Although Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) composed in all the major genres of his day, it is his sacred music—numbering almost 500 works in total—that assumes the most significant place in his output. Written for churches, convents and private chapels, his religious output exhibits an extraordinary richness and diversity of genre, form and compositional technique, and includes masses, psalms, motets (including so-called oratorios), Magnificats, Te Deum settings, Litanies, hymns, Tenebrae compositions, antiphons and instrumental church music. Many of these works reveal Charpentier’s love of the dramatic Italian liturgical style, which he acquired during his studies in Rome with the great oratorio composer Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674) from 1666. By this time, however, France’s own musical style was developing in a very different direction: courtly and grand, it was dominated by the figure of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). As Surintendant de la Musique at the Versailles court of Louis XIV, and later director of the Royal Opera, Lully sought to reject both Italian music and French composers who had studied in Italy (despite having been born there himself). He also held a monopoly over the development of staged musical theatre in France, which he jealously guarded. It is little wonder, then, that Charpentier once commented, ‘since those who scorned me were much more numerous than those who lauded me, music became to me a small honour and a heavy burden’.

As a result, after returning to France around 1670, Charpentier was inhibited from gaining a permanent position at Louis XIV’s court, instead serving a succession of church and aristocratic appointments. In doing so, however, it became possible for him to develop his own unique style, and experiment with forms and genres in ways that would not have been possible at court. In the household of ‘Mademoiselle de Guise’, Marie de Lorraine (1615-1688), he found not only sympathetic patronage but, through the Guises’ influential connections in Paris, the opportunity to write sacred music in the Italian style, including the ‘dramatic motet’. From 1687, he became maître de chapelle at the Jesuit Collège de Louis-le-Grand, and then, additionally, maître de musique at Saint-Louis, the most prestigious Jesuit church in Paris, for which he wrote many important sacred works. His last appointment was as maître de musique at the French Dauphin’s chapel, the Sainte-Chapelle, a position he held until his death.

Charpentier composed no fewer than 35 dramatic motets, often called oratorios, for use in church services. Modelled on the works of his teacher Carissimi, this was an essentially Italian genre—sacred music as drama—but one that now became infused with French influences. Of the four settings Charpentier composed for Christmas titled In nativitatem Domini canticum, it is the one dating from 1690, later given the catalogue number of H416, that is undoubtedly the grandest, and the one most frequently performed today. The text, by an anonymous author, presents the Christmas story in two distinct sections, based on various passages from the Old and New Testaments, respectively. The first section depicts God’s people waiting for the coming of the Messiah, whilst the second focuses on the events of the Nativity, chiefly from the perspective of the shepherds. The music reflects this division of the text, undergoing a noticeable modal shift between Parts 1 and 2, from C minor as a central key to C major. This kind of allegorical key change is also found in other dramatic works by Charpentier.

The motet opens with a reflective instrumental Praeludium that leads into a declamatory recitative, its text taken from Psalm 12. This, in turn, is answered by the ‘Chorus Justorum’ (Chorus of the Righteous), who plead for God to send a Saviour to deliver them. Further Biblical quotations in the following movements come from Joel 3, Isaiah 64 and Isaiah 45. Solo voices and groups of singers are employed to represent the Israelites, the angels and the shepherds.

Charpentier also uses the orchestra to create magical effects that heighten the storytelling. Between Parts 1 and 2, for instance, he inserts a mesmerising interlude entitled Nuit. In both its orchestration (including one of the earliest uses of muted strings) and its slurred two-note rocking motion, it conjures the stillness and quiet sense of expectation that Christmas Eve brings. Suddenly, the mood changes, and flûtes (recorders) rejoin the orchestra as the heavens open in radiance and the angels appear. Based on Luke 2:9-15, the gospel reading for Midnight Mass, this section is cast as an Italian dialogue lauda between the angel and the shepherds (the ‘Chorus Pastorum’), musically reinforced through the use of joyful Italianate dance rhythms.

At the ‘Et in terra pax’, Charpentier employs yet another magical transformation, shifting to a slower duple metre to express the calm of earthly peace, which in turn makes the following contrast with the ‘Marche des bergers’ (‘March of the Shepherds’) all the more delightful. When the shepherds arrive at the manger, their sense of awe and wonder is movingly conveyed through unusually powerful dissonances. In this work, therefore, Charpentier already reveals his skill in combining different kinds of music that evoke elements of both the sacred and the secular, in the service of dramatic expression: rich harmonic language and ‘high’ musical styles lie easily alongside folk-like melodies and dances.

The Catholic Council of Trent, in the sixteenth century, had technically forbidden the use of secular tunes in church, but there was nonetheless a long-standing tradition in France of the liturgical performance of popular, folk-like Christmas carols. These noëls, which had mainly spread in oral traditions, were printed for the first time in the Grande Bible de Noëls (Lyon, 1554), and subsequently in various organ books and with continuo accompaniments. As a result, many French composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Charpentier, composed instrumental carol settings to be played in church.

Charpentier’s Noëls sur les instruments, H531, for two flûtes (recorders), strings and basso continuo, dates from the early 1690s, and was specifically designed to be performed alongside In nativitatem. It consists of three carol settings: the stately ‘O Créateur’, the genial ‘Laissez paître vos bêtes’, and the triple-time ‘Vous qui désirez sans fin’. Subsequently, Charpentier composed another set of seven Noëls, H534, which were intended as companion pieces for his eight so-called ‘O’ antiphons (H36-43) that were sung in the week before Christmas. Many of these carols had their origins in secular French songs: ‘Une jeune pucelle’, for example, is based loosely on the older ‘Une jeune Fillette’, whilst ‘Joseph est bien marié’ was originally a children’s song, ‘Quand Biron voulut danser’.

All the Noëls feature prominent tutti-solo dialogue: contrasts between passages for the whole orchestra and others for smaller groups of instruments. This, together with the discovery the organ part was intended for a full-size instrument, has led some scholars to suggest that Charpentier was composing not for a small chamber ensemble but a large orchestra. In any event, his chosen scoring, especially the inclusion of recorders, strongly evokes the pastoral, reinforcing the link with the shepherds. In H534, the carol ‘Les Bourgeois de Chastre’ appears in two versions, although only one is recorded here.

Most of the tunes heard in the Noëls reappear in Charpentier’s most popular mass setting, the Messe de Minuit pour Noël, H9. Written around 1694 for the Jesuit church of Saint-Louis in Paris, this work was designed to evoke the special atmosphere of the Midnight Mass, the first of three celebrated on Christmas Day. Here, however, Charpentier took a daring step: rather than simply arranging ten carols as instrumental movements to supplement a vocal work, he decided to incorporate them into the mass itself, by setting sections of the Latin text to these secular tunes. In doing so, he also utilised a contrapuntal, concertante style of instrumental writing, already seen in his earlier masses, that is distinctively Italian. The Messe de Minuit is therefore a work of remarkable synthesis, uniting elements of the French and Italian national styles, modality with tonality, and the sacred with the profane. The carols used, and the corresponding sections of the mass in which they appear, are as follows:

Movement – Noël melody
Kyrie eleison – Joseph est bien marié (‘Joseph is well betrothed’)
Christe eleison – Or, nous dites Marie (‘Now tell us, Mary’)
Kyrie eleison II – Une jeune pucelle (‘A young virgin’)
Gloria (‘Laudamus te’) – Tous les bourgeois de Chastre (‘All the people of Chastre’)
Gloria (‘Quoniam tu solus sanctus’) – Où s’en vont ces gais bergers (‘Where are these happy shepherds going’)
Credo (‘Deum de Deo’) – Vous qui désirez sans fin (‘You who desire endlessly’)
Credo (‘Crucifixus’) – Voici le jour solennel de Noël (‘Here is the solemn day of Christmas’)
Credo (‘Et in spiritum sanctum’) – A la venue de Noël (‘At the coming of Christmas’)
Sanctus – O Dieu, que n’étais-je en vie (‘O God, if I had been alive’)
Agnus Dei – A minuit fut fait un réveil (‘At midnight there was an awakening’)

The extraordinary effect created by Charpentier’s use of the carols can be heard from the very first ‘Kyrie eleison’, which is based on ‘Joseph est bien marié’. After the carol melody is heard and then repeated in full, Charpentier proceeds to alter it using different kinds of instrumentation and imitation, and by quoting it only in part. This kind of varied motivic development continues in the second ‘Kyrie’, and beyond. Indeed, musical diversity, whether in treatment of the carol melody, texture, or scoring, is central to this piece.

In some sections, such as in the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, the carols are used throughout. Here, Charpentier alternates between movements for instruments only, and movements for voices; within these, he also alternates between solo and choral textures. This switching between instruments and voices was already a well-established practice in French organ masses of the time, as seen in François Couperin’s two organ masses of 1690, and particularly suited the tripartite structures of these texts. In the Messe de Minuit, the orchestra simply takes over the role of the organ.

The other sections of the mass, the Gloria and the Credo, are more motet-like in structure. They only partially feature carol tunes, and sometimes the carols are not used at all. The Gloria, for instance, opens with a nocturnal scene, featuring muted strings and vocal echoes, that appears to deliberately recycle music from In nativitiatem’s equivalent setting of the same text, ‘Et in terra pax’ (see above). This is then sharply contrasted with the ‘Laudamus te’ that follows, in which the carol ‘Tous les bourgeois de Chastre’ represents the awakening of the shepherds. Elsewhere, Charpentier uses other techniques to heighten musical expression. For example, in the Credo, he wordpaints the text ‘descendit’ and ‘ascendit’ with appropriately descending and ascending passages, whilst ‘et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam’ (‘and in one holy catholic and apostolic Church’) is sung homophonically by all the voices, emphasising the church’s unity. At the end of the ‘Et incarnatus’—a text central to Christmas—the words ‘et homo factus est’ (‘and became man’) are repeated three times, punctuated by dramatic pauses, and followed by the instruction to hold a long silence (‘faites ici un grand silence’).

Although they do not feature in every movement, the carols nonetheless have a striking influence on the character of the whole work, giving it an unusual modal flavour and an enchanting, dance-like quality that both seem perfectly suited to Christmas. In addition, Charpentier’s remarkable fusion of sacred and secular musical traditions in the same piece perhaps serves a larger symbolic function, evoking the meeting of Heaven and Earth on Christmas night, and the wonder and mystery of God taking human form.

Andrew Frampton © 2025