Charpentier: Historia Esther, H. 396
The Dallas Bach Society Early Music Ensemble
James Richman Harpsichord

It is hard to imagine today how little reward and renown were accorded a composer of Marc Antoine
Charpentier’s talent and lifetime achievement; if his works had not been preserved in their complete
glory, we might never have suspected how much beauty and expressivity he left us in his total oeuvre,
comparable in its ongoing impatience to that of Bach or Mozart. In his “Epitaph” motet (Epitaphium
Carpentarii, H.474) we read his lament – that he was esteemed by the few “good” musicians and
passed over by the larger number of those who were insensitive to his talents. As a result, music was
for him a hard life, and having come into this world with nothing, he left it with the same!
The only image of him that we have, tentatively, is from a painting of his patron the Duchesse de Guise,
who holds a page of music in her hand which is also touched by a small figure in a corner of the
canvas, who presumably has ownership of it as well, meaning that he must be the composer of the
work, whom we know to be Charpentier.
‘Historia Esther’ is a sacred oratorio that tells the story of the great heroine in the history of the Jewish
people. She averted perhaps the first genocide by Hebrew leaders, and she ended up with an entire
book of the bible named for her. It is the only book of the Bible that does not contain the word ‘God’.
Her story here is told by a Historicus, a trio of alto, tenor and bass. The work is through composed with
no da capo arias, remarkable given the complex story which needs every moment of compositional
time to portray the emotion and the dependence upon the heroine of the story for its consummation.