A gardener was hard at work, meticulously shaving the surface of a tall topiary cone. In front of him, a man tossed food to a pair of swans gliding on a long, glassy lake. On a temporary stage spanning the water, technicians were checking sound equipment.
William Christie — the acclaimed harpsichordist and conductor who founded the Baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants — was taking a break from rehearsals to walk through his elaborate gardens. Stopping in front of a row of fruit trees, he carefully picked a brown leaf off a branch that had been singed during a heat wave that had just broken.
“Alas,” he said, ruing the increasingly common extreme heat. “We’ve got a lot of clearing up to do before the festival.”
It was late August in Thiré, the tiny town in the Vendée region of western France where Christie has spent decades restoring an abandoned 17th-century manor house and planting a spectacular baroque garden. Now he was preparing to host his annual weeklong music festival there, Dans les Jardins de William Christie, which this year was the culmination of a season-long celebration of his 80th birthday and the improbable musical empire he has built. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Christie is venerated in France, where he played a key role in the revival of French baroque music and the reputations of composers like Lully, Charpentier, Couperin and Rameau. His inventive, vital performances showed that early music could be exciting and chic, and have sold out venues from the opera house at Versailles to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where Christie will return in December for the first time since 2019.
When it comes to both his music and his gardens, Christie, a nattily dressed, patrician figure, is a perfectionist with a profound love of beauty. His ensemble’s chosen repertoire — like his painstakingly recreated Grand Siècle home and its dazzling gardens — is once again flourishing, revived from the state of neglect it was in when he was starting out.
When Christie arrived in France in 1970, he recalled, the early music repertory in concert halls was “almost nonexistent.” And when he discovered the Thiré property in 1985, there was nothing but an abandoned house, surrounding by fields. But he saw the possibilities.
“It was pretty much in my head, the whole thing,” he said, speaking of the garden. But he might as well have been talking about his ensemble and its projects, too.
‘The Way Music Becomes Eloquent’
A few hours later, Christie was in a community hall in the village, rehearsing Charpentier’s “La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers” with this year’s intake of Le Jardin des Voix, the academy to train young singers that he started in 2002, and a handful of musicians.
Lean and bespectacled, in lemon-colored pants and a crisply pressed shirt, Christie held up a hand and stopped the music. “Do you have the text in front of you?” he asked the cellist. The musician nodded apprehensively. “It’s a very important question,” Christie said. “You can’t play or sing French music if you don’t understand how the musicality of language, declamation, syntax is essentially the way music becomes eloquent.”
As the rehearsal continued, he frequently stopped the singers, focusing on their articulation and emphasis (“Please, give me words!”), correcting a scream (“No, no, that’s the tryout for ‘Turandot’”) and demonstrating a dying breath (“Je meu-eu-eurs …”), often making the singers repeat a single phrase over and over again.
“He can be exigent, because he is with himself,” said Myriam Rignol, a viola da gamba player who has performed with the ensemble for 12 years. “You aren’t obliged to do what he wants, just to convince him with what you are doing. Technique is almost secondary; it’s the passion that counts.”
The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who first worked with Les Arts Florissants on Handel’s “Hercules,” in 2004, said that she had heard of Christie’s demanding reputation, and had arrived at rehearsals “duly terrified,” ready “to be told all the things that were not correct.”
Instead, she recounted, he greeted the cast with a speech “that began with the revelation that this was a true work of human drama and he wanted everything we had to offer vocally from ‘the whitest white sound, to the most full-throttle screams.’ ”
“I felt unleashed,” recalled DiDonato, who surprised Christie by singing at an 80th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall earlier this year.
And Sonya Yoncheva, a soprano who is sought after by the world’s leading opera houses, traced the real beginning of her career to 2007, when she participated in his Jardin des Voix program. “I think Bill’s innovation is that he approached the music with all of his knowledge but also an animal instinct in terms of colors,” she said. “With his knowledge, his charm, it becomes so emotional and he can communicate that to an audience.”
Leaving for Paris During the Vietnam War
Surprisingly, Christie didn’t plan on a musical career. He started piano lessons young, with his mother, an accomplished musician who conducted the church choir and was a fervent supporter of the Buffalo Philharmonic.
“Through the choir, I got to know one of the most important aspects of western music, sacred music,” Christie said during an interview in his barrel-vaulted library, its shelves holding piles of books and scores, and adorned with classical busts.
He added that he had “an incredible fascination for early music even then,” and ruined a piano in his parents’s house by adding thumb tacks to its hammers to try to mimic a harpsichord sound after hearing Handel’s “Messiah.”
He studied art history at Harvard, where he joined musical societies, played in ensembles and once shut himself up in his room for a week, “listening nonstop to Janet Baker in Rameau’s “Hippolyte et Aricie,” after a roommate gave him a recording, he said.
Only in his third year did he yield to the inevitable. “Someone on the music faculty said to me: ‘Why are you stalling?’ ” Christie recalled. “ ‘Look at yourself in the mirror and say the only thing I can do well and like to do in make music.’ ”
As a graduate student at Yale, he studied with the harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, then taught at Dartmouth for a year. He opposed the Vietnam War, and after four students protesting the war were shot and killed at Kent State University in 1970, he made a decision. “I said to myself, that’s it, my time is up.”
Already a Francophile, who spoke the language and adored the music, he went to Paris.
Discovering Music ‘To Be Dusted Off’
For a few years, he navigated between Paris, Amsterdam and London, teaching and playing with ensembles. In 1979, determined to help revive the moribund French early music scene, he formed a nimble ensemble of singers and musicians eager to explore the repertoire on period instruments. He called it Les Arts Florissants, after a 17th-century Charpentier opera.
“The Dutch and the British could play Vivaldi and Handel, but not French music,” he said. “And the French paid lip service, but had the idea that on a modern instrument you could play everything with one technique. It was the last music of the 16th to 18th century to be dusted off — and we did it.” The ensemble’s big breakthrough was a 1987 production of Lully’s “Atys” at the Opera Comique in Paris, staged by Jean-Marie Villegier. It was Paris’s first presentation of the opera in more than two centuries, and the vitality and freshness of the production abolished any notion that the baroque repertory was the province of nerdy musicologists.
“The staging was brilliant, and we worked for hours and hours and hours on making the music eloquent and the recitative not just palatable but exciting,” Christie said. “We were finding sounds on early instruments that composers would have known back then, and trying things that aren’t admitted by modern instrument players.” It was “grand musical theater,” he added, “and it set us on a world course.” Over the subsequent decades, Christie and Les Arts Florissants have made regular appearances in major opera houses and concert halls, drawing audiences who thrilled to unexpected collaborations with cutting-edge directors and choreographers: Robert Carsen (Handel’s “Alcina” and Rameau’s “Les Boréades”), Debra Warner (Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”), Peter Sellars (Handel’s “Theodora”), Basil Twist (Mondonville’s “Titon et l’Aurore”) and Mourad Merzouki (Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen”), among others.
“Bill was astonishing because of his radical openness,” Sellars said. “With Handel, your preconceptions are the least interesting part; the work itself had to speak and I could be truly exploratory with someone who was wide open to what could be next.”
Christie’s relish for theatrical inventiveness in combination with profound musical scholarship and sophistication has been key to his impact and influence, said Nicholas Kenyon, a former director of the Proms, Britain’s most prominent classical music festival. “There are certainly other contenders in terms of people who have moved this music into the mainstream, but he has done it in a distinctive, theatrical and audience friendly way,” he said.
Walking in the gardens, Christie talked animatedly about working with directors and choreographers. “This music is wonderful, rhythmically for dance,” he said. “I think Rameau is as interesting as Stravinsky for a choreographer. I have done some period revivals, but it’s so much less free, and so much less fun.”
Ensuring the Future of the Past
Christie has been warmly embraced by his adoptive country, where he became a citizen and holds the Légion d’honneur, among many other awards, and was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2008. Since 2015, Les Arts Florissants has been a resident orchestra at the Philharmonie de Paris.
“There have been ups and downs, a few hard knocks,” Christie said of living in France, noting that he wasn’t welcomed with open arms when he first moved to Thiré, a tiny community, where outsiders were regarded with suspicion.
He has been planning for the future. In 2019, Christie asked Paul Agnew, a singer and conductor who was working extensively with Les Arts Florissants, to join him as a co-director. And the ensemble is now also a foundation, which owns both the house and garden and has bought and restored properties in Thiré, where his festival brings around 10,000 visitors each year.
“Despite France’s occasional posturing, it has been very kind to me,” Christie said. “I have been able to do things I could perhaps only have done here.”
His next project is to build a theater, with rehearsal space, in Thiré, where the only large-scale performance space is currently the outdoor stage over the lake, known as the Mirroir d’eau. The foundation has acquired land and raised money for an initial feasibility study. It’s an ambitious idea, requiring serious fund-raising.
Christie likes to ask rhetorical questions: “Do I have moments of asking what I am doing? Yes.”
But he has a gift for realizing improbable dreams. “That’s his talent,” said Thomas Dunford, a lutenist who plays with Les Arts Florissants. “He sees what he wants and makes it happen.”
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