Early years and first successes , where Desmarets' opera
Endymion was first performed in 1686 Henri Desmarets was born into a modest
Paris household in February 1661. His mother, Madeleine
née Frottier, came from a
bourgeois Parisian family. His father, Hugues Desmarets was a
huissier in the cavalry at the
Grand Châtelet. Desmarets' childhood was marked by his father's death when he was eight years old, his mother's subsequent remarriage in 1670, and the death of his two siblings. In 1674, he entered into the service of
King Louis XIV as a
page and choir singer in the
Chapelle Royale (Chapel Royal). According to Duron and Ferraton, he may have also previously sung as a choir boy in
Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois which was the parish church of the kings of France. While in the service of the king, he received a general education as well as music training from
Pierre Robert and
Henry Du Mont. He is also thought to have received training from the court composer
Jean-Baptiste Lully, who used the chapel pages as performers in his operas. By 1680 he had become an "
ordinaire de la musique du roi" (court musician) and had composed the first of his
grand motets (
Te Deum 1678). The
idyll-ballet which he composed in August 1682 to celebrate the birth of the king's grandson, the
Duke of Burgundy, found great favour at court and the following year he entered the competition to select four
maîtres (masters) of the Chapelle Royale. He was only 22 at the time and according to some accounts, the King had vetoed his selection after he had passed the first round on account of his youth. After the competition, Desmarets petitioned the king to allow him to leave France for study with Italian composers, but Lully objected on the grounds that it would diminish his command of the French style. Desmarets remained at the court and made money by "ghost-writing" works for one of the composers who had won the competition,
Nicolas Goupillet. Goupillet was dismissed from his post ten years later when the deception came to light. In the meantime, Desmarets continued to find favour with his own compositions, most notably his motet
Beati quorum (1683); his
divertissement,
La Diane de Fontainebleau (1686) and his first full-length opera,
Endymion (1686). The first performance of
Endymion was in the
king's private apartments at
Versailles, performed in parts over six days.
The Dauphine was so pleased with it that at her request it was performed again in its entirety at the court theatre ten days later. Desmarets was increasingly gravitating towards stage works, but the king had granted Lully a monopoly on performances at the
Académie Royale de Musique in Paris, so that operas by other composers were not presented there until after Lully died in 1687.
Operas on the Paris stage and scandal in Senlis Desmarets'
Te Deum was performed in the oratory of the
Louvre Palace in February 1687 to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from illness, and later that year the king granted him a pension of 900
livres. Desmarets married Élisabeth Desprez, the daughter of a Parisian blade manufacturer, in 1689, and the following year their daughter, Élisabeth-Madeleine, was born. He became the Chapel Master of the
Jesuit college
Louis-le-Grand in 1693 and premiered his opera
Didon in June of that year. It was the first of his stage works to be performed at the Académie Royale de Musique. Over the next two years three more of his operas premiered there:
Circé (1694),
Théagène et Cariclée (1695), and
Les amours de Momus (1695). In the summer of 1696, Élisabeth Desmarets died, leaving him with six-year-old Élisabeth-Madeleine to parent. Desmarets became a frequent visitor to the Saint-Gobert family in
Senlis, who offered to help him take care of Élisabeth-Madeleine. Both families had been friends since 1689, and Desmarets had given singing lessons to Marie-Marguerite de Saint-Gobert when she was fifteen. During these visits, Desmarets and the now eighteen-year-old Marie-Marguerite fell in love and within six months of his wife's death, they asked her father, Jacques de Saint-Gobert, for permission to marry. He flatly refused and put his daughter in a convent when he discovered that she was pregnant. In the midst of all this, Desmarets was preparing his opera
Vénus et Adonis for its 1697 premiere. The lovers eloped to Paris and Marie-Marguerite gave birth to a son in February 1698.
Exile After the elopement, nearly three years of complicated court cases ensued with Marie-Marguerite's father accusing her mother, Marie-Charlotte de Saint-Gobert, of complicity in the affair. She in turn accused her husband of attempting to poison her. Saint-Gobert disinherited his daughter and had Desmarets charged with seduction and kidnapping. Desmarets and Marie-Maguerite fled to Brussels before he could be arrested, leaving his opera
Iphigénie en Tauride unfinished. He was eventually condemned to death
in absentia in May 1700. With no possibility of returning to France, Desmarets took a position in Spain as the court composer to
Philip V. There he and Marguerite were officially married. He left Spain in 1707 to become the master of music at the court of
Leopold, Duke of Lorraine at the
Château de Lunéville. (At the time, Lorraine was not officially part of France.) While he was in exile, his friends
Jean-Baptiste Matho and
Anne Danican Philidor kept his artistic reputation alive in France by ensuring that his works continued to be performed and published there.
André Campra completed
Iphigénie en Tauride for him and it premiered in Paris in 1704.
Final years Desmarets was finally pardoned by the
French Regent in 1720, and his second marriage was officially recognized. He applied to become the master of the Chapelle Royale at the court of
Louis XV in 1726, but was unsuccessful and remained in Lorraine for the rest of his days. Desmarets died in Lunéville on 7 September 1741 in his 80th year and was buried there in the convent church of the Sisters of Saint Elisabeth. Marie-Marguerite had died fourteen years earlier. Only two of their many children survived them, Francois-Antoine (1711–1786), who became a high-ranking official in
Senlis and Léopold (1708-1747), who became a cavalry officer and for many years was the lover of novelist and playwright
Françoise de Graffigny. Élisabeth-Madeleine took care of him in his old age and died a few months after her father. ==Works==