Continue to read about our Musical Journeys with
French baroque music researcher Mr. Benoît Dratwicki ......
Part 2: Advice for Foreign Musicians & The Structure of Baroque Music
KY: French influences can be found in many baroque works. Do you think it is important for baroque musicians to study French Baroque music in depth?
BD: Yes, I think you cannot perform Baroque music well without having an overview of French Baroque. Especially for flute players, harpsichord players, and viola da gamba players, because French music is foundational repertoire for these instruments.
However you can only learn this music a little bit later. Because when you begin to interpret the music, you must have a clear structure to know that usually main beats are more important than the upbeats. This is our foundational understanding. But then you can go to French music and think, "Ah, in fact, in this music, the upbeats are more important."
Benoît Dratwicki
Artistic director of the
Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles
To be honest, for the technique for singers and for a lot of instrumentalists, French music is not very good. Because you have a lot of appoggiaturas, you have this inégalité, a lot of things which make this music very nice, but not very strict regarding the rhythm, regarding the line, regarding the fluidity. This can create tension for the singers. To make all these appoggiaturas, these ports de voix everywhere, you can do it very well without breaking your voice only if you are very well trained before. So, I really suggest to everybody to work first on Haydn, Mozart, and then Vivaldi. Later, you can work on more complicated things like Bach, which is a whole specific world, and French music, which is also its own specific world.
KY: It’s fascinating that there are such significant differences of musical style between European countries which are so geographically close! How would you sum up some of the key differences?
In France, our music is rarely pure music. In our music, we like text, dance, and theatre. If you take Rameau, it's only this. A tempest is just theatre. An aria is just text. And a gavotte is just dance.
We want everything to be short, very efficient and very poetic. That's why all the pieces by Couperin have titles, because all are an evocation of someone or something. Or they give an atmosphere.
In France, we don't like pieces to be so long, so developed, and so complicated. We like when it's short. An aria by Rameau is two minutes. An aria by Vivaldi can be eight minutes.
But in Germany it is the opposite! Their music is quite intellectual and written purely for the beauty of the music. We can find these big symphonies or all these fugues in sacred music. They put their brain first. They want complicated music, complicated harmony, and it's pure theory, but it's super nice.
In Italy, the composers wanted to showcase virtuosity. They wanted to show the music is complicated. In France, we hate to show that it's complicated, and we hate when music is purely intellectual. So the essence of the musical styles are totally different.
Part 3: Analyzing Lully & The Royal Aesthetic
KY: Many of the non-French Baroque composers—Telemann, Bach, Handel, Fasch also used elements of the French style in their music. To what extent do you think their use of French style was authentic?
BD: Most of these composers never came to France, and they never heard French orchestras or French musicians. I know that a lot of French instrumentalists went abroad, but I'm sure they never listened to the orchestras of the King—the 24 Violins of the King—or the Paris Opera. So, they got their understanding of French music from just reading the scores and I think this created some misunderstandings.
For example, non- French composers see that we like this dotted rhythm:
But for them, the long note is the one which is accented:
And in France, it's —it's the short one:
So, all the writing of the French pieces by Telemann, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and even Haydn and Mozart later, or Purcell, is written on the beat and for a French person, this feels a bit static or a little heavy. The music is not in the air, it's not choreographic. And to be honest, you cannot dance to Bach, the music was not written to be danced to. However, it’s quite the opposite for Rameau - absolutely all his dances were composed to be danced on stage. It’s a totally different thing.
KY: The interpretation of ornamentation is a lifelong study for baroque musicians, are there key differences in the way French composers used ornamentation? How should we interpret them?
I think the way foreigners do the ornaments today is not the same way that French people were doing it. We have a lot of ornaments in France which are, in fact, not musical things; they are more like a theatrical effect. Like the sigh, "Ah! Ah!". You cannot write a note for this; it's just a kind of effect. We have a lot of these types of ornaments which foreigners don't have because they think more in terms of pure music.
For example, Bach, he can write the ornaments in full notes, but Couperin or Rameau will rarely write all the ornaments in full notes. So for us, Bach’s ornaments look quite heavy and concrete. French ornaments are supposed to be a little bit sophisticated, that's true, but they should be very soft, and light on the melody – more subtle.
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632 – 1687)
KY: Jean- Baptist Lully was the music director in the court of Versailles under King Louis XIV. What are the elements in Lully's music that make it sound so grand and so royal?
BD: What is surprising is that Lully did maybe the very best French music, but he was Italian. Why? Because in fact, as a foreigner, he felt and he understood a lot of things that the French did not feel themselves. They were writing in the French style by instinct, but Lully understood at a more conscious level "Okay, the accent is here, they break here, they do this like that." So he wrote music which sounds very effective, but which is not as sophisticated compared to Rameau, which is more elaborate.
So, what makes the music of Lully feel so French and so grand is that it's essential for the dance, essential for the body, and essential for the language. That means, physiologically, for the breath, for the tessitura and so on, you do not have to push, it's just the breath. In fact, Lully’s music is quite simple, but there is the most important thing; there is the text and the theatre. And text is life.
Part 5 : Déclamation & Le Goût du Chant
KY: Can you talk about your expertise in coaching singers in declamation?
BD: I’ve been working with singers for 20 years so I needed find ways to understand their problems and help them find solutions. When you are doing recordings you need to find those solutions quickly! So over the years I developed certain ideas and techniques to help singers interpret this music.
In parallel, for my research as a musicologist, I discovered that the techniques I am teaching already existed in the baroque time. There was a teaching method called Le Goût du Chant (The Taste of Singing). At the time, all the teachers of the singers, they were Maître de Goût du Chant (Master of the Taste of Singing).
In France, they mostly never taught technique. A symptom of this is that all the sopranos ended their tessitura around the F or the G, because it's the last note you can do when you are shouting and without covering like bel canto in the high tessitura. You can sing until F, G, and after it's impossible. So around this time, many of the female parts in the stop there because their technique certainly was not so good.
And so, these masters, they were teaching exactly what I teach. This means we look at how to bring the melody as close as possible to the text, and how to make the text sound as beautiful as it can be. Musically, we look at ornaments, how to match the sentences with the punctuation and where to apply some pressure or accents. We also consider the right speed for each verse, because we can certainly change the speed according to the passion the singer is depicting.
For the musical part, working on the text means working on the accentuation, on the articulation, that means to the consonants, and the weight of each word in each sentence. And so "Enfin, j'ai dissipé la crainte". And so there, I can tell you, accent is on "Enfin, j'ai dissipé la crainte."
And so, you can work in detail on everything. It takes time, but at the end, it makes everything easier for the singers.
KY: For a new listener to French Baroque music, which composer you recommend?
BD: Rameau is perfect and you can start by listening to all his opera overtures. The overtures are all different, all very beautiful and full of energy. There is a recording by Christophe Rousset that I can recommend. And now we are lucky, we have recordings of all Rameau’s operas except for one. We still are waiting to record Les Surprises de l'Amour, version 1748 and then we will have all the operas done.
KY: Your sharing of your expertise on French Baroque music, especially on the vocal and text aspects are certainly inspiring and it will lead us to more further discoveries in the baroque world! Merci beaucoup!
Karen Yeung interviewed Benoît Dratwicki
in November 2025, Prague
