TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage (Jul 2021)
Lully et la prosodie française à la fin du XVIIe siècle
Abstract
In the French musical landscape, the Italian composer Giovanni Lulli, or Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), is an emblematic figure. His compositional style is based on a significant musical rhetoric and oriented towards theatrical declamation. The new musical genre of tragédie lyrique, created by Lully, is entirely based on this principle. It thus met the expectations of the French public which missed the direct reference to the classical theater in Italian opera. In his compositional work, Lully was also inspired by the actors and actresses of his time (and especially the famous La Champmeslé), whose intonation and rhythm he tried to capture in order to translate them into music. Among his contemporaries, Lully was considered a master of the word-sound relationship. Even today, musicologists and musicians acknowledge the fact that in composing his melodies (especially recitatives), Lully strictly adhered to the rhythmic material provided by the text matrix, which in most cases came from Philippe Quinault (1635-1688). But beyond that, Lully also imitates the expressive turns of phrase and rhythmic finesse that characterized the vocal work of the actors of his time. Thus, his music presents a veritable panorama of the possibilities of expressive prosody. For today's researchers, this fact is all the more interesting because prosody is still a barely treated subject in the grammars of the time, and consequently we have little information on the subject. This article offers an approach to the prosodic material available to us in the form of Lully's composition. This is done with the help of reading a contemporary of Lully, Jean-Léonor Grimarest, who published Traité du récitatif in 1707, in which the verbal part of the actio is treated. The word récitatif is not to be understood as a musical genre, but Grimarest used it to refer to reading aloud, public speaking, a lawyer's plea, and theatrical declamation as well as singing. His text is thus addressed to a wide audience. All the different expressions mentioned are understood as a kind of continuum, in which each time, from stage to stage, a new nuance of expression is added in tone, gesture and vocal modulation. In the last section, devoted to song, Grimarest discusses several prosodic phenomena of the French language by referring to specific excerpts from Lully's lyric tragedies. In doing so, Grimarest develops several arguments to show that Lully's music, which accurately incorporates the materiality of Quinault's textual basis, meets all the requirements to allow musical language to become naturally expressive, thus enabling the musician to move the heart of the listener. The prosody reproduced in music is, of course, that of the theater. But all the expressive modes are based on that of reading aloud, and thus on a natural way of speaking, whose expressive part is extended by procedures and mechanisms that the classical authors observe in their contemporaries. The reading of Grimarest's analyses allows us to understand the intellectual approach of the authors: According to the theoretical baroque concept, sung speech becomes expressive when it imitates the melodic, rhythmic and modulatory variations of spontaneous speech. For a better understanding, the article first presents the theoretical description of the authors' prosody around 1700, the role of Grimarest and his motivations for the analysis of Lully's compositions. It then explains the principle of the connection between music and the prosody of the French language in Lully's tragédie lyrique. The detailed study of the explanations Grimarest gives of Lully's prosodic procedures, which are dealt with in the main part of the article, shows the relevance of these considerations in comparison with some approaches of modern authors (Jean-Claude Milner and François Regnault, Albert Di Cristo, Piet Mertens, Pierre Delattre) on the same subjects. The analyses of this last part concern, first, the treatment of vocal quantity; second, the basics of the means necessary to create a rhythmic, metrical and emotional movement; third, the analysis of the sensitive, melodic and rhythmic expressiveness in the passages mentioned by Grimarest; and fourth, the musical realization of the punctuation marks that ensures the naturalness of the temporal and melodic organization of the composition. A final paragraph presents the artist's point of view and his role in interpreting the composition. Through the close connection between words and music, all the rhythmic, melodic, and intonational details that Grimarest addresses in the example of Lully's settings help to understand the late seventeenth-century authors' prosodic conception of expressive artistic language. Several steps can be distinguished. First, it seems that the composer's work starts from an analysis of the structure of the text according to the requirements of the (usually normative) grammar describing the functioning of the French language in prose and poetry. The musician should subordinate the rhythm, form, and intonation of the music to the rhythms, forms, and intonation of the poetic text as much as possible (some deviations may obviously be due to the artistic freedom and expressive will of the artist). For intonation, the work of Pierre Delattre (1966) and Piet Mertens (2012) shows the accuracy of the observations of classical authors. Most importantly, knowledge of the quantity and effects corresponding to written punctuation in spoken language are invaluable. Paying attention to them is considered the best way to ensure that the musical structure accurately reflects the content and meaning of the text, thus contributing to its complete understanding, both factual and emotional. This remark concerns not only the composers, but also the musicians, since they must consciously make the details contained in the written composition palpable during interpretation, and if necessary, even intervene in them in a corrective manner. By paying close attention to the linguistic model, it is possible to recreate an artistic language that is perceived as natural. But to be truly expressive, artists must observe the natural behavior of speakers in real and spontaneous situations. No expressive speaker speaks monotonously or with a static pulse. Composers and actors must know how to use every detail embedded in the composition that allows them to make gossamer modifications to the notated regularity. Grimarest uses Lully's compositions to show modern readers how verse and metrical speech patterns can be brought to life through rhythmic effects. In this way, the movement of passion can be made palpable through musical movement. In addition, as in theater, there is the possibility of exploiting the sound properties of different types of consonants, variations in melody, tone and timbre of the voice, based on the observation of spontaneous behavior of speakers in real situations. Grimarest emphasizes that knowledge of the functioning and materiality of language is important for all those who use language, whether to read aloud, to give a speech, to play a role, or to sing. It provides a framework within which any expressive element can be consciously and profitably placed. The expressiveness of the singing itself can be described by variations: a syllable is a little shorter or longer than expected, the voice a little higher or more radiant than usual, a syllable or a note stands out from a uniform environment. Lully's art is revealed in subtle nuances, just as Albert Di Cristo (2003) shows in the example of the actualization of a known meter by the particular speech rhythm chosen. The treatment of prosodic, rhythmic as well as intonational elements in Lully corresponds exactly to the considerations on the diction of the (classical) Alexandrian in Jean-Claude Milner and François Regnault (2008). Thus, the practical study in the form of musical compositions can be complemented by a theoretical study on poetry. While Milner and Regnault justify their reasoning by recourse to Romantic and modern musicians, the analysis of Lully's compositions shows that there are examples even from the period of classical verse that can provide (musical) examples of the diction of the classical Alexandrian. In Lully's work, there are few grand theatrical gestures (typical of Italian opera of the same period), but there are subtle modulations that bring his musical rhetoric closer to the natural expression of any speaker, even in everyday situations. Although singing is at the end of the continuum of verbal expressions presented by Grimarest, it contains all the prosodic elements that also characterize spontaneous speech. In this way, the study of Lully's compositions can enrich our knowledge of the prosody of French at the end of the 17th century and of the development of the relationship between speech prosody and song at that time.
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