In 1680, Francois Chaperon, maître de musique of the Sainte-Chapelle, entrusted the setting of some verses from the Lamentations of Jeremiah to Michel Richard de Lalande and Jean-Fery Rebel, Lalande’s brother in law. The Lecons de Tenebres of 1680, now lost, probably provided material for the Tenebrae compositions that have come down to us. Although Lalande had written his Lecons and his Miserere for solo voice for the nuns of the convent of the Assumption, they were actually sung- like many of his works for female voices- by his daughters. The Lecons de Tenebres and Miserere must have therefore been composed some time before 1711, for that year Jeanne and Marie Anne de Lalande died in the smallpox epidemic. For this interpretation of the Miserere, the musicians have chosen the version presented in Brossard’s autograph manuscript of 1711, in which the alternate verses are sung by three voices in faux-bourdon, a practice that was still in vogue at that time in France. Fragmentary notation for a treble instrument is found throughout this manuscript version, thus attesting the practice, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of improvising the countermelody at sight.
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