The ninth and final volume in the monumental collection dedicated to the composer Sébastien de Brossard, this new publication from the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles brings together twenty-nine works: sixteen motets composed between 1695 and 1712, a complete cycle of nine Leçons de Ténèbres printed in 1721, and four motets that remain in manuscript.

Sébastien de Brossard (1655-1730) was a composer from Normandy, master of music in Strasbourg and Meaux, theorist and collector. Well-known for his immense and invaluable collection preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, he also left us an important corpus of sacred music that offers a highly original synthesis of French and Italian styles, in a manner comparable to the Goûts réunis dear to François Couperin.

These superb motets were an immediate publishing success. Both innovative in form and modern in style, they provide an insight into Sébastien de Brossard’s relationship with Ballard. The volume’s scholarly editor recounts the astonishing genesis of these printed collections in the context of French publishing, and the composer’s multiple intentions: work on the pieces' duration and scoring, pedagogical ambitions, aesthetic innovations, choice of texts and liturgical destinations, and more. Finally, the beauty and originality of the four unpublished motets that Christophe Ballard was unable to include in the already substantial Prodromus musicalis II volume convinced Jean Duron to propose a restoration that would enable musicians to discover and perform them.

Founder and director (1989-2007) of the Atelier d'études sur la musique française des XVIIe & XVIIIe siècles at the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles (whose research section is associated with the CESR - UMR7323), Jean Duron is currently a researcher at the CMBV and director of the book collections. He works on the music of Louis XIV’s era, mainly in terms of its interpretation: scoring, counterpoint, composition, structures, affects and theory. He is currently editing a 17th-century sacred manuscript, as well as a digital critical edition of Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle.