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Portraits around Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Baltimore, 2004, Patricia M. Ranum's 640-page presentation of twenty years of research on composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier and the people with whom he rubbed shoulders.

The year 2004 (February 24, to be exact) marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of the French composer, Marc-Antoine Charpentier. To commemorate his works and life, Patricia M. Ranum has created a historical portrait gallery that brings to life the composer’s family, protectors, patrons, and collaborators. Master scriveners, secretaries, impresarios , poets, playwrights (among them Molière), and learned translators appear beside singers, lineners, dancing masters, abbesses, ambassadors, curieux, eminent Jesuits, dukes and duchesses, the Queen of Sweden, and Louis XIV himself. The sixty word-portraits hanging in this historical gallery are followed by a word-portrait of the composer himself, grounded on nearly twenty years of archival research and reflection.

Taken as a whole, the gallery depicts an important but little-known cultural moment in the Age of Louis XIV. Charpentier spent his adult life in the service of two powerful women, Mademoiselle de Guise and Madame de Guise, whose spiritual and social hopes and fears are refracted in his music. He later composed for the Dauphin, then served as composer en titre for the Jesuits, and finally was named music master at the Sainte-Chapelle. Each environment enriched and colored the music of this, the most learned composer of his day. Special attention to the physical spaces where Charpentier lived and wrote is made possible by the discovery of hitherto unknown notarial documents. This work will be deeply satisfying reading for those interested in the general history of the period, as well as for historians of music.