ABSTRACT
Many of the texts set by Marc-Antoine Charpentier in his petits motets express intense spiritual devotion through language that draws on vivid sensual imagery. This chapter examines examples of Charpentier’s text setting in the petits motets, and puts these works into the wider context of seventeenth-century French Catholicism, which was characterised by deep spirituality and religious piety with an emphasis on the visual. The language used in many of the petits motets evokes the type of sensual imagery most closely associated with female spirituality. In much seventeenth-century Italian music the theme of the peccator pentito is most commonly expressed musically in the form of oratorios; in Charpentier’s music it is found in the motet, especially the elevation motet. Charpentier conveys the image of the heavenly Jerusalem through his choice of a major tonality and predominantly consonant writing, with an abundance of parallel thirds, melismas and many ascending melodic lines.
