Le Te Deum de Jacques Morel et le Concert spirituel d'Alexandre de Villeneuve comme exemples de divertissements sacres

In his « Discours sur la musique d'Eglise » (1706), Lecerf de La Vieville stated that the « music intended for gods, that he [Lully] put onto his theatre [stage], like sacrifices and invocations, shows us some admirableexamples of the exact observance of our rules. Let them be obeyed in the motets of our churches [... they] will make Christians pray excellently, » thus inciting composers to model their motets on Lully's operatic divertissements. In 1757, Jacques Lacombe further added that French « should be employed » in motets sung at the Concert Spirituel, because « listeners could follow the subject of the poem with ease and judge more clearly the appropriateness of the expression that the musician gave to the words, » as if the well-known operatic topoi used in grands motets since La Vieville's time-such as Jean-Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville's Venite exultemus-were not sufficient enough to make the words understood to those ignorant of Latin. Lacombe's criticism may even have urged Mondonville to write what have been thus far thought to be the first « motets francais » (i.e., oratorios sung in French): Les Israelites a la Montagne d'Oreb (1758) and Les Fureures de Saul (1759). This story however needs revision in the light of Jacques Morel's 1706 setting of a French translation of the Te Deum, and of the I e r Concert spirituel (1727) that Alexandre de Villeneuve composed on Simon-Joseph Pellegrin's French paraphrase of Psalm 96. In both cases, the French verses can easily be compared to contemporaneous dramatic libretti calling for the usual operatic features, thus strongly suggesting that the two musicians and their poets devised their motets as genuine sacred divertissements akin to the French oratorios of a later period.