"VIVE LA FRANCE!"

FINAL CONCERT OF THE ACADEMIA DE MÚSICA ANTIGUA "On no fewer than three occasions the city of Logroño suffered attack from its French neighbours. The first is the one that concerns us in this commemorative year. The other two are more recent: in 1808, with the French as “allies” in the Peninsular War, and in 1823, as “the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis” sent to support Ferdinand VII.

The streets and the people of Logroño carry this relationship in their very essence, one that, like so many, separates love from hatred by the finest of lines; it can be viewed from many angles and gave rise to numerous crossings and exchanges. Between one invasion and the next, the splendid French music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bears fine witness to this. Chaconnes and passacaglias would pass from the popular, lascivious sphere of the Iberian Peninsula to the courtly setting of Versailles. These and other dances, together with songs in Spanish performed by “the Spaniards”, form the backdrop to the comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, premiered in 1670 at the court of Louis XIV, with a text by Molière and music by the greatest composer of the day, the dancer and violinist Jean-Baptiste Lully. It is a jest in which Monsieur Jourdain, a nouveau riche, sets out to become a distinguished nobleman by acquiring his accomplishments: the handling of arms, dancing, music, philosophy, and so on. On arriving in Paris from Rome, Marc-Antoine Charpentier would snatch from an irate Lully the post of composer to Molière's company. Georg Muffat, who had studied with Lully, at the court of Salzburg and in the Rome of Corelli, represents the concord and meeting of international styles; and Jean-Philippe Rameau, with his grandiose and spectacular operas, the modernity of the eighteenth century on the eve of the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century, La Rioja would welcome waves of Frenchmen who came in search of grapes or wine after the disastrous passage of phylloxera through its vineyards: French commissioners, alliances with the locals, cultural similarities... Today France maintains a very close relationship with La Rioja, with significant commercial exchange. Now that calm has settled, it is not far-fetched to imagine the descendants of those women who brandished sword and heavy pistol against the troops of Angoulême joined, years later, in the famous cry of Vive la France!"