Le Grand Hautbois and Baroque Wind Music at Louis XIV's Court

Introduction

During the reign of Louis XIII, and especially Louis XIV, the courts were alive with new Baroque music and instruments. Many new wind instruments were being created through a variety of innovations, and some instruments were being newly invented altogether. It was a time of experimentation, as these recently introduced instruments had to be tested for their range, sound, and quality. Louis XIV, from his childhood onward throughout his life, was always surrounded by music. He and musicians such as Lully would create ballets and compositions (Palisca 1968). During this time, King Louis XIV also revived and updated Le Grand Hautbois with the new instruments. Although little is written about Le Grand Hautbois — with Whitwell serving as the primary compiler of information available from writers of that period — this does not diminish the importance of this twelve-player band to the French royal court, nor to other European nations that copied it, such as the Germans.

Many differences exist between the wind instruments of the Renaissance and Baroque periods and those of today. Some have evolved into newer forms, while others are no longer played at all. The following list, drawn from Rhodes, describes some of these instruments from the sixteenth century, many of which appear in this report when covering Le Grand Hautbois.

Recorder: This was a very popular kind of end-blown "whistle" flute, with a pleasing, soft tone.

Baroque Instrumentation and Renaissance Wind Instruments

Transverse flute: As the predecessor of today's flute, it was held to the side of the mouth, with a hole near the end of the tube. It was used mostly as a military instrument until 1650, when its inside chamber, or bore, was changed to give it a softer tone. It is also known as the German flute.

Fife: This small transverse flute, held to the side, was typically played in military bands.

Cornetto: This instrument was played with a cup mouthpiece similar to that of a brass instrument. The wood was carved straight or slightly bent and then hollowed out.

Trumpet: A Renaissance horn made of natural brass, it had a cylindrical bore and a flared, cone-shaped bell at the end. Unlike today's trumpet, it was played without any holes, crooks, or valves, so its available tones were limited.

Sackbut: This instrument evolved into the present-day trombone, with a similar design and purpose. However, it had a smaller chamber size and a narrower bell.

Double reed instruments were divided into two groups: those with exposed reeds, where the lips had direct contact with the reeds as with today's oboe and bassoon, and those with a pierced cap over the double reed, which prevented any direct contact. The cap, functioning like a wind chamber, caused the reed to vibrate like an organ's reed pipes. Instruments with a cap were more limited in their pitch range.

Exposed reeds:

The French Hautbois and Le Grand Hautbois

Shawm: A European predecessor to the oboe, it came in a number of different sizes and had a loud, harsh sound.

Racket: This instrument had a reed on top of a short, thick cylinder of wood, approximately the size of a common drinking glass, with ten channels bored out lengthwise to form a continuous tube. It was not used for long due to a design flaw: the interior rotted out because moisture could not escape.

Louis XIII and the Early Wind Band Tradition

Sordun: Similar to the bassoon and with a soft, pleasing tone, its air channel ran down and up the column of wood two or three times.

Dulcian: Another example of an early bassoon.

Capped reeds:

Crumhorn: With its cylindrical tube bent into an upward curve shaped like the letter "J," the name comes from the German term for "curved."

Schryrari: This tapered-bore instrument, with seven finger holes on the front and two thumb holes in the back, had a loud and high-pitched sound.

Rauschpfeife: A German predecessor to the oboe, designed with a long, narrow bore.

The word hautbois comes from the Old French haut, meaning "high," and the Germanic bois, meaning "wood." This instrument evolved from the shawm but has three joints or sections and no pirouette to support the lips. It also lacked a wind cap over the reed, and so was used mostly indoors; it began to be played in bands and then in orchestras. It was the primary instrument used in early military bands until it was replaced by the clarinet. Other names used throughout Europe, including in England and Germany, were hautboy, hoboy, hautboit, and howboye.

Louis XIV, Lully, and the French Court

The band known as Le Grand Hautbois, which used the new French oboes and bassoons, consisted of twelve players and became popular in the court of Louis XIV. Since everything that the "Sun King" did was envied and imitated, this band was widely copied in Germany under the partly French, partly German name of Hautboisten. As noted below, early forms of Le Grand Hautbois can be traced to the reign of Louis XIII.

Unfortunately for Louis XIII, he did not have the easiest of lives. Not only was he very thin and considered unattractive — with a large head, a prominent nose, and a protruding lower lip that caused his mouth to hang open — he was physically weak, a victim of tuberculosis and intestinal illness. Unlike Louis XIV, who consolidated power through his own advisors, it was Cardinal Richelieu who held power during Louis XIII's reign. No one expected Louis XIII to sire a child given his well-known interest in men. Thus, his surprising legacy for the future was his son, Louis XIV (Moote 1989).

Although Louis XIV is the king most associated with music, it is surprising that Le Grand Hautbois — so popular during Louis XIV's reign — may have been established much earlier. According to Whitwell, this twelve-member royal wind band may have originated as early as 1580 under Henry III and then continued under the reign of Louis XIII. An engraving from the coronation of Louis XIII shows an eight-member wind band, though the twelve-member band is once again documented following the coronation. Most likely, when Louis XIII was enjoying music privately or in small groups, he listened to smaller wind ensembles that were part of the larger ensemble. An engraving that Louis XIII commissioned for a ballet includes two cornetts, a shawm, a sordun, and a trumpet.

There was also a group of trumpet players called upon for certain ceremonial and state events, such as the great Carrousel of 1612, held in honor of Louis XIII's marriage. The trumpets played for three days in a series of ballets depicting various Greek gods, the legends of Amadis of Gaul and Perseus, the Seasons, and the Hours of the Day. The celebration concluded with a triumphant entrance of Roman warriors leading captive African and Asian kings mounted on elephants, and a model of a palace illuminated by bursting fireworks (Whitwell).

It seems that it was not only kings who enjoyed large wind instrument bands. Some French lords imitated their ruler with their own groups of musicians. An illustrated De la Ruelle report of the funeral of Charles III, Duke of Lorraine, for example, includes two engravings featuring unusual wind bands. One picture shows singers in a church balcony alongside shawm and trombone players. One of the shawms is a huge bass instrument with an upturned bell that resembled something like a seven-foot bass clarinet.

The other engraving depicts the entire interior of the church during the Duke's ceremony. At least thirty musicians stand on a large balcony, with about a dozen of them clearly identifiable as wind players. The rest, many of them hidden from view, may be singers. The string players are positioned on a separate balcony (Whitwell).

Who could have foreseen, when Louis was born in 1638, the profound impact he would have on the arts and music during his reign? Amid wars with other nations and internal strife, he introduced new forms of musical composition, instrumentation, and dance. Louis was born to Louis XIII and his Spanish queen, Anne of Austria. He was barely five years old when he succeeded his father as king and became ruler of 19 million subjects. Despite his title and designation as "a visible divinity," Louis was largely ignored by his mother and spent most of his time with the servants. Barely four years later, in 1648, the nobles and the Paris Parlement revolted against Cardinal Jules Mazarin, the prime minister. This began a civil war known as the Fronde, in which Louis became a victim of poverty, fear, and hunger. Such childhood hardships undoubtedly influenced the rest of his life and his extreme distrust of both the nobility and commoners (Bernard 1970).

Mazarin, who resumed his position in 1653, may have been hated by the nobles and the populace, but he was the first to pay close attention to Louis. As Mazarin's mentee, Louis acquired the prime minister's love of the arts, style, and opulence. It was not until later that Louis stopped deferring to Mazarin's authority and assumed his own power as king (Bernard 1970). As the war between France and Spain came to an end and power shifted from the Habsburgs to the Bourbons, Louis assumed his role as a soldier on the battlefield. In 1660, Louis demonstrated his commitment to the throne and to France when he married the daughter of the King of Spain — his cousin, Marie-Thérèse of Austria — rather than the woman he loved, Marie Mancini, Mazarin's niece, in order to unite the two countries (ibid).

When Mazarin died a year later, Louis surprised everyone by announcing that he would assume full responsibility for the kingdom. As dictator by divine right and God's representative on earth, he felt obligated to take on this role (Study 1998). For the next 54 years, Louis committed himself to controlling everything — from the soldiers to construction to the arts. He even controlled the nobles, who had initiated eleven civil wars in the previous four decades, by making them dependent on him for luxuries and a grand lifestyle. Yet it was through his patronage of the arts that Louis truly distinguished himself and his reign.

When Louis was a teenager, Cardinal Mazarin supported the king's ballet debut in a series of dances in Le Ballet de la Nuit. In the final piece, Louis appeared as Apollo, the god of the sun, wearing a golden Roman-cut corselet and a kilt of golden rays. From that point on, he was known as the Sun King (Harman and Milner 1959). Louis' teacher was the Italian ballet master Giovanni Battista Lulli, who was rechristened Jean-Baptiste Lully for his work in France. Lully had been at Mademoiselle de Montpensier's court in France studying composition and harpsichord (Blunt 1980). There, he frequently heard performances by the king's grande bande and witnessed many balls featuring the best in French dance music. Lully would become one of the most celebrated artists in the king's court and the principal architect of the French Baroque style. Under Louis' patronage, the Académie Royale de Danse — the world's first ballet school — was established in a room of the Louvre. During the same period, Louis attended the ballet Les Fâcheux by Molière and invited Molière to join him at court. This marked the beginning of many new forms of music and theatrical entertainment.

Lully and a group of musicians traveled with the royal entourage to St. Jean de Luz for the wedding of Louis and Marie-Thérèse in June 1660. Lully prepared his first surviving grand motet, the Jubilate Deo, for the elaborate Parisian festivities that followed the ceremony in August. The celebrations culminated in the formal entry of the royal couple into the French capital on Thursday, August 26, with festivities continuing through August 29. This may have been the grandest celebration of the seventeenth century (Burke 1994).