Henry Desmarets

Henry Desmarets (Paris, February 1661 – Lunéville, 7 September 1741) was a French composer trained in the royal chapel of Louis XIV, who spent most of his mature career in the service of the court of Lorraine. His output stands between the legacy of Lully and the generation that took over lyric tragedy and the grand motet at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which is why his career is useful for understanding how French musical theatre evolved after the death of the Florentine-born master.

Little is known of his childhood, except that he was one of the boy musicians (pages) of the royal chapel, where he came under the direct influence of Pierre Robert and Henry Du Mont, at the height of the grand motet. He probably also crossed paths with Lully, who employed these pages in his stage productions. In 1680 he is recorded as an ordinary musician of the King, and according to Titon du Tillet he composed an idyll in 1682 to mark the birth of the Duke of Burgundy, a genre he would return to often. An attempt to secure the post of sous-maître in the royal chapel in 1683 ended in failure, and for years he wrote motets that another rival, Goupillet, presented as his own; the deception did not come to light until 1693, when Desmarets, dissatisfied with his pay, denounced it.

His stage career was difficult, as Lully's monopoly at the Académie Royale de Musique kept the doors closed to him until Lully's death in 1687. After a private opera, Endymion, in 1686, he premiered several lyric tragedies in the following decade, among them Didon, Circé and Théagène et Cariclée, which met with uneven reception from critics. In 1696 he began a relationship with his young pupil, the daughter of a tax collector from Senlis, which led to a lengthy legal case and to the couple's flight to Brussels in 1699, where he was sentenced to death in absentia. Thanks to recommendations from the Duke of Burgundy, he settled at the Spanish court of Philip V in 1701 and, shortly afterwards, in 1707, he obtained the post of surintendant de la musique in Lorraine, where he oversaw revisions of operas by Lully. After several unsuccessful petitions, he was pardoned by the regent in 1720; in 1726 he unsuccessfully sought to succeed Lalande in the royal chapel.

His legacy rests above all on the language of his lyric tragedies: the expressive use of recitative accompanied by strings, the invocations of oracles with sombre accompaniments in F minor, and choruses of basses in a single melodic line, an idea that other composers later adopted. In his grand motets, written around 1707 for the chapel in Lorraine, he combined operatic arias and trios with choruses in the Lullian style and fugues with a texture closer to Lalande. Many of his works survive incomplete or are lost, which requires that his output be assessed with caution.