Dassoucy Nathalie
Who has heard of Charles Coypeau Dassoucy, this individual with multiple facets, at the same time a poet, a lutist virtuoso and a composer – his first publication, Le Jugement de Pâris, a poem in burlesque verse, had no less than five editions between 1648 and 1668 – but who, despite the unquestionable success that he enjoyed in the 17th century, fell into oblivion afterwards?
Dassoucy was born in Paris on October 16, 1605 and died there, October 19, 1677 at the age of 72. He was dropped by his contemporaries after having been a celebrity and led a life that was at the least romanesque. Son of Grégoire Coypeau, a man of letters and a lawyer in Parliament, and of Chrestienne Damama, descended from an Italian family named Dagnani, « of whom certain members were possibly stringed-instrument makers in Cremona or in Rome. » It was his mother, an excellent musician, who taught him. In 1638 or 39, he was presented to the Court by the Duke of Saint-Simon, father of the famous memoir writer; Louis XIII, admiring his talents as a lutist, gave him the post of maître de musique for the future Louis XIV.
In 1639, Dassoucy made his first trip to the Italian peninsula, accompanying the Count of Harcourt, named to head the Piemontese army. Upon his return, the young composer was able to profit from the Italian trend, prevalent in the entourage of young Louis XIV. He became friendly with Pierre de Nyert, the premier valet de chambre to the king but also an excellent singer, who had gone several years earlier to Rome to complete his musical education. In Italy, Dassoucy probably acquired a taste for Italian music and some practical knowledge. If not, how can it be explained that he was able to play the theorbo in L’Egisto, an Italian opera which was performed at the French Court in February, 1646? He also made friends with Luigi Rossi, whose L’Orfeo he had heard in 1647 and for whom he felt a profound admiration, as the beginning of this sonnet shows:
To Monsieur de Luiggy.
Divine master of sound, Prince of harmony,
King of songs, King of hearts, King of affections,
Song of Heaven’s young women, race of the Amphions,
Whose genius all the earth adores.
Dassoucy was therefore one of the rare French musicians of his generation to have learned, practiced and loved Italian music. He frequented libertine circles and was the friend of such poets as Tristan L’Hermite, La Mothe Le Vayer, Cyrano de Bergerac, Chapelle and Scarron. Between 1648 and 1653, Dassoucy undertook the publication of his poems in burlesque verse (Le Jugement de Pâris, L’Ovide en belle humeur), as well as his Poésies et lettres.
In 1655, his lifestyle, considered immoral, forced him to leave Paris and he then wandered over a period of 15 years, before recounting the years between 1655 and 1658 in Les aventures de M. Dassoucy and in Les Aventures d’Italie. These two autobiographical texts published in 1677, relating events having occurred 20 years earlier, shed light in vivid language on the musical practices of the 17th century. Dassoucy puts himself in the spotlight, not without humour and irony, as he travels the French kingdom and the Italian peninsula in the company of his two pages, faithful companions in his roaming:
“[…] having purchased a jackass to carry my rags, I set out on the road through Burgundy, that I was traversing in this order. My jackass, who as much by the powerful organ of his voice as by the veneration that one owes to his great ears, & to all his musical qualities, was very worthy of the first row, marching at the very head of this symphonic corps. Not wanting to displease the Golden Ass & the one who was carrying the simulacrum of Osiris, I dare to say that mine must have been proud in a different way than the others, since he was carrying a part of Parnassus, Apollo & the Muses: for, apart from the fact that he was loaded down with a chest full of songs, of Epigrams & of Sonnets, all protectively covered with theorbos, & all loaded with lutes, he was followed by my two Musical pages, who dressed in two grapepickers’ old coats, bordered by epaulettes of fake silver, didn’t bring out any less the shine of this pomp, that with an outfit of the same livery, I was making a contribution like an incognito Phebus .”
Dassoucy travelled in the provinces at first; in Lyon, he met Molière and his troop (1655), whom he accompanied as far as Montpellier, where, accused of sodomy, he narrowly escaped being burned at the stake. In June 1657, he arrived in Torino where the Duchess of Savoy, the sister of Louis XIII, accorded him protection which she withdrew the following year. He then went to Mantova, but Charles III of Gonzague, the Duke of Mantova, became infatuated with the voice of his page Pierrotin and, in order to preserve it, had the young boy emasculated. In 1659, Marguerite-Louise d’Orléans, the Grand Duchess of Toscana, seduced by his art of « touching the lute », welcomed Dassoucy to Florence, where he stayed until his departure for Rome in 1662. There he benefited from the protection of important figures of the French community, such as the Duke of Chaulnes, the Ambassadeur of France to the Papal Court. When the Duke of Mantova died in 1665, Dassoucy brought Pierrotin back to his sides but, upset by Pierrotin’s stealing from him, had him arrested. The young page, in return, accused him of atheism, an accusation that caused him to be incarcerated at the end of 1667 in the jails of the Holy Office, which he was only allowed to leave in the beginning of 1669, thanks to the intervention of Pope Clement IX, for whom he had written the Pensées de M. Dassoucy dans le Saint-Office de Rome, which were published only in 1676.
Upon his return in Paris in 1670, he realised that he had been forgotten, and three years later, it wasn’t without bitterness that he saw Molière prefer Charpentier to him for the composition of the music of the Malade imaginaire. So he undertook the publication of the works that he had brought back from Italy; his Rimes redoublées, which contain numerous poems written at the time of his stay in Rome, appeared in 1671. Two years later, he announced his « chromatic concerts » to Paris, probably souvenirs of works which had been the delights of the Barberini in Rome several decades earlier. After a new imprisonment in the spring of 1673, once again for sodomy, Dassoucy brought out his autobiographical works, La Prison de M. Dassoucy in 1674, then Les Aventures de Monsieur d’Assoucy and Les Aventures d’Italie in 1677, the year of his death.
If a number of Dassoucy’s written texts have come down to us, it isn’t the same with his musical works. Outside some airs, pieces for lute and motets, which are all lost although spoken of in his writing, Dassoucy composed in 1647, at Mazarin's demand, the stage music for Pierre Corneille's tragedy Andromède, a play using machinery, which would only be performed in 1650.
Dassoucy is also the author of the livret and the music for Amours d’Apollon et de Daphné, a comedy in music, which for a long time was believed to have been composed in 1650. François Rey’s research has shown that they were problably written and printed in the spring of 1673, two years then after the premiere of Pomone by Perrin and Cambert – which marks the birth of French opera – and a year after that of Cadmus et Hermione by Quinault and Lully. The libretto of this comedy, which foreshadows the opera-comique of the 18th century, is conserved, but there is only one copy. It is not the case with the music, of which there doesn’t remain a single note.
In 1653, Dassoucy’s book of airs in four parts (Airs à quatre parties) were printed by the publisher, Ballard, « sole printer of the King for music, » of which one had thought, until only a little while ago, that only the haute-contre, basse-contre and basse parts were conserved. In 2015, thanks to the donation of Mr. Jean-Robert Henry, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal acquired a handwritten copy of the dessus part, thought lost, which was needed to bring the music back to life again.
This collection contains 18 airs in four parts composed by Dassoucy, the verses as well as the music, with the exception of the airs, Vivez, heureux amans et Cieux escoutez, escoutez mers profondes, which come from the intermèdes of Andromède, the words of which were written by Pierre Corneille. What's more, it contains what remains of the music of this play, known at this time. When the airs were published, Corneille paid tribute to Dassoucy in these words:
For Mister Dassoucy, about his Airs.
This Author has some Genius,
His Airs seem so sweet to me:
Beautiful Spirits, but a little jealous,
Divine children of harmony,
Don’t be angry,
Apollo, like you,
Cannot hear them without envy.
Along with some airs which explore the category of the « amorous complaint, » several pieces were written in honor of Christine of France, the dedicatee of this book of airs. The sister of Louis XIII, she had married Victor-Amédée I of Savoy in 1619. Among these airs is the Adieu à la Cour de Savoye, where Dassoucy complains of having to leave the Court, which permits connecting these two compositions to the first stay in Savoy that the musician made, in 1639, while he was following the Count of Harcourt.
The recording of Dassoucy’s Airs à quatre parties that Faenza proposes, finally allows the rediscovery of the talents of a composer whose other musical works are all lost today. The Airs of 1653 saw the day in a feverish period, in the course of which the basse continue practice was to become common. Heirs of the long tradition of the polyphonic court air, illustrated by composers such as Pierre Guédron or Antoine Boësset, certain airs, like Doux objets de mes sens or the magnificent C’est trop délibérer au chemin de la mort, are still characterised by contrapuntal thinking. Other airs reveal a thinking already more harmonic, like Vous m’ordonnez, belle Sylvie, a composition where the different voices develop in a homophonic manner. Dassoucy, a musician attentive to the text that he was setting to music, was careful to manage certain effects and knew particularly well how to draw from these two types of writing that were not at all mutually exclusive. This can be seen in the air Il s’en va, l’amant infidelle where flight is evoked systematically in the first part with strongly contrapuntal writing where the voices are staggered (Il s’en va, l’amant infidelle / Il fuit et sa rigueur cruelle), in distinct contrast with the affirmations Et vainement je suis ses pas / Refuse de voir mon trépas, which are based on more harmonic writing.
Our edition of the Airs of Dassoucy seek to best respect the musical thinking of the composer : in view of the musical writing which seems sometimes to hesitate between counterpoint and harmony, we have only corrected errors that are clearly printing ones and deliberately maintained some alterations so the listeners wouldn’t be thrown off, those nourished by harmonic thought as we are. In its musical restitution, the ensemble, Faenza has chosen to vary the number of musicians. Thus, certain airs are interpreted by four voices, as was printed, while other airs alternate a vocal quartet with the in Our edition of the Airs of Dassoucy seek to best respect the musical thinking of the composer : in view of the musical writing which seems sometimes to hesitate between counterpoint and harmony, we have only corrected errors that are clearly printing ones and deliberately maintained some alterations so the listeners wouldn’t be thrown off, those nourished by harmonic thought as we are. In its musical restitution, the ensemble, Faenza has chosen to vary the number of musicians. Thus, certain airs are interpreted by four voices, as was printed, while other airs alternate a vocal quartet with the instrumental ensemble or still others make different configurations of voices and of instruments heard. This decision, inspired by the practices of the Renaissance, where the instruments take from the polyphonic vocal repertoire, is perfectly legitimate in the context of music which circulated from the court to salons and from salons to cabarets, inviting the musicians to unceasingly adapt them according to the number of musicians, available in the circumstances.
strumental ensemble or still others make different configurations of voices and of instruments heard. This decision, inspired by the practices of the Renaissance, where the instruments take from the polyphonic vocal repertoire, is perfectly legitimate in the context of music which circulated from the court to salons and from salons to cabarets, inviting the musicians to unceasingly adapt them according to the number of musicians, available in the circumstances.
Nathalie Berton-Blivet
