A refined aperitif for Watteau

In Antoine Watteau (1684–1721): The Music Lesson, February sees the Centre for Fine Arts launch another large-scale multidisciplinary project. This will be an ambitious and multifaceted event of a kind we have come to expect from Belgium’s biggest arts centre, with a retrospective exhibition, a number of concerts (including one by candlelight), talks, and encounters, all focusing on the figure of Antoine Watteau. Few painters had such a strong interest in the performing arts of his time. Watteau is known as the father of what were called the fêtes galantes: intimate tableaux in sumptuous open-air locations, in which nattily dressed ladies and gentlemen merrily enjoy dance, music, and theatre. The titles of works such as La Leçon de musique, Le Concert amoureux, and L’Accord parfait underline how important music was for Watteau. His “language” is one of for the most part allegorical and sophisticated theatrical codes, which are unfamiliar to 21^st-century viewers and thus require extra elucidation.

The exhibition’s curator is a familiar figure in Brussels: the conductor and harpsichordist William Christie, who is also the key figure in a series of eight thematic concerts intended to evoke the refined atmosphere of Watteau’s canvases. To mark the exhibition and the accompanying concerts, harmonia mundi and the Centre for Fine Arts are bringing out a double CD, La Musique de Watteau, with pieces of music that have links to Watteau’s work and others that evoke the atmosphere of the salons of Pierre Crozat, one of his patrons. Through Crozat, Watteau was not only brought into contact with music, but was also given an opportunity to study its performers and their instruments.

Music à la française
Christie himself opens the musical festivities with his ensemble Les Arts Florissants, even before the exhibition opens. The concert (preceded by an interview with the maestro) offers a splendid sample of the work of Watteau’s musical colleagues at the time of the Regency, in the years after the death of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Composers such as Louis Couperin, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Michel Lambert, and the now almost unknown Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre put French music squarely on the map. That “French school” was a direct consequence of the cultural policies of Louis XIV, who wanted to develop a “distinctive” musical culture. The French king – and many courtiers with him – found Italian music too emotional overall and the plots of its operas too complex. But what they found most abhorrent of all was the castrati: “the horror of women and the subject of men’s ridicule,” the poet and librettist Pierre Perin called them in 1659.

William Christie & Les Arts Florissants 28/1, 20.00, €25/26, Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel/Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Regentschapsstraat 30 rue de la Régence, Brussel/Bruxelles, www.bozar.be