Pierre Guédron

Pierre Guédron (also Pierre Guesdron ; * around 1570 in Châteaudun , † after 1620 in Paris ) was a French singer and composer . He was one of the innovators of French music in the early 17th century and one of the first designers of a dramatically oriented ballet .

Life

Guédron came from a family resident in the Dunois . In 1585 he was recorded as a choirboy in the chapel of the cardinal and archbishop of Reims Ludwig II of Lorraine-Guise . As an alto he appeared at a Puy in Évreux . After his master was executed in 1588, Guédron entered royal service. At first he was a singer in the chapel of Heinrich III. In the course of the cultural reorganization by Henry IV , which also affected court music, he rose to head the ensemble. Presumably during this time he also married Gillette Dugué.

In 1601 he was appointed royal chamber composer to succeed Claude Le Jeune , and in 1603 he was appointed chamber servant and music teacher. In the latter role he looked after the children of Maria de 'Medici . In 1613 he passed both positions on to his son-in-law Antoine de Boësset . Guédron ended his life on his estate in the Dunois with a considerable fortune that he had acquired in royal service .

Pierre Guédron enjoyed great esteem on the part of his contemporaries. Madeleine de Scudéry set in her precious novel Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53) as Crysile a literary monument of his standing as a singing teacher. The theorist Marin Mersenne praised Guédron in his Harmonie universelle (1636) as a composer.

Musical creation

The main compositional work of Guédron consists of his vocal music for the Ballets de cour at the royal court. The texts set to music include poems by Nicolas Rapin , Jacques-Davy Duperron , François de Malherbe , Estienne Durand , François Maynard and François Le Métel de Boisrobert, as well as some of his own works. Guédron was the most important French composer of his time. He reached the first at the Florentine Camerata developed monody and developed them in his Airs de cour on; his airs often appeared in two different versions, a syllabic polyphonic and a monodic with lute accompaniment . He replaced the old popular vaudevilles and chansons with a new genre that introduced the gallant taste of the time. Although Guédron knew the Musique mesurée from Le Jeune's work and had also experimented with this prosodic form himself, he broke away from the declamation and at the same time made the air de cour more natural to the rhythm of the developing French language.

Guédron's compositions had a renewing effect on the aesthetics of court ballet. With his work for the court ballet, he left the previously typical, low-action masquerade genre and turned to the dramatically oriented ballet mélodramatique . The Ballet de la Reyne (1609) was one of the earliest dramatic dance games with pantomime elements, entrées and interludes . Guédron pursued this genre to its completion in the Ballet de la Délivrance de Renaud (1617). He took up the reforms of his Italian contemporaries Ottavio Rinuccini and Giulio Caccini . Nevertheless, the Italian reform approaches were not the focus of his aesthetics; Guédron oriented himself more towards early Baroque ornamentation without text repetitions. By equating melodramatic ballet and humanistic ballet comique , he made a significant contribution to the emergence of ballet operas with comic solos, as Jean-Baptiste Lully later designed with her interludes .

Works

• Numerous Airs de cour, ed. by Pierre Ballard , partly in the lute set by Antoine de Boësset (Paris 1602–1620) and in anonymous sets
• Ballet sur la Naissance de Monseigneur le duc de Vendosme (1602)
• Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vendosme or Ballet d'Alcine (1610)
• Ballet de Madame (1613)
• Ballet des Argonautes (1614)
• Ballet du Triomphe de Minerve (1615)
• Ballet de Monsieur le Prince (1615)
• Ballet du Roy ou Ballet de la Délivrance de Renaud (1617)
• Ballet des Princes (1618)
• Ballet du Roy sur L'Adventure de Tancrède en la forest enchantée (1619)

Web links

• Sheet music and audio files by Pierre Guédron in the International Music Score Library Project