Throughout the 17th century, the courts of Europe were at war. The sovereigns and their families, from the Bourbons of France to the Habsburgs of Austria, to the dukes or marquises of the Italian principalities, spent a large part of their time on the battlefields, on the countrysides of the Thirty Years' War (1618 -1648), or on the front of the Fronde in France.
The court music of this period rustled with the echoes of distant wars which it sought to translate into its scores.
Our program retraces the most beautiful "musical combats" of emblematic composers of the genre: Lully, Schmelzer, Uccellini... to end with a work by Claudio Monteverdi, the "Combatimento di Tancredi e Clorinda" ("The Combat of Tancred and Clorinda"), the most spectacular of his "Madrigals warlike and amorous" which he composed for the carnival in 1638. This two-faceted work, which mixes passion and warlike anger, concluded the journey to the heart of the wars which divided the kingdoms of Europe in the 17th century.
