Anthoine BOESSET (1556-1643)

Je meurs sans mourir

 

Airs de cour and court-ballet music from the time of Louis XIII

Le Poème Harmonique/Vincent Dumestre

 

Over his lifetime Anthoine Boesset built up a vast corpus of secular compositions, including almost two hundred and thirty airs. When he obtained

his first position at the court of Louis XIII, his airs de cour were already to be found in the anthologies published by Ballard.  After he became Maître de Musique de la Reyne in 1617 he had his airs published at a regular rate of one book every two years, each one (nine in all) in two versions, the one polyphonic and the other for solo voice and lute.  He led a brilliant career, obtaining the honorary title of Secrétaire de la

Chambre du Roy in 1620 and three years later that of Surintendant de la Musique de la Chambre.  His last book of airs de cour was published at the end of his career, ten years after the previous ones, in 1643.  He died a few months later.  Anthoine Boesset's œuvre was nourished by the air de cour tradition and his art owes much to his predecessors, particularly Pierre Guédron, whose daughter he married in 1613.  Transforming the poem into a veritable musical discourse, Boesset took the air de cour genre to its height: in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the basso continuo was making its first appearances in French music, his death marked both its apogee, and its decline.

 

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