After Montéclair’s return to Paris in early 1701, he maintained connections with Milan: he collaborated on Pollarolo’s Ascanio in 1701–02 by writing the dance music and he certainly had renewed contact with his old colleagues – Philbois and L’Evêque – who visited Paris in the latter half of 1701 and 1702–03, respectively. Although this period of Montéclair’s life is otherwise largely a blank page, collaboration with Italians must have had a profound effect on such a highly talented French musician who was still in his 30s. How could this experience not have left its mark on him? Until recently, however, there was little indication that Montéclair was the source of a dramatic musical paradigm shift or that he developed some sort of brilliant new synthesis. Posterity did not treat him kindly: until the 1980s, when his music – and especially his cantates – began to be performed regularly, he was known largely as a “preramiste” Kleinmeister critic of Rameau. Unlike Rameau, whose prestige as a composer rested on his operas, Montéclair wrote only two works for the Académie royale de musique: the ballet Les Fêtes de l’été (1716) and his sacred tragedy, Jephté (1732), which achieved substantial success only to be eclipsed by Rameau’s premiere opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). This reception has hindered an appreciation of Montéclair’s importance and he has never been the subject of a major published study. Although this chapter is by no means a complete investigation of Montéclair’s life and music, it traces the contributions of his Italian experience to his career, to the broader French musical culture of the time and to an understanding of early eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism.

One reason Montéclair’s trip to Italy seems not to have left a clear trace on Parisian musical culture was a hiatus in his publishing of compositions: despite having actively published before his departure, he issued no more works after his return until around 1714, a fourteen-year gap. This period was one in which the new language of the goûts-réunis in vocal music was developed. Not only had Italian arias based on the new style of Scarlatti, Bononcini and others, appeared frequently in domestic spaces and even on the operatic stage, they served a radical leap: the development a new genre, the cantate, that employed the Italian style to set French texts.