Le Centre de musique baroque de Versailles is dedicated to research toward performances of French Baroque repertoire. It’s a change of priorities: from composers and works to instruments and singers.
The Centre encourages American musicians and scholars to travel to Paris for research or to hone their skills. Its resources are likely unmatched in the early-music world.
This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of EMAg, the Magazine of Early Music America
The raison d’être of the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (CMBV) is simple: researching all aspects of performance of French music — artistic, historical, cultural — from the 17th and 18th centuries. It was founded nearly 40 years ago and has developed into a formidable institution, probably unmatched in the early-music world in its scope and activities.
The facilities are open to researchers from anywhere in the world. Musicians, dancers, costume and set designers, scholars, and promoters can all seek advice from the Centre’s team for any project that involves its repertoire. Yet few in the early-music community, at least in the Americas, seem to know about it.
‘We are trying to cause a new revolution’
“A relationship starts with just one meeting,” Benoît Dratwicki, the CMBV’s artistic director, told me during the summer. “If you begin with an institutional approach it doesn’t work. We prefer to work with individual musicians, with the emphasis on performance practice. We are trying to cause a new revolution which is strongest for musicians and researchers, more than for the audience.”
A few hundred yards down the hill from Louis XIV’s vast palace, the building that houses the CMBV has the enticing title of L’Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs. Translations can be cruel and misleading, though, because the name is not a list of vaguely naughty pleasures but refers instead to its function in the old royal estate offices, built in 1741. It was the place where furniture was stored and restored, the banqueting accoutrements were kept polished, and some of the spectacular props used in court entertainments were kept in good order. Its ancien régime offices housed the staff that managed all the palace entertainments, including the opera and ballet, so it is fitting that their work is the focus of the modern CMBV.
Later in the 18th century, the building also contained the room that held the National Assembly. It was there that Louis XVI tried, in vain, to persuade the delegates to retain the monarchy after the revolution started, and, once the king had failed, it was there that the assembly passed its Declaration of Human and Civil Rights, including the core motto of “liberty, fraternity, equality” — which the subsequent revolutionary government so spectacularly failed to live up during the Terror. That part of the building, demolished in 1802, is now a courtyard, with the outline of the debating chamber’s columns marked out by floor stones. Where politicians and courtiers once argued, children from the choir school now kick around a soccer ball after lessons.
The main part that CMBV has occupied since 1996 is in the other courtyard of the H-shaped complex. Here are the offices, workshop spaces, rehearsal and teaching rooms, and the library — and this is the heart of the organization, where the research can be assessed by musicians, instruments in hand, as well as by examining scores and treatises in print. The organization itself dates from a decade earlier, set up in 1987 by Vincent Berthier de Lioncourt and Philippe Beaussant, with just enough time to prepare for the bicentenary of the French Revolution.
By 1990, a children’s choir, Les Pages, had been established (singing on Tuesdays in the chapel of the palace) as well as an opera studio for young singers, initially led by René Jacobs and Rachel Yakar. The CMBV’s library and publishing branches were started two years later. But by 1997, just after they moved into the refurbished buildings of the Hôtel des Menus-Plaisirs, the opera studio was closed for lack of money, which seems a shame, given the dearth of specialist centers for teaching historical vocal repertoire beyond a conservatory level.
While it is impossible for CMBV to avoid the great names of Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marin Marais, and Jean-Philippe Rameau, it has been careful to highlight a fuller range of Baroque composers working in France — one hesitates to say “French” composers because so many, like Lully, came from Italy — including André Campra, Sébastien de Brossard, Michel-Richard de Lalande, Jean-Marie Leclair, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and a long list of others. Anniversaries have been useful tags over the years, giving a reason for concentrating a season on a particular composer’s work and re-evaluating their position in the pantheon, not just in France but internationally.
Although the Centre had promoted its own concert series, many of them themed, in its first couple of decades — including recreating Lully’s Les 24 Violons du Roi — that side of its activities has diminished in recent years. These days, the vast majority of the events and projects that carry its logo are co-productions performed elsewhere. Nicolas Bucher, an organist and educator, has been CMBV’s general manager since 2018. He has gradually steered the Centre in a direction that concentrates its energy on research and advisory services.
Since 2006 the artistic director of the CMBV has been the musicologist Benoît Dratwicki who, although no longer an active performer himself, oversees part of the public activities of the organization. Despite his actual title, he says his role is not like being in charge at a traditional opera house, thinking about how to stage a production: “For me, the most important thing is to understand the scene and work on performance practice.
“When Nicholas [Bucher] arrived as general manager, he wanted the staff to focus on interpretation,” Dratwicki continues. “It is a very exciting change of focus and priorities, from composers and works to instruments and singers. We are still dedicated to finding unrecorded repertoire — or repertoire that has not been recorded in appropriate editions — because we still have so much to discover and tell. Our aim is to get as close to the beginning of a work as possible, but we also know that there is not one truth — even at the time of composition — because there were different ways of performing in all the many venues. The aim is to come away from study with new eyes and ears.”
When we spoke, Dratwicki had just stepped out of the recording sessions of Lully’s famous 1676 tragédie en musique, Atys, performed by the ensembles Les Ambassadeurs – La Grande Écurie and Les Chantres du Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, conducted by Alexis Kossenko, recorded for the Alpha label for release in 2026.
“As a musicologist, I heard how Lully’s orchestra could sound according to the sources for the first time,” Dratwicki says. “We did a lot of work on bowing and balance. The result was so different from how it has been realized over the last 50 years. I am part researcher, part artistic director, so it was really inspiring.”
Dratwicki speaks of the many myths associated with French Baroque music, for example the conducting technique. The story goes that Lully always conducted with a huge stick, beating it on the ground with a ferocity that gave him sepsis when he stabbed his toe. “That staff,” Dratwicki explains patiently, “was the symbol of the superintendent’s authority,” in the way the leader of a military marching band still flourishes one.
“It was used not just by Lully but by directors up until the end of the 18th century — but only in concerts with big choirs and orchestras, not in the theater or with smaller ensembles. For those he used a small baton, as would be normal now. And the conductor would always try to signal the bar [measure] without division: always one in a bar without divisions.”
‘The revelation is that the winds do not play simultaneously with the strings. It is really changing the way we see and think about the French Baroque.’
The Centre’s Bucher calls the Atys research and recording “very important for us. We see it as fundamental for new directions in performance practice. It is 40 years since William Christie recorded it with Les Arts Florissants. We have been working for the last two years on the sources, and suddenly you see that you can use all sorts of sizes of ensemble. Effectively, there are three orchestras: the strings (Les 24 Violons), the continuo, and the winds. The revelation is that the winds do not play simultaneously with the strings. It is really changing the way we see and think about the French Baroque.”
For a 2021 recording of Rameau’s Achante et Céphise (1751), the first opera to include clarinets in the orchestra — a stirring, gorgeous work not heard complete for 270 years — the CMBV commissioned six historical clarinets made for the occasion. It’s a revelation to hear, and another case of how the Centre helps change how we experience and imagine the milieu.
Research vs. Box Office
You’ll seen the CMBV name on recordings and lending its support to projects and performances far and wide. But the Centre is not to be confused with the self-standing Château de Versailles Spectacles, which operates every variety of performance within the palace’s walls and grounds. The royal complex receives some seven million visitors annually, making it among the most popular attractions in France. The Spectacles’ job is to entertain those many tourists by presenting the fireworks and the fountains, the drone light shows and costumed ball evenings (les Fêtes galantes), the DJ’d electro nights, and concerts in the salons and the gilded Chapelle Royale. The Spectacles also controls the in-house Opéra Royal, which programs a lot of French and Italian Baroque music and dance but also — despite its name — the occasional opera by Georges Bizet, Richard Wagner, or American post-modernist John Corigliano.
Officially, the Spectacles is described as a “private subsidiary of the public establishment of the museum and the national domain of Versailles,” and furthermore the “Château de Versailles Spectacles’ mission is to perpetuate the tradition of spectacle and performing arts through exceptional events.”
Thus, the business of staging events in the palace itself has been left mainly in the hands of Spectacles’ director Laurent Brunner, where the ancien régime is a starting point for repertoire and events rather than a cultural era to recreate. Brunner notes that “the opera leaves a deficit, but I sell millions of tickets for the fountains, balls, and concerts.”
The CMBV’s Bucher explains that there is a loose relationship between his research-focused organization and the ticket-driven Spectacles. A visitor could easily be confused. CMBV artists are part of the Château’s Musical Thursdays series; the Spectacles ventures into French Baroque opera, via concerts or recordings. Yet unlike the Spectacles, the CMBV does not have its own recording label. Instead, it works on projects with the major commercial labels in the early-music field, like Warner Classics, Harmonia Mundi, Alpha, and Aparte — as well assorted performance projects with the Spectacles.
Bucher stresses that, although the Centre does not have its own adult choir or orchestra, as does the Spectacles, his organization still operates the choir school and research laboratory. And CMBV is a partner in concerts and academies all over France and beyond. Since the CMBV isn’t a concert presenter, he says, “it is totally useless to send concert proposals to me.”
Collaborating with the Americas
To date, collaboration with North and South American organizations has been concentrated most notably with the biennial Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) and its directors, Stephen Stubbs and Paul O’Dette. They have been programming a major French opera every four years, for which the CMBV helps with the preparation of scores and delivers lectures and historical information. CMBV was also involved with conductor Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque for the modern premiere of Le Temple de la Gloire, an Enlightenment-themed opera not performed in its original version since 1745, with music by Rameau and a libretto by Voltaire. (A planned 2020 production with the Philharmonia Baroque, Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus, was canceled due to the pandemic.)
In Brazil, CMBV partners annually with Rio de Janiero University (UNIRIO)and its student orchestra, sending singers, instrumentalists, conductors, and teachers from France for a Rio Baroque week featuring lectures, masterclasses, and performances.
The deeper collaboration with BEMF goes back to 2008, when the Versailles 24 Violons went to Boston, and BEMF musicians made the return journey the following year. In 2016, Dratwicki traveled to Boston and New York City to introduce Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Les plaisirs de Versailles and Lalande’s Les fontaines de Versailles. The next year, BEMF staged Campra’s Carnival of Venice for the first time since 1699, using CMBV’s new edition of the score. In 2023, they provided the same service for Henri Desmarest’s Circé, with a libretto by Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Saintonge, the keystone of the festival’s “Celebration of Women” theme.
‘Contact us about a research project, and we can usually find a solution’
The Centre is full of encouragement for American musicians and scholars keen to travel to Paris for research or to hone their skills in situ. Bucher points out that, while CMBV does not have its own scholarship program, it can help scholars find potential funders. “The best way to come to us is not to look for a special funding program,” from foundations or government agencies, “but to contact us about a research project you want to do, and then we can usually find a solution.”
In recent years, several U.S.-based researchers have tapped CMBV’s resources for critical editions, including Lisa Goode Crawford for operas by Pancrace Royer, Jane Gosine on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and Kenneth Owen Smith on Sébastien de Brossard.
“We have two sorts of people coming here to work with us,” Bucher says. “Researchers can come for three months, and it is often easy because we can help by including them in our research team. For musicians who want to come and study [for three months,] we can find a room and contacts, either here at the CMBV or at the Paris Conservatoire. Every situation is different for every musician, so we really prefer to see each proposal, whether from singers, instrumentalists, conductors, or researchers.”
Bucher points out that they also work on staging and Baroque dance. Mandarine Théaudin, the young assistant who showed me around the Centre when I visited earlier this year, specializes in dance.
CMBV can also act as a clearing house for ideas, for example, by helping festival planners. “We have two main ways,” Bucher explains. “We can help promoters who want to program French Baroque music and need advice on artists and a way to make contact with them. And our central position in the profession means that we are often aware of projects and artists’ interests even if the projects are not ours — so we can pass on the information. We know the numbers!”
Alongside that consultancy role, Bucher says CBMV may “propose our own forces and we can help organize, activities running in parallel with the concerts: academies, talks, and education projects.” CMBV also arranges artists residencies around France for individual musicians and ensembles. (Despite the inescapable French love of official channels and bureaucracy, he says the process is actually much more informal than “consultancy” suggests.)
For a North American ensemble wanting to use the CMBV resources, Bucher says the first contact should be with the library, using the database and the librarian’s advice for sources. “We will help as a guide through the repertoire, advise, and make a transcription of the music if needed. It’s easy, just an email.” In the U.S., some branches of Alliance Française, the cultural diplomacy organization, can often help.
Bucher says he would be “very happy to find new collaborators across the U.S. to help discover repertoire and deepen their understanding of it. There is a whole network of universities with which we have no contact. We would love their librarians and music researchers to get in touch.”
Simon Mundy has been writing about music for a half century. Otherwise he is a poet and novelist. He also advises the European Festivals Association and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He lives in Scotland.
