Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre
1665 - 1729
Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet was born on March 17, 1665, into a family of musicians and master instrument-makers in the parish of Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, Paris. Her grandfather, Jehan Jacquet, and her father, Claude Jacquet, were harpsichord makers. Claude taught his sons and daughters how to survive and thrive in the world. Élisabeth received her initial musical education from her father. When she was five, Louis XIV, the "Sun King," took notice of her when she performed at his palace of Versailles. This eventually led to her becoming a musician in his court. She wrote most of her works under his patronage. As a teenager she was accepted into the French court, where her education was supervised by the king's mistress, Françoise-Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan. She stayed with the royal court until it moved to Versailles. In 1684 she married the organist Marin de La Guerre, son of the late organist at the Sainte-Chapelle, Michel de La Guerre. After her marriage she taught, composed and gave concerts at home and throughout Paris to great acclaim.
Jacquet de La Guerre was one of the few well-known female composers of her time, and unlike many of her contemporaries she composed in a wide variety of forms. Her talent and achievements were acknowledged by Titon du Tillet, who accorded her a place on his Mount Parnassus when she was only 26 years old, next to Lalande and Marais and immediately below Lully.
Her first published work was her Premier livre de pièces de clavessin, printed in 1687, which includes unmeasured preludes. It was one of the few collections of harpsichord pieces printed in France in the 17th century, along with those of Chambonnières, Lebègue and d'Anglebert. During the 1690s she composed a ballet, Les Jeux à l'honneur de la victoire (c. 1691), which has subsequently been lost. On 15 March 1694, the production of her opera Céphale et Procris at the Académie Royale de Musique was the first of an opera written by a woman in France. The five-act tragédie lyrique was set to a libretto by Duché de Vancy. Like her contemporaries, she also experimented with Italian genres: principally the sonata and the cantata. In 1695 she composed a set of trio sonatas which, with those of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, François Couperin, Jean-Féry Rebel and Sébastien de Brossard, are among the earliest French examples of the sonata.
Her only published opera only had 5 or 6 performances. An explanation of this failure was that the opera depended on the text rather than the music. Céphale et Procris would soon be known as tragédie en musique, a tragedy put into music, and French literary theatre recited musically. Her compositions were not received well by the French musical culture, which was cautious about contemporary opera. It might have been accepted more readily in Italy with all its musical innovations, but in France, tradition was considered necessary in its music. The reception of Céphale et Procris tells us more about the world of opera in France in the 1690s and French music than about her ability as a composer. This put a stop to her career as an operatic composer.
During the next few years many of her close relations died, including her only son who was ten years old, her mother, father, husband, and brother Nicolas. She continued to perform, however, and in 1707 her collection Pièces de Clavecin qui peuvent se jouer sur le Violon, a new set of harpsichord pieces, was published, followed by six Sonates pour le violon et pour le clavecin. These works are an early example of the new genre of accompanied harpsichord works, where the instrument is used in an obbligato role with the violin; Rameau's Pièces de clavecin en concerts are somewhat of the same type.
She returned to vocal composition with the publication of two books of Cantates françoises sur des sujets tirez de l'Ecriture in 1708 and 1711. Her last published work was a collection of secular Cantates françoises (c. 1715). In the inventory of her possessions after her death, there were three harpsichords: a small one with white and black keys, one with black keys, and a large double manual Flemish harpsichord.
Jacquet de La Guerre died in Paris in 1729.
Biography taken from Wikipedia.
