Hacquart: Carolus and the Dutch Golden Age

Peace treaties rarely inspire great music. The exceptions — Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, written to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle — tend to prove the rule by their rarity. Which makes the case of Carolus Hacquart all the more interesting, and all the more poignant. Here was a composer of genuine gifts, born in Bruges, trained on the bass viol and lute and organ in the tradition of the southern Netherlands, who made his way north to the Dutch Republic during its extraordinary Golden Age — that burst of prosperity and artistic confidence that gave us Rembrandt and Vermeer and, in music, a flowering that history has been slow to acknowledge.

Hacquart arrived in Amsterdam and eventually settled in The Hague, where the diplomat-poet-composer Constantijn Huygens — one of the most cultivated men of his century, a correspondent of Descartes and Mersenne, a champion of everything he considered musically alive — took him under his wing. That connection mattered enormously. Huygens was not a man who wasted his enthusiasm.

De triomfeerende min — Triumphant Love — was the result. Hacquart wrote it to mark the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, which ended the grinding war between France and the Dutch Republic, and he called it “a peace play, mixed with vocal and string music, stage machinery and dance.” The allegorical machinery is entirely of its time: young women, distracted by war, have abandoned Love; Cupid appeals to Mars; Venus intervenes, seduces the god of war, and peace descends. Simple enough as myth-making goes. What matters is how Hacquart animates it.

The comparison that comes to mind — and that the composer himself might not have resisted — is Purcell. Not the late Purcell of Dido and Aeneas, but the Purcell of the semi-operas: King Arthur, The Fairy Queen, works in which spoken drama and music exist in a kind of productive tension, neither quite subordinate to the other. Hacquart’s piece works along similar lines. Much of the text is spoken, and on a recording that creates a genuine problem. The spoken passages, delivered here in seventeenth-century Dutch, sit somewhat uneasily against the musical numbers — not because the performers handle them badly, but because the theatrical logic of the thing simply doesn’t translate to a purely aural medium. A staged production with subtitles would serve this work better. That’s not a criticism of the recording so much as an honest reckoning with the material’s nature.

What we do get, in the vocal writing, is music of real distinction. Hacquart writes for voice with a suppleness that suggests he knew Italian models well — the melodic lines breathe, they have shape, they resist the squareness that mars so much ceremonial music of the period. The songs of praise that open the work, celebrating Dutch peace and prosperity before the French aggression, carry a genuine warmth.

Then there’s the question of the dance music. Hacquart’s score indicates dances and interludes throughout, but either the music was never written or it hasn’t survived. The solution adopted here — borrowing from Chelys, Hacquart’s 1686 collection of suites for viola da gamba — is sensible and arguably inspired. The Chelys suites are among the most accomplished chamber music the Dutch Republic produced, indebted to the French viol tradition but with something distinctly personal in the voice-leading, a warmth in the inner parts that feels almost confessional. Hearing them pressed into theatrical service doesn’t feel like a compromise. It feels like discovery.

One detail lodges in the mind: Hacquart, in The Hague, served as organist in a hidden Catholic church — a schuilkerk, those clandestine places of worship that Dutch Catholics maintained behind ordinary facades while public Catholic worship remained illegal. There’s something in that image — the man who composed celebratory music for the Republic’s peace also playing secretly for a congregation that the Republic only barely tolerated — that complicates any simple reading of this music as official pageantry. Art made under constraint has a different pressure in it.

Whether De triomfeerende min was ever performed in the grand form Hacquart envisioned is unknown. What we have is probably a more modest realization than he intended — which, come to think of it, describes the situation of a great many Dutch baroque composers. The album makes a serious and largely persuasive case for a piece that deserves to be known. Not a masterpiece, perhaps. But alive, consistently interesting, and long enough overdue for the attention.