ANGELS AND DEVILS
Les Violes du Ciel et de l’Enfer
Fahmi Alqhai, viola da gamba & direction
ACCADEMIA DEL PIACERE
Johanna Rose, viola da gamba
Rami Alqhai, viola da gamba
Francisco Javier Núñez, harpsichord
Recording and editing (video and audio): Félix Vázquez
Royal Alcázar of Seville – Noches de Euterpe series 2024
Programme
ANGELS AND DEVILS
Les Violes du Ciel et de l’Enfer
Marin Marais (1656-1728)
Suite à deux violes et basse continue en re mineur
(Premier livre de pièces de viole, 1686)
Prelude
Allemande
Courante
Sarabande
Gavotte
Menuet
Gigue
Marin Marais (1656-1728)
Suite des airs à joüer de ‘Alcione’ (1706)
Ouverture
Marche pour les matelots
Airs I & II pour les matelots
Tempête
Passacaille (‘Armide’, J. B. Lully, 1686)
Antoine Forqueray (1671-1745)
Pièces de viole avec la basse continuë (1747)
La Laborde
Pièces à trois violes par Ms. Forcroy (MS de Lille)
Allemande
Sarabande
Courante
Passacaille ou Chaconne (‘Pieces de violes ‘, F. Couperin, 1728)
Arrangements (Alcione & Armide): Fahmi Alqhai
The concert took place in one of the halls of the Royal Alcázar of Seville, a space of great historical and artistic value. Surrounded by the architectural and heritage riches of the palace, the setting lent an intimate and special atmosphere that enriched the musical experience in one of the city’s most iconic monuments.
The repertoire of Louis XIV’s court at Versailles is the quintessential music for the viola da gamba. It was there, at the beginning of the 18th century, that some of the greatest composers to have written for the instrument came together, in particular Marin Marais and Antoine Forqueray, already known in their day as the angel and the devil of the viola da gamba. Accademia del Piacere immerses itself in its natural musical habitat: music for basses de viole.
Programme notes
When Louis XIV effectively took power in 1661, he had not forgotten the events of the Fronde that had embittered his childhood. He was therefore obsessed with order and wished above all to control the kingdom’s unruly aristocracy. After the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659, France had indisputably become the leading power in Europe, and the king was not prepared to give up the future of grandeur that the new international situation promised him. For that reason – to safeguard the dignity of his majesty in a solemn setting and to keep the powerful within his grasp – he decided to move the court from Paris to Versailles. There he would turn the old hunting lodge his father had built decades earlier into the most sumptuous and imposing palace any royal house could ever have dreamt of.
Since the aim was also to impress visitors (especially foreign ones), the king spared no expense in attracting the most illustrious intellectuals and the finest artists in France to his new residence. Years later, in The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire would recall that confluence of talents with enthusiasm:
It is an age worthy of the attention of times to come, that in which the heroes of Corneille and Racine, the characters of Molière, the symphonies of Lulli, new to the nation, and (since we are not concerned here solely with the arts) the voices of Bossuet and Bourdaloue were heard by Louis XIV, Condé, Turenne, Colbert and that multitude of superior men. Never again will we see the days when a duc de La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims, would go from a conversation with Pascal to the theatre of Corneille. There have not been many geniuses since the fine days of those illustrious artists; it seems that nature rested.
In this lavish setting, where the aristocracy of blood lived side by side with that of art, the meeting between the two greatest viola da gamba players of all time was to take place at the end of the 17th century. Marin Marais was born in Paris in 1656, the son of a humble shoemaker, and trained as a choirboy at Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois before spending a few months with Jean de Sainte-Colombe, the great master of the French viola da gamba. By the age of 20 he was already at Versailles as a member of the Académie Royale de Musique, and he would spend his entire artistic career at court. Antoine de Forqueray was also Parisian, but he came from a family of musicians. Born in 1671, he arrived at Versailles aged just 17 to join La Chambre du Roy, dazzling everyone with his frenzied virtuosity and frequently getting into quarrels because of his choleric temper.
Marais and Forqueray clashed over everything. The former was a craftsman who aspired to climb the social ladder and was clearly determined to leave a lasting record of his art, documented above all in his five books of pieces for viola da gamba published between 1686 and 1725. The latter was a haughty revolutionary of improvisation who boasted of never having written down a single note. Marais presented himself as the heir to a whole tradition that had made the viola da gamba one of the noblest instruments in the France of his day: his dances and character pieces, grouped by key into suites, helped spread the fashion for printed collections dedicated to the instrument in the first decades of the 18th century. Forqueray despised the printed page so much that, if his pieces have survived, it is thanks to his son Jean-Baptiste, who published them posthumously in 1747. In Marais lived the classical spirit. In Forqueray, the spirit of excess.
Neither of them, in any case, could prevent the decline of the viola da gamba, which was already very marked by 1740, the year in which Hubert Le Blanc published his famous treatise in defence of the instrument. In it he recalled the glorious years when Parisian artistic circles buzzed with gossip and news about those two great rival prodigies: the gentle Marais, “who played like an angel”, and the furious Forqueray, “who played like a devil”. Three hundred years later, the duel goes on…
Pablo J. Vayón
