Dassoucy Marco
If we do have a mission as early music interpreters to resurrect long-buried pieces of music, the pleasure of having access to corpora neither previously studied nor interpreted is very uncommon. If it still happens to us to feel the joy of discovering, through research in a library or on Internet, some precious pearls which have been duly catalogued by musicologists, but have escaped – it isn’t known why – the attention of our musician colleagues , the uncovering of unlisted works has become extremely rare. After a wait of several decades, the emotional response can only be one of highest satisfaction.
This is why the day that Frédéric Michel – harpsichordist, teacher and untiring researcher – sent me a digital copy of the dessus missing from the Airs à quatre parties by Charles Dassoucy, my blood raced and I immediately knew that, unless there was a bad surprise in the quality of this music, I owed it to myself to record it with Faenza.
The character of Dassoucy has fed my imagination since my adolescence, from the first time I ran across him in the film Molière by Ariane Mnouchkine, where he is seen accompanying the troop of the Illustre Théâtre, a lute on his shoulder and a smile on his lips. I rediscovered him later in a more authentic form (even though altered in autobiographical fiction) while reading his extraordinary autobiographical novels, Les Aventures, Les Aventures d’Italie, Les Pensées, La Prison and also collections of his poetry, such as L’Ovide en belle humeur and the Rimes redoublées.
It is very difficult to have an idea of the life led by a musician under the Ancien Régime. Whether it concerns a famous composer or, a fortiori, a lesser-known personality, the biographical information is rarely sufficient to open the window for us on their intimate lives. If it isn’t indispensable to know the life of a composer to understand his music, it isn’t uninteresting to know that he was, as in the case of Dassoucy, pleasure-loving, playful, irascible, cheeky, cowardly or faithful to his friends.
It’s pleasant to travel with him from inns to aristocratic dwellings, fascinating to know his opinion on other composers and his taste for popular music (he admired the singer Philippot, known as Le Savoyard), both amusing and comforting to see him get entangled – as we do today – in the nets of protocol and the hazardous search for success, as in this scene where he loses face before the entire Court of Savoy because of his page Pierrotin’s loss of singing ability, his voice prematurely damaged by alcohol and debauchery:
Who has ever heard a cat mewling when he serenades his Mistress, or the grunting of a pig when he flatters a sow, has heard Pierrotin sing your Song and mine. I amaze myself that I didn’t die from it, struck down by pain, since not only was I embarrassed and speechless, I had also lost the use of my senses and of my reason. Although all the Princesses were only a short distance away from me, I could no longer see them any more than one can see the Sun through silk crêpe, and although Pierrotin’s voice was in my ears, I no longer heard it, not even my lute’s harmony; I kept mistaking one fret or string for another. And, in order for my disgrace to be complete, the devil, who without a doubt was in charge of this beautiful Music that day, made my tabard fall down, and since it was he who was beating the time in that moment, he still wanted me to give, in reaching over to grab my tabard, Madame the Princess of Bâle, just next to me, a big whack on the head with the neck of my Theorbo; in raising myself up, it wouldn’t have taken much to take out the eye of a Cavalier who was in range of my blows.
In another extract from his Aventures d’Italie that I cannot resist sharing with you, Dassoucy makes us die laughing by his description of a troop of singers who, in order to pay him tribute, wanted to give him a concert at all costs:
After dinner, which lasted at least three hours, they took away the plates and food, but left some glasses and the drinks, because, without a pint, the Musicians wouldn’t know how to sing. Yet, they didn’t sing any better and guaranteed me the truest insult that ever reached my ears, which lacked a bit of wool, padding or cotton, making me need all my Philosophy and all my patience; because in addition to an extremely overbearing Bass, who was singing like the Ass of Sylene, and who from time to time, being just in front of me, was conveying some sighs directly to me which were not at all marked in his music, I was positioned directly in the middle of two other Singers, who were screaming murder although no one was hurting them: the one destined to break the cartilage in my right ear was the Tenor who was screeching as he sung a Crucifixus, as if he were himself attached to the tree of the Cross; and he, merciless, who wanted to kill me via my left ear with the unpitying tone of a Cornet, so penetrating and shrill that I am amazed that I didn’t remain deaf the rest of my life; but as recompense, there had some excellent high voices: there were four little Cats dressed in red, vulgarly called Choir Children, who were singing so badly, in such a cruel way, that I don’t believe the Cats of Mister Lambert, who are fed between sounds, do not mewl with more grace and technique.
In numerous extracts from his autobiography, in addition to amusing us with his droll descriptions , Dassoucy informs us about the conditions relating to the interpretation of his era’s music. But where his literary contribution becomes particularly touching is when, like a romantic composer before the term existed, he partly discloses the secrets to us of artistic creation and reveals its torments:
My mind was so tense, and my imagination so filled with the blaze of my thoughts, that, not wanting to let anything foreign in, I was only hearing for the most part half of what was said to me. I won’t say how many times, writing my verses or my airs, in place of the powder jar, I took the inkwell and poured all the ink on my paper; how many times, dreaming while eating, I brought up to my eye the morsel of food that my hand was intending for my mouth, nor how many times, having my brain entirely full of chromatic tones, in place of descending the stairs from my room one after the other, I thought I would break my neck, descending them four by four.
To work on Dassoucy’s airs, while reading his memoirs again, gave me the illusion of being close to him for several weeks and constituted an antidote to the pernicious doubt that I amw often feeling as to the legitimacy of our interpretations, we musicians of the 21st century who cannot follow the example given us by lutist Denis Gautier in 1672 – as written in the preface of his Livre de tablature (1672) – to give to the 17th-century composers “the honor to come see them.”
I dare to hope that, thanks to Dassoucy’s virtual mentoring, we will pay homage to his music with more finesse than the picturesque troop of singers described above, that made him hear it in such a deformed fashion that the composer “could recognize nothing in it!” If not, I would include myself, without too much regret, in the line of asses with big ears for whom the poet felt a particular affection and with whom he would have been, like me, in subtle connivance.
Marco Horvat
