1689–1755 · France · Baroque
Joseph Bodin de Boismortier (1689–1755) was a French composer from Thionville. He was one of the first to live on the income from publishing his own music, with neither a post nor patrons. He wrote most of all for the flute. The site offers four of his Op. 40 sonatas: three at an intermediate level and one intermediate-plus.
Joseph was born on 23 December 1689 in Thionville. His father, Étienne Bodin, was a former soldier who went by the nickname Boismortier. He married Lucie Gravet in 1687 after being released from his military duties, and became a confectioner and merchant. Joseph was not the only child: his elder sister Marie arrived in 1688, and in 1691 a younger sister, Catherine, was baptised in Thionville.
His elder sister Marie became a master seamstress as early as 1712, and on 8 April 1720 she married a button merchant, Jean Bouchotte. Their grandson Jean-Baptiste Noël Bouchotte served as minister of war under the Convention in 1793–1794.
The family moved from Thionville to Metz, where the father kept a confectioner's shop beside the Cathedral of Saint-Étienne. The son was most likely meant to take over the shop, but his talent, already visible, led him down a different road. He studied music in Metz with Joseph Valette de Montigny, a well-known composer of motets. Montigny himself came from Béziers and had arrived in Lorraine in the retinue of the Viscount d'Andrezel, an adviser to the Grand Dauphin. These two were to play a major part in Boismortier's later life. It was once supposed that his teacher might have been Henry Desmarest, then living in exile in Lorraine, but that was not so.
In 1702 he sang, together with his brother, some of the parts of Montigny's motet Parce mihi Domine at the church of Saint-Gorgon in Metz. Boismortier probably composed his first pieces while still in Lorraine.
The prospect of life as a confectioner did not appeal to Boismortier, and he left for Roussillon in the south. In Perpignan, in the Saint-Jean quarter, he took the post of receiver in the royal tobacco administration that supplied the troops. Buying such a post probably took financial help rather than a gift from his father.
Montigny was living in Perpignan by then as well. On 20 November 1720, in the cathedral, Boismortier married Marie Valette, a niece of his teacher and the daughter of goldsmiths who had grown rich. The couple settled in the family house on the rue de l'Argenterie Vieille, and when his father-in-law died on 18 March 1722, Boismortier inherited it. A vineyard on the lands of Vernet came to him with it.
Their first daughter, Suzanne, was born on 15 November 1722. She later became a playwright and novelist.
The Viscount d'Andrezel followed Boismortier and Montigny to Perpignan, where he took the post of intendant of Roussillon, Cerdagne and the County of Foix. He used his influence to urge Boismortier to send the Paris publisher Christophe Ballard a first serious air and a drinking song, to test the market. The piece went off to Paris in 1721.
The success came quickly, and the composer decided to leave his post and take the risk. On the road to Paris in winter he made a short stop at the Château de Sceaux, home of the Duchess of Maine, and performed a French cantata, Le Printemps. The splendour of the great nights of Sceaux had faded by then, but there Boismortier met Nicolas Bernier, Joseph Mouret and Charles-Hubert Gervais, from the circle of the Knights of the Honey Fly.
In Paris Boismortier settled on the rue Saint-Antoine, opposite the Great Jesuits. On 29 February 1724 he obtained his first printing privilege, which let him publish four books of sonatas for two flutes without bass, a kind of selection of his best early attempts. In 1724 he also obtained a royal licence for engraving music: he sold his music to anyone who wished to buy it and made enormous sums that way. After his death his wife returned to the same quarter, and she was buried there.
In the preface he explained why he was publishing the sonatas himself. For nearly a year, twelve of his sonatas for two transverse flutes had been circulating in Paris in hand-made copies, and the copyists had slipped serious mistakes into them. He decided to add twelve new ones and bring everything out in four books, each with three of the earlier sonatas and three new ones. If the public liked the first book, he meant to release the rest in quick succession.
So began a career in which Boismortier accepted no protection, although his colleagues Naudot, Braun, Blavet, Corrette and Leclair did not turn it down. He made it a point of honour to owe his success to himself alone. For his first work he allowed himself only a preface with a fictitious dedication to d'Andrezel, which was really a mark of sincere friendship. Some of his works were published by the flautist, composer and prominent Freemason Jacques-Christophe Naudot, with whom he was on friendly terms.
He wrote for many instruments and voices, and he got into print quickly. His first works came out in Paris in 1724, and by 1747 the number of his opuses, vocal and instrumental alike, had passed one hundred. His vocal music in particular was loved, and it left him a man of means. This provoked the irony and envy of many contemporaries.
He is described as a cheerful man, pleasant company. He moved through the salons in his finest gilded coat, paying compliments to the ladies and meeting the greatest names of the Parisian nobility. To his talent as a composer he added a poet's gift: he gladly printed poems at the front of his publications. Jean-Benjamin de Laborde wrote that Boismortier composed verses in the manner of Scarron, and that some of them circulated in society.
For all his recognised talent, he was famed for being so absent-minded that he could not conduct his own works and preferred to leave that to others. In 1780, in his Essay on Ancient and Modern Music, Laborde remarked that Boismortier's pen was so fertile that it could produce a volume of music every month without effort. To such comments, it is said, he would simply answer that he was earning money.
Once the Italian-leaning opera school had triumphed in the so-called War of the Buffoons, Boismortier stopped composing actively, from 1753 on. He died on 28 October 1755 in Roissy-en-Brie. At his own request he was buried in the church of Saint-Germain. A book-length life of the composer by Stephan Perreau came out in France in 2001.
Boismortier wrote both vocal and instrumental music: chamber works, cantatas, opéra-ballets. His first opuses appeared in Paris in 1724. They are sonatas for two transverse flutes without bass (Op. 1 and Op. 2). The flute remained his favourite instrument: he wrote for it more than for others and wrote an instruction method for it, which is now lost. But he also turned to viols, musettes, bassoons, cellos, violin, oboes and harpsichord.
The forces he used vary widely: sonatas for two viols (Op. 10, 1725), suites for two musettes (Op. 11, 1727), sonatas for violin with bass (Op. 20, 1727), sonatas for cello, bassoon and one other instrument of choice, with figured bass and a concerto at the end (Op. 26, 1729), and sonatas for flute and violin in chords (Op. 51, 1734). There are also vocal Les gentillesses, cantatilles, that is, short cantatas.
In 1727 he published six concertos for five flutes, Op. 15, and was the first Frenchman to adopt the Italian concerto form. In 1729 came the first French solo concerto, written among others for cello and bassoon. He went on writing concertos for one instrument, yet preferred the flute to all others. For the stage he left the opéra-ballet Les voyages de l'amour (1736, staged at the Paris Opéra), the comic ballet Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse (1743) and the tragédie lyrique Daphné (1748), which was never performed.
For keyboard he wrote four suites of harpsichord pieces, Op. 59 (Paris, 1736), and six sonatas for harpsichord and transverse flute, Op. 91, published in Paris with a tribute to Michel Blavet. These are probably the best known of his pieces today, and the Second Serenade, or symphony, also remains in frequent performance. Writers have called his music beautiful and refined; he lived in the Rococo of Louis XV and kept to French tradition.
The site offers four sonatas from Op. 40. This opus, published in 1732, is a set of six sonatas for two bassoons, cellos or viols, followed by a number of pieces that can be played alone and easily. Sonatas I, III and IV are marked on the site as intermediate, and Sonata II as intermediate-plus. It is convenient to begin with the first of them and work towards Sonata II.