Trois visages d’Hécate

Paris, 1700. Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and his circle were in the throes of developing a new literary and musical genre, the cantate française, — although based on an Italian model — in the Café Laurent, on the corner of the rue Laurent and the rue Christine. In order to keep his sweet-voiced mistress Mlle. De Louvancourt in good humour, Rousseau had written poems on mythological themes which he then caused to be set to music. This genre rapidly became astonishingly successful.

One of the first composers to venture into this new genre was Nicolas Bernier, a pupil of Antonio Caldara. Bernier’s musical mastery far surpassed that of his colleagues: whereas others simply imitated the Italian genre without much inspiration of their own, Bernier was able to combine it with the finest elements of the French style. He composed seven volumes of cantatas that continued to be performed until the outbreak of the French Revolution, of which the great majority have not yet been recorded. We have chosen three cantatas, Diane, L’enlèvement de Proserpine and Médée, to record here. These mythological women are each an incarnation of Hecate, the three-faced goddess: she appears as Diana, patron of the hunt, as Proserpine, goddess of the night, and as Medea, Hecate’s own high priestess.

Musically speaking, Diane from Bernier’s first volume of cantatas is his airiest work, composed for voice and continuo. A mysterious opening and a first aria with sleep as its theme soon develop into an exuberant second aria, before coming to a swift conclusion with a characteristically 18th century moral.