the National Guard, tired of standing in the blazing sun in the Place de la Bastille, began to march off to the accompaniment of some 50 side drums maintaining a relentless barrage throughout the Apotheosis” (the symphony’s rabble-rousing finale).

“That,” he continues, “is how they regard the role of public occasions in France: By all means let it figure as an attraction--for the eye.”

Perhaps the best way to hear this music is on recordings, particularly when presented as lustily as it is (on Nimbus 5175) by British trumpeter/conductor John Wallace and his 60-odd member wind ensemble, the Wallace Collection.

Wallace augments the Berlioz with band music from the (first) Revolutionary period by Gossec, Cherubini and Rouget de Lisle, his “Hymne a la liberte”--a k a “La Marseillaise”--in Wallace’s arrangement.

The last-named is sung with appropriate abandon, in a language purported to be French, by the Leeds Festival Chorus, which also adds its obscure mouthings to the “Symphonie funebre.”