A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726).(Book review)

A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726). By Lionel Sawkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. [xlvii, 700 p. ISBN 0-19-816360-6. $225.] Music examples, facsimiles, tables, bibliographies, indexes.

Lionel Sawkins has been working with the music of Michel-Richard de Lalande for more than thirty years, and he has long been recognized by his colleagues as the leading authority. He began publishing on Lalande in 1975, and by 1984 had complete control of the sources for Lalande's motets, contributing 400 entries to the Catalogue thematique des sources du grand motet (ed. Jean Mongredien [Munich: K. G. Saur, 1984]). Along the way, Sawkins wrote a dissertation, "The Sacred Music of Michel-Richard de Lalande (1657-1726)" (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1993), and edited a great deal of Lalande's music. The present thematic catalog, all 700 big pages of it, is a lifetime achievement and a resounding success.

The importance of Lalande is perhaps not common knowledge today even among musicologists and music librarians. A generation younger than Jean-Baptiste Lully, Lalande quickly rose to prominence at the court of Louis XIV. He became one of the four Sous-maitres de la chapelle in 1683, personally chosen by the king, and then Surintendant de la musique de la chambre in 1689. In the last year of his life, 1726, he had many of his works performed at the new Concert Spirituel in Paris, and he was an icon of French musical life, particularly in the sacred realm. From 1700 to 1770, Parisian newspapers chronicled no fewer than 600 performances of his motets at the Concert Spirituel. His music slipped out of the repertory in the nineteenth century, and when the twentieth-century revival of music by composers like Schutz and Vivaldi occurred, Lalande was ignored. This catalog should be an enormous help in fostering a modern appreciation for this great composer.

The long gestation period of this catalog means that a good deal of its information has been made available elsewhere. Sawkins published a relatively substantial article and worklist in Marcelle Benoit's Dictionnaire de la musique en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris: Fayard, 1992). The Sawkins numbers were made public in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 2001), in which Sawkins revised the article by James Anthony (who also penned a fine foreword for this catalog before his death in 2001). More extensive use of the catalog's information appears in the new edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Personenteil, v. 10, 2003). However, the wealth of detail provided in this catalog, and of course the thematic access it provides to Lalande's oeuvre (there are 3,180 musical incipits!), are to be found only here.

The 175 works are divided into two sections, sacred and secular, each proceeding chronologically within genres, to the extent that the works can be specifically dated; the system does not provide for easy additions of works not yet known. Lalande frequently revised his works for subsequent performances, and thus multiple versions survive. Rather than merely summarizing the differences, Sawkins provides complete inventories of each version. Thus, a Te Deum is cataloged as S32/i, S32/ii, S32/iii, and S32/iv; its eighteen movements generate twenty-one packed pages. The amount of information provided about the work is generous and reflects painstaking attention to detail. But Sawkins is also a fine musician, and always has musical relevance and usefulness in his choices of what information to give, which varies slightly depending on the work. Here he cites Lalande's source for the text, the dates of the four versions, the forces required for each, and the lengths of each movement. Then come the incipits for all of the movements of each version, giving the full texture of the music in short score, and distinguishing between acccompanimental instrumental parts and voices that are doubled. The incipits are almost always long enough to show a whole phrase ...