“Les Demoiselles Couperin” (The Couperin Ladies) is a tribute to the women who transformed sacred music. Bringers of dreams, they were figures who reshaped the musical landscape of their time.

Featuring Couperin’s expressive and virtuosic motets, this programme is dedicated to the first women permitted to sing at the gallery of the Royal Chapel of Versailles.

Instead of two solo voices, the polyphonic sections of the motets are reimagined for a small female choir of six sopranos, offering a new depth to this exquisite music, recreating the distinctive soundscape of the female ensembles found in religious institutions at the dawn of the Enlightenment.

By the end of the 17th century, under the influence of Louis XIV, women began to hold a more prominent place in sacred music. Until then, upper vocal lines were sung by maîtrise boys or castrati. The daughters of Michel-Richard de Lalande (a close contemporary of Couperin at royal court), and Marguerite Louise Couperin were among the first women to be heard in the Royal Chapel of Versailles.

Vocal parts became increasingly virtuosic, and audiences flocked to hear the great sopranos of the Opera perform in the offices des ténèbres. Convents and institutions such as the Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr flourished musically and spiritually.

Among the most iconic works of the time, the famous Troisième Leçon des Ténèbres, composed for the Abbaye de Longchamp, stands out as a luminous dialogue between solo verses and duets entrusted to a women’s choir, now a true schola cantorum.