Gilles: Requiem -- The Boston Camerata - Joel Cohen (1997) [RE-UP]

Jean Gilles' Messe des Morts (Requiem Mass) was one of the most famous and frequently-heard works of eighteenth-century France, both in the south, where Gilles lived and worked (born in Tarascon in 1668, he was in the employ of the Aix cathedral from 1679 to 1695) and in the North. "There is hardly a funeral service with music today where Gilles' Mass is not performed," wrote one mid-century observer. Jean Gilles himself, the musicians Pancrace Royer and Jean-Philippe Rameau, and many great dignitaries, including Louis XV, were laid to rest to the sounds of this music. On socio-historical grounds alone, this work would merit a place in textbooks and reference works.

But Gilles' Messe des Morts is much more than a historical curiosity; it is a major monument of spirituality in baroque Europe, and one of the most beautiful and compelling choral works in the entire history of French music. Gilles, like other composers of the Franco-Provençal school managed to combine elements of the Paris/Versailles court style – elegance, refinement, transparency – with some more typically Mediterannean traits of melodic grace, exteriorized gesture, and emotional intensity.

Gilles' style in fact owes as much to an Italianate penchant for text-painting and theatricality as it does to French rationality. The image of the Introit is that of a funeral procession – as the violins (and later, the tenor soloist) enter with the melodic element, the idea of eternal rest is suggested by the long-held notes painting the word "Aeternam." Movement and repose are magically combined with the simplest of means.

The well-known "drum" rhythm of the Introit has been much discussed; not remarked on so far, to the best of my knowledge, is this musical image's antecedent in lived reality. Gilles' imaginative evocation of a procession refers, I believe, to an actual Provençal custom. In Provence, prior to its burial, the corpse of a wealthy or noble personnage was generally given a tour de ville (procession around town). The newly-deceased, open-faced in his coffin, accompanied by music, was promenaded around the principal streets and squares of his city; testaments often give the precise, posthumous itinerary desired by the dying soul. (This practice is discussed in Michel Vovelle's 1978 study, Pieté baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle). Gilles' imaginary mise en scène continues in the hearers' minds, and within the church walls, the actual procession on the city streets.

This kind of pictorialism, naïve perhaps but telling, pervades Gilles' music. Elsewhere in the Introit, perpetual light is depicted by rapid, ascending eighth notes, as in innumerable Italian madrigals of earlier generations. Later, in the Offertoire, the soul's fall into darkness is symbolised by descending vocal lines for the lowest male voice; fear before the "lion's mouth" is suggested by a tiny, wailing motif in the flutes. The Agnus Dei, pervaded by its carillon motifs, brings us back to the the tour de ville; in Provence and elsewhere, when a prominent citizen's coffin passed by, all the bells of the churches and convents would ring out.

Yet if Gilles' music is gestural, overtly emotional, and even at times almost sentimental, it is also contained, centered, and consoling. The light, airy rhythms we hear so often in the course of the mass (for instance, the Sanctus angels of Isaiah's vision performing a stately, heavenly dance to the words "Hosanna in excelsis") and the natural, unforced harmonic language – these traits lend a serenity and a sense of acceptance to our contemplation of these solemn texts. Death in this vision of things is sorrowful but not tragic, one episode in a larger chain of existence. Gilles' Mass, in its dimension of composure, is more truly "religious," more rooted in a deep sense of cosmic order, than many symphonic Requiems (Berlioz, Brahms, et alia) of more recent vintage. No wonder this work symbolised things eternal for so many French people of the old order.

The notion of "authenticity" was completely foreign to earlier times, and Gilles' Messe des Morts underwent numerous revisions and even recompositions by other hands during the course of the eighteenth century. The manuscript of the mass as performed at Rameau's burial service, for example, contains parts for clarinets, bassoons, horns, and drums; harmonies and phrase lengths are freely altered, and entire movements are inserted from other sources. To complicate matters still further, no manuscript source exists from the composer's hand, only later copies.

Our performance of this work, based on the modern edition of John Hajdu, reverts to the oldest surviving manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Vm1.1345 bis) copied in Toulouse around 1731. We have added to this source a part for solo baroque tambour, in keeping with the well-documented tradition of drum participation in eighteenth-century performances of this music. The four Provençal tambours also participate in the ceremony (as they likely did in the eighteenth-century Midi) as a prolongation of the tour de ville evoked in Gilles' Introit.

The Gregorian chants are interpreted by the Ensemble Sagittarius according to their appropriate place in the Requiem liturgy. We are not certain in every aspect as to how Gregorian chant may have been sing in seventeenth century Provence and Languedoc. But comparison of the now- standard Solesmes readings of the melodies with old Provençal prints yields some surprises: the Dies Irae, for instance, seems to have been performed in the Midi with rhythmic articulations recalling sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian music. Our aim, by reintegrating Gilles' polyphony, performed on baroque instruments, with the chant melodies, is to better indicate the overall temporal proportions, and the meditative scope, of the funeral mass, The ceremony as thus reconstituted adds gives an added dimension of spaciousness and breadth to Gilles' music and deepens our relationship to the texts.

We can never recreate every dimension of a composer's time and place, but we can learn so much by trying! It is easy to go a bit too far – for example, recent attempts to pronounce Gilles' Latin the "French" way seem excessively Parisian-ethnocentric, an example of mistaken historicity. For choirsingers in Aix and Toulouse, French was at best a second language, and the vowel sounds of the Provençal/Occitan language would have been very different from those of the "foreign" French tongue. Until we learn more about the pronunciation of Latin in the South, il est urgent de ne rien faire. We have used Roman Latin pronunciations in these performances.

On the other hand, the chance to hear the Requiem chants, the drum tatoos, and Gilles' music in acoustics of the the Aix-en-Provence cathedral, the very church where the composer learned to sing and to compose, may well add something important to our experience. Prepared from an edition by an American scholar, performed by a cast of French, Dutch, American, and English musicians, Gilles's Messe des Morts sounds forth in this special place in a special way.

– Joël Cohen