The light dims, only partially obscuring the friendly, fluffy clouds that drift across a brushed blue sky. Pathetic fallacy demands rolling thunder, created by large sheets of metal positioned within the orchestra. The topiary that Ariodante – the eponymous lead in Handel’s opera – is crouching behind remains unbothered by the storm. His ringletted wig remians perfectly coiffed.
The Royal Opera at Versailles doesn’t go for complex digital effects – productions are designed to work in harmony with the hall’s historic setting. ‘It’s so beautiful, we cannot fight it,’ says Laurent Brunner, who, as director of Château de Versailles Spectacles oversees the Royal Opera. The visual clutter is impressive. Huge wooden pillars, painted to look like marble, frame the stage; chandeliers wink coquettishly at silken trimmings and wooden panels. The 650-seat venue feels lavishly cosy by today’s standards, but at its inauguration in 1770 was the largest concert hall in Europe – and painted scenery was the very latest in stage technology.
Ariodante (countertenor Franco Fagioli) moves to the balcony just above me, his expression changing as he – like us, the audience – observes the dancers on stage. We’ve all become guests at this ball; witnesses to the pomp of the Ancien Régime. This meta blurring is in keeping with history: the very first performance to take to the stage was the wedding breakfast of Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin of France, the future Louis XVI, on 16 May 1770. Royal architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s gilded cage allowed courtiers to gawp at the royal couple from the comfort of theatre boxes, perhaps noticing in the candlelight that nuptial tension was as tight as the young princess’s dress, which, due to a tailoring error, did not fit.
Marie Antoinette: a lover of music and the arts
While Marie Antoinette did not use the opera house much during her lifetime – the theatre hosted only a handful of events before the Revolution – her love of music has left a significant legacy. Like the Royal Opera, which, having been turned into an assembly hall during the Third Republic and suffering near-destruction during the Second World War before being reopened in 1957 in the presence of Queen Elizabeth II, Antoinette’s cultural impact is undergoing belated reconstruction.
‘Marie Antoinette’s considerable influence as a patron of the arts and style icon has yet to be properly explored,’ suggests the Victoria & Albert Museum’s (V&A) recent ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ exhibition. ‘The arts of her time remain in her husband’s name: the Louis XVI style. What if, instead, we considered the “Marie Antoinette style”?’
Marie Antoinette hosts concerts and played the keyboard
An etching by François Dequevauviller after Nicholas Lavreince (1783-84) on display at the V&A depicts a gathering around a harpsichord. One woman, Princesse de Lamballe, plays the keyboard, turning to engage those seated behind her, while another, Mademoiselle de Condé, shares a joke with a violinist. Discarded sheet music and further waiting musicians suggest a recital is in progress. The Gathering – at the Concert illustrates the development of the salon-concert, which rose in prominence under Marie Antoinette’s curation.
Taught by Gluck, no less, the Queen was a performer as well as a host: among the 17 keyboards available in the palace was a specially made Érard (1793), now part of the Cobbe Collection Trust and on display as part of ‘Marie Antoinette Style’. The marquetry wooden case, ebony and ivory keys remain in apparently perfect condition; the instrument was brought back by the Érards in 1793 after the sale of the contents of Marie Antoinette’s residence at Petit Trianon.
Marie Antoinette... a patron of composers
So what was Marie Antoinette playing on the Érard? She received, as Dauphine, the dedication of France’s first printed piano music by Nicolas-Joseph Hüllmandel. She is also likely to have played works by Mozart (an excerpt of the Minuet & Trio from Sonatina in C played on the same instrument can be heard at cobbecollection.co.uk), who had performed at the Schönbrunn Palace in 1762, when both composer and soon-to-be queen-in-waiting were children. (This meeting prompted the legend that Mozart proposed to the then Archduchess Maria Antonia.)
In adulthood, the composer visited Paris in 1778 in the hope of securing royal patronage. Marie Antoinette was pregnant at the time, and seemingly indisposed. It was a disastrous experience for Mozart; not only did he fail to receive his desired appointment – he was offered the role of organist at Versailles, which he declined – but his mother died during the visit.
Another composer within Marie Antoinette’s orbit was Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, with whom she often played chamber music. Bologne – the illegitimate son of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman – was knighted (‘Chevalier’) for his fencing prowess and promoted within the upper echelons of society partly due to his violin performances. As well as inviting him to her private soirées, Marie Antoinette attended Bologne’s public concerts in Paris.
The 2022 biopic Chevalier hints at the racism the composer faced; he was physically attacked at Versailles and victim of various political manoeuvrings. These came to a head in 1776 as he sought to become director of the Paris Opera. Marie Antoinette, who had previously supported his candidacy, ultimately selected Gluck for the role. Though the film concocts a bitter rivalry between Gluck and Bologne, there is little evidence that there was any animosity between them.
A musical revolution
‘Gluck’s arrival in Paris precipitated the first revolution – a musical revolution,’ says Christophe Rousset, founder of Les Talens Lyriques and specialist in 17th- and 18th-century European music. ‘He established a more fluid style of opera, where the orchestra played practically non-stop – before, there were long recitative sections, accompanied by continuo – and developed a new style that fused Italian and French traditions.’
Marie Antoinette was a fan of Gluck’s changes, which also championed an overture to introduce the melodic themes and less improvisation in arias, and commissioned six stage works. The first, Iphigénie en Aulide, had an audacious premiere that has become almost as mythologised as that of The Rite of Spring. Its first performance in 1774 precipitated a split based on operatic nationalism: Gluck’s opponents brought Niccolò Piccinni to Paris to argue the superiority of Neapolitan opera, causing a schism between ‘Gluckists’ and ‘Piccinnists’.
Popularity is rarely an indicator of artistry – Gluck’s star dimmed, and was extinguished with 1779’s Écho et Narcisse (recently recorded by Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet on the Château de Versailles Spectacles, the label founded by Brunner in 2018 to record works in the Palace of Versailles). ‘He returned to Vienna, but not before entrusting Salieri with an early draft of Les Danaïdes, which he had already committed to writing for Paris Opera,’ says Rousset. ‘Salieri was Gluck’s protégé and, although the work premiered [in 1784] as a collaboration, Gluck later publicly stated that the music was entirely by Salieri.’ Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques – who perform Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at Grange Festival this summer – have done much to revive the reputation of Gluck, Salieri, Lully et al, with a new recording of the latter’s Proserpine recorded in Versailles (out in May.
Marie Antoinette... started a fashion for playing the harp
In another filmic portrayal of Marie Antoinette, a youthful Kirsten Dunst is seen being handed over by the Austrian court to the French, the replacement of her Viennese culture depicted by a cruel removal of Mops, her beloved pug (she would go on to install several dogs at Versailles). However, she was permitted to bring her own pedal harp, something she had become adept at playing and subsequently inspiring a passion for the instrument. While the early-21st century saw the Lang Lang effect – a surprising upturn in people learning the piano, particularly in the star pianist’s native China – in 18th-century Europe there was the Marie Antoinette effect, as the harp replaced the harpsichord as the fashionable music maker among well-heeled ladies. (Social historians point out the erotic lure of the positions required to play the harp, the posture occasionally revealing – gasp! – a glimpse of ankle.)
The princess continued to study harp with German harpist Philipp Joseph Hinner (1755-84) and a good many of his harp duets seem to have been written for teacher and royal pupil. Jean-Baptiste Krumpholz also benefited from courtly patronage, with his harp concertos played at Versailles. And Marie Antoinette composed her own pieces, mainly short songs for voice and harp. Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty’s 1775 painting shows Antoinette playing an exquisitely decorated instrument with a bucolic scene adorning the pillar. She is depicted in her bedchamber, surrounded by a select audience –
the concert format for which she was becoming recognised.
Music was everything to Marie Antoinette... right up to her death
The day after my night at Versailles with Ariodante, I’m wandering around the tourist-filled palace grounds where neat hedges reflect those seen earlier on stage. My vision, still haloed by gold leaf, is soothed by the vast gardens and cold grey skies. Hidden out of view from the court proper lies Petit Trianon, the estate gifted to Marie Antoinette by Louis XVI, having been the former home of the previous king’s mistresses. There, in the music room, sitting opposite the 1790 Taskin keyboard is a harp from the same era, waiting as if their mistress will return at any moment.
Outside the neo-Greek mansion, I follow a red squirrel through winding paths to what looks like a film set. ‘Have we gone the wrong way?’ asks a confused American couple. This is the Queen’s Hamlet, built on her instruction in 1783-86 by Richard Mique. The timbered cottages and tended shrubberies were an elaborate stage upon which Marie Antoinette conducted theatrical scenes, performing roles as rural characters in pastoral idylls. A selection of the Trianon ‘gardening tools’ featured at the V&A exhibition, the immaculately plaited ribbons revealing that they were never intended for physical labour.
Music was everything to Marie Antoinette, right up to the end of her life. During the first part of her imprisonment in 1792, she was permitted access to an old harpsichord and continued to practise and teach her daughter. Legend has it that one of the last scores she perused was the ‘Paris’ symphonies by Haydn – No. 85, nicknamed ‘La Reine’ (The Queen) was known to be her favourite.
