Tous les Matins du Monde
(All the Mornings of the World)
Directed by Alain Corneau — 1991, France — 110 minutes, color, aspect ratio 1.66:1 — Drama
IN BRIEF, explores the tangled relationship between seventeenth-century French composer Sainte Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle) and his fiery protégé, Marin Marais (Gérard Depardieu).
Revew
Tous les Matins du Monde is a ravishingly beautiful film that combines engrossing characters, focusing on the tempestuous relationship of seventeenth-century composer Sainte Colombe (ca. 1640–1690) and his protégé Marin Marais (1656–1728), with a deep understanding of music. It is at once a highly entertaining melodrama – replete with forbidden love, scalding passion, intrigue, and even a ghost or two – and, on a more rarefied level, a brilliant exploration of the connections between Sainte Colombe’s and Marais’s music and cinematic form. Director Alain Corneau (Some Kind of Blue, Fear and Trembling), screenwriter Pascal Quignard (who adapted his original novel), and Jordi Savall (who performed and conducted the music) deserve the enormous critical and popular success of this film, which among many international honors won seven 1991 César Awards, including Best Picture, and remains one of the highest-grossing French films. Besides a gorgeous transfer of the film (its first time on DVD), this two-disc special edition also features several documentaries about the production, including an absorbing 65-minute portrait of Jordi Savall, who helped modern audiences rediscover the music of Sainte Colombe and Marais.
Tous les Matins du Monde is told from the point of view of the aged Marin Marais (Gérard Depardieu – Truffaut’s The Last Metro, Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette, the 1990 Cyrano de Bergerac), now a lionized composer at the court of Louis XIV. He remembers his tumultuous, decades-long relationship with the reclusive musical genius, Monsieur de Sainte Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle – Philippe de Broca’s Un Monsieur de Compagnie, Tavernier’s Coup de Torchon, The Da Vinci Code), as well as his affair with the passionate young Madeleine de Sainte Colombe (Anne Brochet – Roxane in the 1990 Cyrano de Bergerac) when he was teenager (played by Guillaume Depardieu, son of Gérard – trivia buffs take note: Guilliaume has played such other youthful incarnations of lead characters as Young Edmond Dantès in a 1998 Count of Monte Cristo, and Young Jean Valjean in a 2000 Les Misérables). Young Marais did everything he could to become a pupil of the reluctant Sainte Colombe, not only a great if secretive composer but the master of the hauntingly beautiful viola da gamba (also called a bass viol, it’s the forerunner of the cello). Throughout the film, Sainte Colombe has a series of eerie, and erotically charged, visits from his dead wife (Caroline Sihol – over 50 films, also the wife of this film’s producer, Jean-Louis Livi); we later learn of her surprising connection to her husband’s music. Sainte Colombe has some of these ghostly visits memorialized in paintings by his friend Baugin (Michel Bouquet – the narrator of Resnais’s Night and Fog, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle). Sainte Colombe breaks with Marais when the young man accepts a lucrative position, and flamboyant garb, from Louis XIV (who tried in vain to secure Sainte Colombe), but with Madeleine’s assistance he manages to hide beneath her father’s isolated music cabin and continue to study the master’s technique. The final section involves the adult Marais (now played by Gérard Depardieu, whose voice-over narration we hear throughout the entire film), who again tries to secure a lesson with Sainte Colombe. I’m purposely omitting several juicy dramatic, and melodramatic, scenes, which you can enjoy discovering if you see the film. Besides its compelling storyline, the film works on many other levels: historical, psychological, aesthetic, and philosophical.
Historically, it not only recreates the French Baroque in meticulous, and often sensuous, detail – its homes (from a farmhouse to Versailles), clothing, expansive landscapes, and qualities of light (from candles to the play of sun and shadow on fields) – it explores the very nature of the period through its cinematic form. We’ll look more closely at that below, but first a whirlwind overview of the era. The Baroque period extends from about 1600 till 1750; the term derives, vividly, from the Portuguese barroco, meaning a pearl of unpredictable and ornate shape – a perfect metaphor for all the era’s arts, from painting to music. Historically, the Baroque is marked by religious strife between adherents of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation (in this film, Sainte Colombe’s ascetic life is partly explained by his being a “reformist” Jansenist); the simultaneous consolidation of absolute monarchies (as represented by Louis XIV, the “Sun King”) and the rise of the middle class (with a keen taste for the arts); and rapid scientific expansion (Copernicus had proved that the sun was the center of the universe, which made many people feel dislocated: a popular theme of the era’s painting is a small subject amidst a vast landscape, also reproduced in this film’s iconic shot of Sainte Colombe and Marais climbing a hill during a storm, surrounded by a sprawling verdant world). In the arts, a few of the period’s major composers include Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel; key visual artists include Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Rubens. Baroque artists, in all media, sought balance in dramatic new ways, utilizing sensuousness, tension, movement, and exuberance. Musically, the Baroque begins with the transformative masterpieces of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643; Nine Books of Madrigals, choral Vespro della Beata Vergine, opera Coronation of Poppea) and ends with the death of the titanic Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750; solo keyboard Goldberg Variations, orchestral Brandenburg Concertos, choral Mass in B Minor). The French Baroque is synonymous with the long reign of Louis XIV, born in 1638; he ruled France for seventy-two years from Versailles, which he transformed from a hunting lodge into the opulent symbol of its age. Key French Baroque artists include poet-dramatists Molière and Racine, artists Poussin and Watteau, and composers Lully and Rameau.
French Baroque Music: One reason I’m writing about this film is because I greatly enjoy the under-appreciated music of the French Baroque (among many other periods) – not only Sainte Colombe and Marais but the sometimes extraordinary Jean-Baptiste Boismortier, Guillaume Bouzignac, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, various members of the Couperin musical dynasty – in particular François Couperin “le Grand” (his spine-tinglingly beautiful 1713 vocal piece, “Troisième Leçon de Ténèbres,” underscores the extended love scene between Sainte Colombe and his ghostly wife, although Couperin actually wrote it decades after Sainte Colombe’s death), Michèl-Richard Delalande (also known as Lalande – in the film, we’re told he was young Marais’s roommate), Jean-Marie Leclair, and the magnificent opera composer Jean-Philipe Rameau. I also enthusiastically include the period’s reigning maestro and favorite of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Lully, whose spirited “Marche pour la Cérémonie de Turcs” has become the unofficial theme for this film, despite its not being by either of the principal composers. Trivia buffs may want to know that Lully wrote it as part of his incidental music for Molière’s hilarious 1670 comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman (which contains one of my all-time favorite lines, when the pretentious title character, fresh from a literature tutorial, exclaims, “I’ve been speaking prose all my life and never knew it!”). The too-few Lully recordings suggest that, despite his enormous musical and political power, his foppish affectations, and his notorious life – father of ten children, but openly amorous with male lovers (which some historians use to disparage him), his music, including his operas (such as Atys) and choral works, is exceptionally powerful. Such inspired contemporary musicians as Jordi Savall, William Christie, and Marc Minkowski are to be thanked for reviving the musical riches of the French Baroque.
One of this film’s many strengths is its careful attention to historical details, although, as we’ll see below, it does play fast and loose with the known facts about the lives of both Sainte Colombe and Marais. Few films feel as sensuously authentic as this one; you can almost smell the verdant fields and taste the wine and gaufrettes roulées, those sweet rolled-up wafers that appeal so much to the spectral Madame Sainte Colombe, and the painter Baguin. Like the Kubrick masterpiece Barry Lyndon or Ang Lee’s flawless Sense and Sensibility, every location and object in Corneau’s film feels not only real but actually lived in. Most historical films manage to stumble at least a few times, often with costumes which don’t seem to have been worn before the day’s shoot – but not here. However, there is one inauthentic note (pun intended): some musicians have pointed out that the fingerings and bowings of the actors are inexact (although Guillaume Depardieu actually does play the cello). Fortunately, there are only a few shots that focus on close-ups of playing (Jordi Savall recorded the performances we hear). I’m not arguing that ignorance is bliss, but as a non-viol-player this discrepancy did not lessen my enjoyment.
For all of its historical accuracy, the film does take many liberties with the few historical facts we have about Sainte Colombe and Marais. For instance, there is no sign of Marais’s nineteen children (!), nor of Sainte-Colombe’s son, himself an accomplished viol player who emigrated to England (Jordi Savall, as composer, based his improvisatory “Prélude pour Mr. Vauquelin” on the younger Sainte Colombe’s Prelude in G minor). Sainte-Colombe’s daughters were actually named Brigide and Françoise, not Madeleine and Toinette, and they seem to have had rather happier, and longer, lives than depicted here. Also expunged are the (possibly) many love affairs attributed to the widower Sainte-Colombe, some even including illegitimate offspring: what would his ghostly wife in the film think! Still, at least for me, the power and emotional resonance of the story more than compensate for a lack of documentary exactitude.
The same can be said for the work most often compared to this one, and likely its inspiration: Peter Schaffer’s play and screenplay about Mozart, Amadeus (which borrows its central “conspiracy theory” about the composer’s murder from Pushkin’s 1831 melodrama, Mozart and Salieri). Milos Forman’s hugely popular, Oscar-winning film adaptation is, like Tous les Matins du Monde, a first-person narrative, with the elderly Salieri’s memories coloring the biography of Mozart. Quignard actually conceived and wrote his short novel, of the same title, simultaneously with the development of the film (although it would be unfair to call it a “pre-novelization”). He and Corneau then collaborated on the screenplay, making the elderly Marais the psychological locus of the narrative.
After a riveting six-minute close-up, with frighteningly convincing make-up (this man is clearly at death’s proverbial door), we do not again see Gérard Depardieu, as the adult Marais, for another 75 minutes. But he has indelibly, viscerally left his presence on the film, even when it focuses on Sainte Colombe. However, we do hear Depardieu’s voice-over narration throughout the entire film, even as we see his real-life son Guillaume (beginning in another 30 minutes) play the 17-year-old Marais. The narration is terse but resonant, and used with admirable restraint: in most movies, this technique is a desperate attempt to hide poor dramatic structure, but not here. The elderly Marais’s perceptions add another vital and complex layer to the film, enriching its visual and aural strategy, as well as the themes (which we’ll look at below). So while Amadeus is more transparently entertaining, with Mozart’s eclectic music and its lavish set pieces, this film moves me on a deeper level. Why?
One of the most involving aspects of Tous les Matins du Monde is its rich interplay of visual style and performance, which encompasses Marielle and Gérard Depardieu (in what some have called the finest performances of both their long and distinguished careers), as well as the psychological depth of Quignard’s writing (historical accuracy aside) and Corneau’s subtly inspired direction. This film was completely engrossing from its unforgettable opening close-up to its final black screen, as the music fades away to silence – as we know Marais, like all of us, will too.
Early in Marais’s opening monologue, the filmmakers set out not only the theme but the aesthetic of the entire film, when he says that Sainte Colombe “was all austerity and rage.” We later come to see that his rage is divided: partly against death and partly for art, as a supreme embodiment of the human spirit – together those forces produce yearning, the emotional key to this film, as well as to the music of both Sainte Colombe and Marais.
The conflict between “austerity and rage” is certainly true of the music’s basic style, juxtaposing calm phrases against tormented ones (a technique, representative of so much Baroque art in all of its forms, which Marais further developed in his later works). If we alter Marais’s terms slightly – to austerity and passion – we can see that those poles relate not only to the men’s music, and lives, but to the film’s thematic and stylistic strategy as well, and even to Baroque art, which can feel so very twenty-first century, in its tensions and sensuousness. In other words, this is far more than just a movie about historical musicians, with a gorgeous soundtrack of their greatest hits.
The film’s extraordinary visual style is a clear example of the central conflict between severity and emotionalism. For all of the film’s seething passions, and scenes of melodrama, the camera virtually never moves. The actors move, but our gaze is fixed. Although I don’t mean to make any extravagant claims, it does recall such earlier masterpieces of this style as Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, a riveting historical epic, with titanic emotions, but shot with a static camera. With its intimate scale, this film seems closer to the transcendental concentration, and rarely moving camera, of such master filmmakers as Ozu (Tokyo Story) and Bresson (Diary of a Country Priest).
Some of the most dramatic moments are visual, and small in scale – but large in impact. Corneau, cinematographer Yves Angelo, and designer Bernard Vézat are masters of color. Who can forget the introduction of teenage Marais, appearing in the distance down a country road, surrounded by towering green trees, in a blindingly red jacket. His older self narrates that his coat was “red as a cock’s crest,” which plays as intentionally funny and endearing, not redundant. The blue hue during the nocturnal scene between Sainte Colombe and his ghostly wife at the pond, adds another sensuous, and heartbreaking, layer to their impossible relationship.
There are also many powerful effects using candlelight, which recall one of the greatest, and most enigmatic, Baroque painters, Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), whom Corneau admits to having studied in preparation for this film. One of his best-known works, which seems to have directly inspired some scenes, is the early 1630s canvas, “Magdalene of the Night Light.” In both the painter and filmmaker, we again see the tension, and sensuousness, in the pull between minimalism and passion.
Quignard and Corneau actually include another artist as a character in the film, Lubin Baugin (1610–1663), going so far as to reproduce his 1630s oil painting, “The Dessert of Gaufrettes” (with its sweet wafers, wine bottle, and glass), but with the addition of a crumbled gaufrettes which Sainte Colombe believes is proof of his dead wife’s presence. In one close shot, Corneau even combines both de la Tour (candle and lighting effect) with Baugin (the wafers).
For all of its visual power, this is a film that lives and breathes music; most other musical biographies pale by comparison. They are content to turn their composers into conventional “tormented artists,” as we can see in two films which first popped into mind: William Dieterle’s flattened biopic of Richard Wagner, Magic Fire (the epitome of ’50s Hollywoodization, although Dieterle has made several exceptional films), and Michael Curtiz’s de-gayed movie about Cole Porter, Night and Day (although there’s a certain poetic justice in having the closeted Grant play the closeted Porter). One frequent failing of biopix about artists is the literal-minded way in which they attempt to depict inspiration. For instance, in Curtiz’s film while Porter sits at a piano, eking out the (spellbinding) title song, we see a grandfather clock while he writes “”Like the tick, tick, tock of the stately clock / As it stands against the wall…;” a moment later we see rain coursing down the window, while we hear Porter come up with, “Like the drip, drip, drip of the rain drops / When the summer shower is through, / So a voice within me keeps repeating, / “You, you, you.” / Night and day, you are the one…”
On the opposite extreme, we have maverick filmmaker Ken Russell, who depicts composers’ lives – Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers, Mahler, Lisztomania – with outrageously provocative, but germane, metaphors: Mahler’s expedient conversion from Judaism to Christianity involves him jumping through a flaming circus hoop. By enormous contrast, Tous les Matins du Monde suggests the truly mysterious process of artistic creation not only through its recreation of the feeling of its historical time and place (Sainte Colombe’s isolated and melancholy music cabin is clearly an extension of the composer), but through its visual strategy and its two profoundly written and performed central characters.
This film is all about the full, at times overwhelming, experience of music, which is as much a force of nature as the storms that punctuate the film. It is also a spiritual force, which connects humankind with the divine: as Marais reveals up in his narration, “Music’s goal is to transport the soul.” On another level, music is tangible proof of lives expressed, as with the two composer/protagonists, or even of a cherished life remembered, as in Sainte Colombe’s stream of musical tributes to his dead wife. In that respect, music fights against the ravages of passing time: Marais says in his narration, “All the mornings of the world are gone without recall” – but through music, the spirit of human experience can remain forever, through each new performance of a work. Of course the work must survive, which is one reason why Marais is obsessed with notating and preserving his master’s brilliant but ephemeral improvisations, at any cost.
In this film, more than almost any other, music is fully lived, breathed, even made love to. With visceral immediacy, we can feel what it means to live through music. At the film’s most intense moments, as during the climactic final lesson in the music cabin between Sainte Colombe and Marais we can feel the spiritual, even cosmic, nature of music passing through two people, directly to us. In a mystery akin to the creative process, the music’s – and film’s – formal austerity and passionate core only adds to our involvement. The rich, fundamental humanity of this experience, through Corneau’s timeless film, has connected with people all over the world.
A key moment of that climactic duet (verbal, emotional, musical) scene does, however, raise a problem with the film. I was fascinated by the game the old master plays with his now no-longer-young, and enormously successful, former pupil. Sainte Colombe, taking up the mantle of Socrates, asks Marais repeatedly what music truly means, rejecting each response in turn. I’ll let you ponder, and enjoy, Marais’s litany of “wrong” (or are they?) answers, but what Sainte Colombe finally implies is the meaning of music, without actually saying it directly, may give some people pause: Music is how we commune with, and appease, the dead. Forgive me, my eyeballs are rolling!
Before looking at the fuller implications of this idea, let’s get better acquainted with the principal ghost: the beautiful, graceful, and erotically-charged Madame de Sainte Colombe: as Marais tells her, in what may be the film’s most shocking (although never depicted) line, “Twelve years have not cooled our bed sheets.” (This brought to mind the ghostly but sensual noblewoman in Mizoguchi’s sublime 1953 fantasy, Ugetsu.) The wife has one of the most heartbreaking lines in the film, when she expresses her frustration at the unbridgeable gap between the dead and the living: “I wish I could make you some crushed peaches, but I can’t.” The film remains ambiguous about the reality of the ghost wife. On the one hand, she appears in several scenes, and interacts with the material world (as seen in crumbling the wafers). On the other hand, well, she’s dead. As Marais opines in the narration, if she represents Sainte Colombe’s madness, it made him happy; if she truly exists, it was a miracle. An example of Quignard’s writing at its best comes in her simple but evocative metaphor for how she is able to cross back and forth from death: “The other world is leaky as a boat.”
Questions of reality aside, one problem with this ghostly reality is that it’s something of a cliché, and will become even more so about 150 years after Marais’s death – and a 150 years before this film was made. Recall the tradition of “love death” in nineteenth century Romantic literature, including such iconic French poets as Baudelaire and Rimbaud. It’s debatable whether this attitude was as pronounced in the time of Sainte Colombe and Marais as later, during its peak when Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde (1859) provided the purest expression; in fact, its signature motif, the Liesbestod, literally means “love death.” However, the idea does have some intrinsic, albeit morbid, resonance, as we can see in perhaps its most evocative literary embodiment: Wallace Stevens, in his 1915 poem “Sunday Morning” (section V), wrote, “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires….” You can almost imagine Sainte Colombe weeping, had he been able to hear this verse that sums up his beliefs as perfectly as his own music sums up his relationship with his wife.
The “love death” idea also echoes at the end in a provocative, and perhaps unexpected, way. In the final moments, we see that Marais’s ghostly visitor is Sainte Colombe – just as Sainte Colombe’s was his wife. For all of the film’s oppose-sex desire, both fleshly and spectral, at the end Corneau and Quignard leave us with this intriguing parallel between the elderly Marais and the long-dead Sainte Colombe. Approaching death, Marais has a vision of the person who has dominated his life, his passion, and his music: not Madeleine, not the historical woman he married (and mother of his nineteen children), but Sainte Colombe. Again we feel the yearning of absence, of unspoken, impossible connections. I’m not saying that the film is crypto-gay, but its same-sex resonance does add another layer to it artistically, emotionally, and spiritually. Master and pupil, music their shared language and passion, will soon be joined in eternity.
The connections between history, the individual artist, and spirit – not to mention “austerity and rage” – are complex indeed, as this film reveals with heartbreaking beauty.
Crew
- Directed by Alain Corneau
- Written by Pascal Quignard & Alain Corneau
- Produced by Jean-Louis Livi
- Executive Producer Bernard Marescot
- Cinematography by Yves Angelo
- Production Design by Bernard Vézat
- Costume Design by Corinne Jorry
- Makeup by Jean-Pierre Eychenne
- Sound by Anne Le Campion, Pierre Gamet, Gérard Lamps, & Pierre Verany
- Original Music by Jordi Savall
- Additional Music by Sainte-Colombe, Marin Marais, François Couperin (from Troisième Leçon de Ténèbres à 2 voix), and Jean-Baptiste Lully (from Marche pour la Cérémonie de Turcs) – below is a complete listing of all the music used in this film
Cast
- Jean-Pierre Marielle as Monsieur de Sainte Colombe
- Gérard Depardieu as Marin Marais
- Anne Brochet as Madeleine de Sainte Colombe
- Guillaume Depardieu as Young Marin Marais
- Carole Richert as Toinette de Sainte Colombe
- Michel Bouquet as Baugin
- Jean-Claude Dreyfus as Abbe Mathieu
- Yves Gasc as Lequieu
- Jean-Marie Poirier as Monsieur de Bures
- Myriam Boyer as Guignotte
- Violaine Lacroix as Young Madeleine
- Nadège Teron as Young Toinette
- Caroline Sihol as Madame de Sainte Colombe
- Yves Lambrecht as Charbonnières
Music
Here is a complete listing of music found on the remastered two-CD soundtrack.
1. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
with Jordi Savall
2. Couplets de folies (Les folies d’Espagne), for viola da gamba & continuo in D minor (Pièces de viole, Book II, No. 20) Extraits
Composed by Marin Marais
with Jordi Savall
3. Prélude pour Mr. Vauquelin, improvisation for bass viol (after de Sainte Colombe le fils’ Prelude in G minor)
Composed by Jordi Savall
with Jordi Savall
4. Gavotte du Tendre
Composed by Jean de Sainte-Colombe
with Jordi Savall
5. Une jeune fillette
Composed by Anonymous
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, Maria Cristina Kiehr
6. Les Pleurs, for solo basse de viole
Composed by Jean de Sainte-Colombe
with Jordi Savall
7. Concert for 2 equal bass viols No. 41 (“Le retour”)
Composed by Jean de Sainte-Colombe
with Christophe Coin, Jordi Savall
8. La Reveuse, for viola da gamba & continuo in F minor (Pièces de viole, Book IV, No. 82)
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantai
9. Leçon de Ténèbres 3, for 2 treble voices & continuo
Composed by Francois Couperin
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Montserrat Figueras, Maria Cristina Kiehr, Pierre Hantai
10. L’Arabesque, for viola da gamba & continuo in F major (Pièces de viole, Book IV, No. 80)
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantai
11. Fantaise for viol in E minor (after de Sainte Colombe le fils)
Composed by Jordi Savall
with Jordi Savall
12. Les Pleurs, for 2 basse de viole
Composed by Jean de Sainte-Colombe
with Jordi Savall
13. La Badinage, for viola de gamba & continuo in F sharp minor (Pièces de viole, Book IV, No. 87)
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall
14. Tombeau pour M. de Sainte-Colombe, for viola da gamba & continuo in E minor (Pièces de viole, Book II, No. 109)
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantai, Jerome Hantai
15. Pièces de viole, Book III, for viola da gamba & continuo Muzettes I-II
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantai
16. La Sonnerie de Sainte Geneviève du Mont à Paris, for violin, viola da gamba & continuo in D minor
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Pierre Hantai, Fabio Biondi
17. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Marche pour la Cérémonie Turque
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
18. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Premier Air des Espagnols
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
with Manfredo Kraemer
Conducted by Jordi Savall
19. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Second Air des Espagnols
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
with Rolf Lislevand, Pedro Estevan, Jordi Savall
20. Fantasie en Rondeau
Composed by Sainte-Colombe le Fils
with Jordi Savall
21. Couplets de folies (Les folies d’Espagne), for viola da gamba & continuo in D minor (Pièces de viole, Book II, No. 20)
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Jordi Savall, Michael Behringer
22. Prélude for viol in E minor
Composed by Jean de Sainte-Colombe
with Jordi Savall
23. Work(s) Unspecified Prélude for ensemble
Composed by Marin Marais
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
24. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Entrée
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
25. Charivary, for viola da gamba & continuo in D major (Pièces de viole, Book III, No. 58)
Composed by Marin Marais
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
with Manfredo Kraemer
Conducted by Jordi Savall
26. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Canarie
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
27. Les Voix Humaines, for viola da gamba & continuo in D major (Pièces de viole, Book II, No. 63)
Composed by Marin Marais
with Jordi Savall
28. Fanfare
Composed by French Anonymous
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
29. Work(s) Unspecified Passepieds I-II, for oboe, flute, bassoon, guitar & percussion
Composed by Marin Marais
with Rolf Lislevand, Pedro Estevan, Josep Borras, Marcel Ponseele
Conducted by Jordi Savall
30. La du Vaucel
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Forqueray
with Jordi Savall
31. Les Ombres, for viols da gamba, harpsichord & percussion
Composed by Jordi Savall
with Pedro Estevan, Jordi Savall, Sergi Casademunt, Michael Behringer, Lorenz Duftschmid, Sophie Watillon
32. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 L’Entrée des Scaramouches
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
33. Le bourgeois gentilhomme, comédie-ballet, LWV 43 Chaconne des Scaramouches
Composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully
Performed by Le Concert des Nations
Conducted by Jordi Savall
Video
Video Release
Koch Lorber Films‘ widescreen DVD transfer of this film, which is here making its debut on DVD, is gorgeous in both image and sound. This two-disc special edition also features a wealth of supplemental features, the highlight of which is a superb hour-long documentary, In Search of the Perfect Sound, on Jordi Savall, who on the soundtrack plays the viola da gamba for Marielle and the Depardieus and conducts the orchestra, and who helped return Sainte Colombe, Marais, and other extraordinary “lost” composers to prominence.
- Digitally restored, 16×9 anamorphic in the original theatrical release aspect ratio of 1.66:1
- Soundtrack remastered in Dolby Surround 5.1
- In French with optional English subtitles
- In Search of the Perfect Sound, an outstanding 65-minute documentary featuring musical performer, historian, and composer Jordi Savall; one of the most revealing portraits I have seen of any musician
- Interviews with director Alain Corneau, actor Jean-Pierre Marielle, and Jordi Savall
- Making-of Featurette
- César Awards ceremony footage
- Theatrical trailer
- 8-page booklet with essays by film critic Robert Horton and music historian Stuart Cheney
- $34.98 suggested retail
Reviewed May 27, 2006 / Revised October 27, 2020