Marc-Antoine Charpentier

Charpentier’s years in Rome and contact with Carissimi influenced his use of chromatic harmony, concertato writing and sacred drama within French musical forms. For the better part of two decades he served Marie de Lorraine, Mademoiselle de Guise, and he wrote for Molière's company after its break with Lully, including the music for Le Malade imaginaire. He composed for the Dauphin in the early 1680s, worked for the Jesuits in Paris and from 1698 held a post at the Sainte-Chapelle. Some 550 works survive, most of them sacred: the histoires sacrées, among them Le Reniement de saint Pierre; Médée of 1693; and the Te Deum whose Marche en rondeau announces European broadcasts to this day. He died in 1704, still in post at the Sainte-Chapelle. He was born in 1643 in the diocese of Paris; his father Louis worked as a professional scribe preparing official documents. He spent three years in Rome before returning to Paris in the late 1660s. No post at court ever came to him, only separate commissions, and the twenty-eight volumes of autographs he catalogued himself, the Mélanges, hold the bulk of what survives.