Fame is fleeting. It certainly was for Marc-Antoine Charpentier, perhaps the most renown of all French baroque composers. He wrote a huge number of works and was seen by his contemporaries as unrivaled in sacred vocal composition. His fame and reputation were such that after he died (on this date in 1704), his heirs sold his scores - collected into two massive folios - to the Royal Library, now the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Nowadays he's almost never heard. Too bad. As Napoleon said, fame is fleeting. Obscurity is forever.
2 comments:
Didn't know about this guy -- a nice regal start to the day.
Snowing here - giant wet flakes. We have about 11 inches on the ground so far.
Going to add one of his Christmas disks to my collection. Lovely music.
I guess I was the only one to show up for class today.
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