A Yankee Courts King Arthur

When William Christie arrived in Paris in 1971, a young music scholar eager to explore his passion for the French Baroque at its source, he found the natives more enamored with modern compositions, instruments and techniques. Like so much cultural baggage, the French had tucked their impressive musical heritage--Rameau, Lully, Charpentier, Couperin and other composers--away in the archives.

“You say to yourself, ‘Why aren’t they doing it?’ ” Christie asked rhetorically on a recent afternoon, barely sipping a the au lait and thinking back to his 27-year-old self. “Then you suddenly realize it’s a very complex thing. Paris is a town that likes to dethrone. Fashion and mode are very operational here, and people do forget composers.”

What’s more, he says, the Paris Conservatory’s focus on teaching modern techniques “sounded the death bell for a lot of this music, because you couldn’t play it with modern techniques.”

In 1979, Christie founded Les Arts Florissants (meaning the flourishing arts), named after a work by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. He used period instruments; did heavy musicological research in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where many of the scores are housed; and insisted on historically informed performances. He tackled not just the French Baroque but the English and Italian as well.

And suddenly, la mode was on his side. Audiences--especially young people who regarded it as exciting and “new,” he says--embraced it.

Twenty years later, having toured the world and made more than 40 recordings, he has become a darling of international music critics, one of the undisputed leaders in the Baroque revival, and a French national treasure (they bestowed on him the prestigious Legion d’Honneur in 1993).

In terms of live performances, at least, Southern California has not been among his conquests. This week, Les Arts Florissants makes up for that with its first Southern California appearance, at Santa Ana High School, on the bill of the Eclectic Orange Festival. The group will perform a semi-staged version of the five-act “King Arthur,” a combination of music, text, song and dance. Written by composer Henry Purcell and poet John Dryden, it premiered in London in 1691.

Christie premiered his version in 1995 in Paris and won a Gramophone award that year for a recording of the work. Unlike the 1995 premiere, which featured elaborate sets and costumes, the semi-staged version Orange County will see has no sets, costumes or complicated lighting. Two British actors will recite a linking text written in modern English by Jeremy Sams, and two dancers will perform brief interludes.

Reviews of Christie’s “King Arthur” follow the pattern of critical response to Les Arts Florissants: a masterful ability to make authentic old music speak to modern audiences.

After a Brooklyn Academy of Music performance of “King Arthur” in 1995, New York Newsday praised the piece as “loving, appropriate and altogether delicious” and wrote that the performance “enjoyed a rapturous reception from one of the most subdued and sophisticated audiences in New York.” The New York Times wrote that the music was presented with Christie’s “characteristic elegance and taste,” and it noted that some in the smiling audience even sang along with one ballad.

So how does Christie manage to make 300-year-old music relevant?

“It has [a] spontaneity that makes it very immediate and very alive,” he says. Like all Baroque art, it wants to say something, it wants to move its listener, or its beholder.

“You treat it with respect, you find out what it wants to say, and how it wants to say it--what ingredients musicologically speaking--and then you let it speak for itself.”

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Part of the charm of “King Arthur” is the way it appears to be a spontaneous performance, without a conductor running things .

“If you look around very closely, there’s an extremely well worked-out pattern of who’s looking at whom, who’s giving a cue here,” Christie says. “The idea, of course, is to give the public the idea that this is not a concert, that there’s no one flapping his arms around in front. [It] is a real tour de force to pull off.”

But in a studio in the 14th arrondissement, where Christie is leading 16 instrumentalists, nine singers, two actors and pair of dancers in a run-through of the show, one can witness the carefully wired machinery behind the illusion. He leads inconspicuously from his seat at the harpsichord, in a polo shirt and Banana Republic khakis, waving a long, lean arm only at a particularly crucial downbeat. Occasionally he gets up, walks stiffly to the front of the group, chews on a nail and observes. Just a week before a North American tour, he seems worn out. He is 55, but he could be much older, with just a lick of gray hair and a weary voice.

The orchestra members bob about with every stroke and pluck, and the singers deliver their notes brightly. Christie stops them intermittently to deliver comments in a mixture of French and English. He is just as apt to lose his famous temper, to scold the orchestra for talking or tease a singer for holding himself too stiffly, as he is to crack a joke with his colleagues, who call him Bill. Often, he hooks an arm around their shoulders as he walks beside them.

Today they spend a long time refining the stresses and nuances of key words and polishing the English-language pronunciation of the French speakers.

“Purcell, like all composers of Baroque music, is obsessed with language, his own language--English--and he sets it exquisitely,” Christie says. “The first step in setting Purcell is to understand what are the key words, what is the rhetorical content? Oftentimes I’ll ask the singers [first] to declaim rather than to sing.”

Christie insists that, above all, he chooses musicians who can communicate music’s emotional content, regardless of their native languages. “I have a horror of dullness and non-expressivity,” he says with a muted scowl. If he has an uncanny ear for authentic sound, his own voice is a dissonant blend of Ivy League tones and British diction, the result perhaps of having spoken English with foreigners for too many years.

Singers and instrumentalists consider an audition with Christie a major career boost, and what began as a group of 10 has now swelled to a pool of some 300 freelance musicians, many groomed by Christie at the Paris Conservatory, where he was appointed the first American professor in 1982 and taught until a few years ago.

He says he looks for “people who want to be historically informed performers, which means that when they attack a piece of Bach or Handel or Rameau or Couperin or Lully or Purcell, they don’t try to impose techniques instrumentally or vocally that have no relation with the music. In Baroque music, a number of stylistic ingredients aren’t even on the page. You’ve got to know about them, you’ve got to know where to put them.”

Christie says that he works a lot of that out himself. He assigns parts that might not be specified by instrument in the score, for instance, and makes “decisions about ornamentation, adding notes, trills, what have you.” For example, the score for “King Arthur” does indicate several instruments, such as flutes, oboes, strings and trumpets, but Christie added the harpsichord.

“How did I know that?” he volunteers. “Because that was the practice of the time. There’s no mention of a harpsichord in the score, there doesn’t have to be. You know it’s there.”

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Christie fell in love with French music long before he settled in France. As a boy growing up outside Buffalo, N.Y., Christie played the piano and harpsichord, and he listened to as many French Baroque recordings as he could get his hands on.

“I was very much taken with sacred music from the very beginning,” Christie remembers. “It seemed to me so special. I loved the idea of organs and harps and recorders, things I didn’t see and hear in a normal orchestra. It was exotic and very compelling. And then I needed my daily dose of Bach.”

He always felt connected with Europe, visiting relatives in Scotland and traveling abroad regularly with his parents. “I was more interested in European cultural history and art than almost anything else growing up,” he says. “I spent days in this wonderful Queen Anne-style library in Williamsville, N.Y., going through old art catalogs. It was the same thing with music. I had a very strong feeling about European 17th and 18th century music.”

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He went on to study art history at Harvard, but he also played the piano and the organ for the glee club and went to lots of concerts. In his junior year he had a serious talk with himself.

“For three years, I had flirted with this and flirted with that,” he recalls. “I was interested in medicine, science, history, art history, architecture. I would have loved to be an architect or a landscape designer. But I realized that I was really fooling myself, that there was one thing that I could do better than anything else, and one thing that I liked to do more than anything else--it was really necessary sort of for my well-being. I looked at myself in the mirror one day and I said, ‘Look, just face it: You’re going to be a musician.’ ”

During that year, he also witnessed an inspiring series of concerts by harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who later became his graduate school professor at Yale.

After graduating, he spent an unsuccessful year teaching at Dartmouth. “I was a brash little upstart who offended in every possible way almost all of my colleagues, by excessive zeal and pretending to know everything about everything,” he admits.

After his contract wasn’t renewed, he was afraid of being drafted to Vietnam. “I decided what I needed was just to get away,” he says. “I was mad at the States; I had this gnawing, really gut desire to play. The idea was that if I left the States, I would become a real harpsichordist, and in Europe, where I could probably make a living at it much better than anywhere else.”

At the time, he thought of it as a stepping stone, not a life choice. “I was going to spend a year, two years or so and then go back and do something,” he says. “I realized after four or five years that I was happy. There were really rough moments obviously and great ups and downs. But the downs were always in the most extraordinary environment. I realized that I could never be anything else but a European. That, although being intensely happy and proud of being an American, I nonetheless was happier living here.”

Christie now has French citizenship. While he says that his work with Les Arts Florissants is the equivalent of two full-time jobs, he manages to find time when he is not producing 80 concerts a year or recording to cultivate his garden at his country house in Normandy.

He has often said that it is his goal to find a permanent home for Les Arts Florissants, which, despite some people’s perceptions, receives only 25% of its annual budget from federal, regional and private funding.

“Amongst the Baroque groups, we get almost more than anybody,” he adds, “but it’s chicken feed compared to the major orchestras; and the entire allotments for all the Baroque ensembles in France are not even equal to the yearly budget of one regional orchestra.”

Considering the obstacles, how long does he expect to hold out? He laughs. “That’s a question I don’t ask myself. When you like what you do, you don’t think about it stopping,” he says.

And he insists that, having made Baroque music popular again, he is going to see that it doesn’t go out of fashion.

“I think what we’ve established is that there’s as many composers of genius and enough masterpieces in the 17th and 18th century as there are in the 19th and 20th,” he says. “And that these pieces are not to be listened to as curiosities and forgotten. Bach, after all, and Handel are eternal. And we realize now that there are more than just Bachs and Handels, there are Couperins and Lullys and Rameaus and a hundred other composers who are absolutely wonderful. That’s not a fad.”

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“King Arthur,” Les Arts Florissants, Tuesday, 8 p.m., Santa Ana High School, 529 W. Walnut St., Santa Ana, $35-$50, (949) 553-2422.