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Jean-Joseph de Mondonville
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean-Joseph de Mondonville (25 December 1711 (baptised) 8

October 1772), also known as Jean-Joseph Cassana de
Mondonville, was a French violinist and composer. He was a
younger contemporary of Jean-Philippe Rameau and enjoyed
great success in his day. Pierre-Louis Daquin (son of the
composer Louis-Claude Daquin) claimed: "If I couldn't be
Rameau, there's no one I would rather be than Mondonville".[1]

Contents
1 Life
2 Music
2.1 Sacred music
2.2 Operas
3 Selected works
3.1 Instrumental
3.2 Operas
3.3 Grands Motets
4 Recordings of works by Mondonville
5 References
6 Sources
7 External links

Jean-Joseph de Mondonville, by
Maurice Quentin de La Tour,
ca. 1746

Life
Mondonville was born in Narbonne in Southwest France to an aristocratic family which had fallen
on hard times. In 1733 he moved to Paris where he gained the patronage of the king's mistress
Madame de Pompadour and won several musical posts, including violinist for the Concert
Spirituel.
His first opus was a volume of violin sonatas, published in 1733. He became a violinist of the
Chapelle royale and chamber and performed in some 100 concerts; some of his grands motets were
also performed that year receiving considerable acclaim. He was appointed sous-matre in 1740 and
then, in 1744, intendant of the Royal Chapel. He produced operas and grands motets for the Opra
and Concert Spirituel respectively, and was associated with the Thatre des Petits-Cabinets, all the
while maintaining his career as a violinist throughout the 1740s. In 1755, he became director of the

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Concert Spirituel on the death of Pancrace Royer. Mondonville

died in Belleville near Paris at the age of sixty.[2]

Music
Sacred music
Between 1734 and 1755 Mondonville composed 17 grands
motets, of which only nine have survived. The motet Venite
exultemus domino, published in 1740, won him the post of
Matre de musique de la Chapelle (Master of Music of the
Chapel). Thanks to his mastery of both orchestral and vocal
music, Mondonville brought to the grand motetthe dominant
genre of music in the repertory of the Chapelle royale (Royal
Chapel) before the French Revolutionan intensity of colour
and a dramatic quality hitherto unknown.

Mondonville, 1768 engraving

Operas
Although Mondonville's first stage work, Isb, was a failure, he enjoyed great success with the
lighter forms of French Baroque opera: the opra-ballet and the pastorale hroque. His most
popular works were Le carnaval de Parnasse, Titon et l'Aurore and Daphnis et Alcimadure (for
which Mondonville wrote his own libretto in Languedocien - his native Occitan dialect).[3] Titon et
l'Aurore played an important role in the Querelle des Bouffons, the controversy between partisans
of French and Italian opera which raged in Paris in the early 1750s. Members of the "French party"
ensured that Titon's premiere was a resounding success (their opponents even alleged they had
guaranteed this result by packing the Acadmie Royale de Musique, where the staging took place,
with royal soldiers).[4] Mondonville's one foray into serious French opera - the genre known as
tragdie en musique - was a failure however. He took the unusual step of re-using a libretto,
Thse, which had originally been set in 1675 by the "father of French opera", Jean-Baptiste Lully.
Mondonville's bold move to substitute Lully's much-loved music with his own did not pay off. The
premiere at the court in 1765 had a mixed reception and a public performance two years later ended
with the audience demanding it be replaced by the original. Yet Mondonville was merely ahead of
his time; in the 1770s, it became fashionable to reset Lully's tragedies with new music, the most
famous example being Armide by Gluck.[3]

Selected works
Instrumental
Sonates pour violon op.1 (1733)
(6) Sonates en trio pour deux Violons avec la basse continue uvre Second, Ddies

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Monsieur le Marquis de la Bourdonnaye, graves par Le Duc, Paris 1734

6 Pices de clavecin en sonates op.3 (1734, orchestrated as Sonates en symphonies 1749)
The preface of op.4 contains the first evidence of a written text concerning playing with
harmonic sounds, "Les sons harmoniques (Paris and Lille, 1738)
Pices de clavecin avec voix ou violon op.5 (1748)

Operas
Isb (1742)
Bacchus et Erigone (1747)
Le carnaval du Parnasse (1749)
Vnus et Adonis (1752)
Titon et l'Aurore (1753)
Daphnis et Alcimadure (1754)
Les ftes de Paphos (1758)
Thse (1765)
Les projets de l'Amour (1771)

Grands Motets
Mondonville's nine surviving grands motets are:
Dominus regnavit decorum (Psalm 92) (1734)
Jubilate Deo (Psalm 99) (1734)
Magnus Dominus (Psalm 47) (1734)
Cantate domino (Psalm 149) (1743)
Venite exultemus Domino (Psalm 94) (1743)
Nisi Dominus aedficavit (Psalm 126) (1743)
De profundis (Psalm 129) (1748)
Coeli enarrant gloria (Psalm 18) (1750)
In exitu Israel (Psalm 113) (1753)

Recordings of works by Mondonville

Pieces de clavecin avec voix ou violon Op.5 Judith Nelson, William Christie, Stanley Ritchie
(Harmonia Mundi, 1980)
Titon et l'Aurore Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski (Erato, 1992)
Les ftes de Paphos Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset (Decca L'Oiseau-Lyre, 1997)
Les Grands Motets (Dominus regnavit, In exitu Israel, De profundis) Les Arts Florissants,
William Christie (Erato, 1997)
Six sonates 'en symphonies' Op. 3 Les Musiciens du Louvre, Marc Minkowski (Deutsche
Grammophon, 1998)
Venite Exultemus, De Profundis (Grands Motets) Oxford New College Choir, [Edward

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Higginbottom] (Helios, 1999)

The aria "Dsirs toujours dtruits" from Isb, sung by Vronique Gens on the collection
Tragdiennes (Virgin Classics, 2006)

References
1. Quoted in the booklet to Titon et l'Aurore
2. Biographical information: Viking, various booklet notes
3. Viking
4. Booklet notes to Titon et l'Aurore

Sources
The first draft of this article was based on a translation of an article on Mondonville in the
French Wikipedia.
Brief biographical entry in the Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, 1994, published by
Oxford University Press, Inc. on the Gramophone (http://www.gramophone.co.uk/) site.
Booklets to the above recordings
The Viking Opera Guide ed. Amanda Holden (Viking, 1993)

External links
Free scores by Jean-Joseph Cassana de Mondonville at
the International Music Score Library Project
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Categories: Baroque composers French classical composers French male classical composers
French opera composers French classical violinists Male violinists People from Narbonne
1711 births 1772 deaths Ballet composers Occitan-language writers
18th-century classical composers
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