Claude LeJeune

Claude LeJeune was the last great chanson composer of the 16th century. Being a Protestant his religious music consists mostly of psalm settings, but he is known primarily for his chansons especially those employing musique mesurée. Which consists of applying longer note durations to accented syllables in the text resulting in irregular meters. “Revecy venir du Printemps” heard below is a good example.

Claude LeJeune was born in Valenciennes on the French/Flemish border in 1528. Little is known of his life until he moved to Paris in 1564, eventually becoming associated with Baif and Courville at the Académie de Poésie et de Musique in 1570. After the St Bartholemew’s Day massacre in 1572, LeJeune managed to maintain his position as a Protestant in a Catholic City until in 1589 he was forced to flee for his life to La Rochelle, a Protestant-friendly town on the Atlantic coast. After a few years LeJeune was able to return to Paris and is listed among the Royal Household musicians of Henry IV, whose Edict of Nantes provided a more tolerant situation for Protestants.

LeJeune died in September 1600, less than a month before the wedding of Henry IV and Maria de’ Medici where the featured music was ‘Euridice’ by Peri and Caccini . . . sounding a death-knell for the superb multi-voiced polyphony of Claude LeJeune. A posthumous consolation might well be found in the 1606 publication of a collection of thirty-six of his songs under the general title of ‘Octonaires de la vanité et inconstances du monde’ (Octonaires on the Vanity and Inconstancy of the World), organized and with an introduction by his sister, Cecile.