Henry Desmarest: Circe

Description

The latest release from the outstanding Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) is devoted to the monumental opera CircE by Henry Desmarest. Lully's death in 1687 was a defining moment in the history of French opera. Until then, his dominance in tragEdie en musique was almost as great as Louis XIV's dominance in French politics. The 1690s then saw a veritable explosion of new voices on the French operatic stage - both among composers and librettists. Some composers, such as Pascal Colasse, sought to maintain the closest possible proximity to Lully's model, while others, such as Charpentier, Marais, Campra, Desmarest, and their librettists, betrayed a voice and vision all their own from the beginning. More recently, BEMF became aware of the composer Henry Desmarest and the fact that he wrote his first two tragedies in 1693 and 1694 on texts by Louise-GeneviEve Gillot de Saintonge, the first librettist in the field of tragEdie en musique. BEMF chose CircE (1694), the second of these works - partly because of the quality of the score and partly because Desmarest and Saintonge had clearly been inspired by the artistic success Charpentier and his librettist Thomas Corneille achieved with their MEdEe of 1693.