Music: Stones Set to Music

France is loaded with châteaux, tourists and musicians. Such is the Gallic sense of style that these disparate elements are now combined in an artistic enterprise that is also a moneymaker. The enterprise is called Son et Lumière (Sound and Light), and it amounts to setting all those chateaux to music.

The idea functions most impressively at Versailles. At dusk, some 2,000 to 6,000 visitors perch quietly on steel folding chairs on the vast graveled terrace, listening to the piquant yet noble strains of an orchestral prelude, the work of Jacques Ibert, distinguished French composer (Ports of Call) and former manager of the Paris Opéra. “Here intrigues are woven and romance prevails,” proclaims a voice which seems to come from the heart of the chateau itself (it is the recorded voice of Charles Boyer, via 28 loudspeakers, speaking a text by André Maurois). “Here all France is assembled; not only the court, but also Racine, Boileau, Molière [and] ambassadors from all over the world, who have come to see the greatest King on earth.”

Grace After Grandeur. The music goes into an arietta by Lully (Louis XIV’s favorite composer), sung in a sweetly plaintive soprano voice. From the 17 great windows of the Hall of Mirrors, lights blaze as courtiers chatter and fawn. In the distance a voice proclaims, “Gentlemen, the King!” The monarch’s cane clumps louder and louder on the floor as he approaches, and a burst of triumphal music rings out as “the greatest King” enters.

Louis XIV grows older. Over a subtle background melody, Madame de Maintenon makes her legendary stab at Madame de Montespan: “Last night I dreamt, Madame, that we were on the grand stairs of Versailles: I was going up; you were coming down.” The King dies, and several deep orchestral chords seem to roll a tombstone over his entire century. Then Louis XV is on the throne; his meeting with Pompadour is set off by a lilting love song. Music marks a new culture, as from the palace windows twang the pure, shrill notes of the harpsichord. Explains Narrator Boyer: “Grace succeeds grandeur . . .”

Louis XV also dies. After him the deluge—mob shouts, bloodthirsty gutter songs, the Marseillaise. The kettledrummers in the orchestra knock themselves out producing revolutionary thunder. And then the quieter waltzes of Citizen-King Louis Philippe, a brief reprise of glory under Napoleon the Third, World War I —La Madelon, Tipperary, Over There. Three majestic, mournful booms sound from the percussion section; at each one, the lights fade, and at last the palace is plunged once more into darkness.

Dams After Châteaux. Versailles’ Son et Lumière is merely the biggest, best known of scores of similar musical spectacles that have cropped up all over France. (In 1953, Versailles’ first year, some 180,000 people saw it, and by last year the entire original production cost of $125,000 was paid off.) Georges Van Parys, one of France’s best-known movie composers, did the music for the simpler spectacle at Compiègne, the rural pleasure dome of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. Other pageants are staged at Avignon, 14th century home of the exiled Popes; at Chenonceaux, onetime home of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henry II.

For a composer, Son et Lumière provides 3% of the seasonal gate receipts and a chance to reach a big audience. But having to stick to the story is tough. Composer Ibert, 65, found it “intriguing to try to make stones speak.” He used melodies by composers of the periods as they came up, but more often wrote original music. He finds the job as demanding as composing for films and states firmly: “Never again.”

But Son et Lumière is already seeking new ways to express the French spirit. One plan is to move on from châteaux to a great industrial plant or dam, and set it to hypermodern musique concrète.