Introduced in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century, Italian opera took a long time to conquer French audiences. The genre of the spoken tragedy, represented by the works of Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, had brought French theatre since the 1640s to a point of perfection: the notion of a play being sung throughout was thus met with much scepticism. French desire for cultural hegemony also resisted opera, which was perceived as an Italian import. The fate of this genre was also complicated at the political level: Cardinal Mazarin’s attempt to impose opera in France did not sit well in the hostile climate generated by the Fronde (1648–1653), during which time several members of Parliament and high-ranking nobles vehemently opposed strengthening the absolute monarchy. While Italian influence was considerable in the artistic domain, it was progressively restricted to theatrical architecture, machinery, and décors, all aspects that would nevertheless become paramount for the development of ‘pièces à machines’, that is, spectacular theatrical plays mostly performed on private stages – princely residences, the king’s palaces – and in Parisian public theatres.
As in other European countries, French opera arose from the development of the divertissement de cour in combination with the new expectations of urban audiences, who wanted to enjoy in public theatres the performances usually restricted to the court – thus, the significant imprint left by the ballet de cour on French opera, in which dance is an essential ingredient. All these factors explain the fairly late year – 1671 – of the first public performance of a French opera, Pomone, on a libretto by Pierre Perrin (c. 1620–1675) with music by Robert Cambert (c. 1628–1677). Founded by Perrin and Alexandre de Rieux, Marquis de Sourdéac, in 1669, the Académie d’Opéra (renamed in 1671 Académie Royale de Musique) promptly institutionalised French opera through the suppression of all foreign influences, securing for many decades to come the preservation of a specific French model.
The Ballet de Cour
During the first half of the seventeenth century, the ‘ballet participatif’ (participatory ballet) – today known as ballet de cour – was the prevalent divertissement at the court. It was meant to entertain courtiers, members of the royal family, and the king himself, and offered them the possibility of participating. The practice of hiring commoners as professional dancers and having them mingle on stage with members of the court began in 1630. However, the final grand ballet danced at the end of these spectacles was restricted to courtiers only.1
Dance – in addition to fencing and horse ballet – was part of the formal education of young French aristocrats. The young king had daily lessons with his maître à danser (dance master). During the seventeenth century, dance played an essential social and artistic role in court life, not only during the increasingly codified great balls but also during exceptional performances that would usually take place during the carnival season.2
The origins of the ballet de cour go back to court festivities and divertissements: prime examples are those ordered by Queen Catherine de’ Medici at the end of the sixteenth century.3 In keeping with the legacy of masquerades and large-scale political ballets of the Renaissance, these ballets were conceived by the intendants of princely houses, or, when motivated by less prestigious demands, improvised by the courtiers themselves.4 The content of most of these seventeenth-century spectacles is known to us through their libretti, which remain nevertheless without much detail.5 Only the most important or monumental ballets were preserved thanks to commemorative publications in connection with their political agenda.6
Historically, a ballet consisted of a succession of very brief danced sequences called entrées (entrances). When the number of entrées was extensive, the ballet was divided into parties (parts). These parties were sometimes unified by a single subject (for instance, the Ballet Royal de la Nuit). Generally, however, variety and surprise were favoured. As a collective enterprise, the ballet nevertheless had one author responsible for the general dessein (design) – that is to say, the subject and organisation of the plot. The responsibility for the music and for the poetic text was delegated to others. In parallel with printed occasional poems lauding patrons, printed programmes or booklets detailed the dessein, with an explanation of the décors and the characters. Later, these booklets would also give the text of the narrations sung by the chorus and the soloists, as well as the ‘verses for the characters’, in either a laudatory tone or a comic vein. These printed materials fulfilled a social function that was much appreciated by the audience, who would attempt during performances to identify the masked dancers.
The composers of the Chambre du Roi (the king’s chamber) provided different types of music according to their own specialties: the dancer and composer Louis de Mollier (c. 1615–1688) composed ballet music, Jean de Cambefort (c. 1605–1661) récits, and so on. These scores usually required an ensemble of lutes, violins, or flutes; choirs set for four or five voices; and solo parts. A group of dancers could also include musicians: the leader could sing, often accompanying himself while surrounded by other musicians. In 1673, the French writer Charles Sorel praised the lute, as ‘there is grace when holding it and pinching [its strings]’, stressing that ‘one can dance and walk’ while playing.7
Some ballets were organised around a single plot: Le Ballet comique de la Reine (1581) is about Ulysses being freed by the gods from Circe. Other ballets were based on Italian epics: Le Ballet de Monseigneur le duc de Vandosme ou Ballet d’Alcine (1610), Le Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud (1617),8 and Le Grand Ballet du Roi sur l’aventure de Tancrède en la Forêt enchantée (René Bordier, 1619). Most of the music for these three ballets is attributed to Pierre Guédron (1564–d. 1619–1620). Other ballets were thematic: Le Ballet des Fées des Forêts de Saint-Germain (1625) or Le Grand Bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (Bordier, Antoine Boësset; 1626). Ballets with a laudatory purpose alternated with more informal divertissements and masquerades: some of them – those related to the carnival season – were grotesque, and their performances were often lengthy.
One such work is the allegorical Ballet Royal de la Nuit (Clément, Cambefort, Mollier, Jean-Baptiste Boësset [1614–1685], Michel Lambert [c. 1610–1696]), which celebrated the end of the Fronde conflicts in 1653: it included no less than forty-three entrées, among which was Ballet en Ballet and two short ballets in several acts each: Les Nopces de Thétis and the Comédie muëtte d’Amphitrion. In 1654, Le nozze di Peleo e di Theti or Les Noces de Pélée et de Thétis (Francesco Buti, Carlo Caproli [1615/20–1692/5]) was commissioned by Mazarin after the Fronde as an ‘Italian comedy in music, mixed with a ballet on the same subject, danced by His Majesty’. The opera is augmented by some ten entrées chosen by François de Beauvilliers, Duke of Saint-Aignan, Premier Gentilhomme de la Chambre du Roi, and set to music by court musicians. The king and his family participated in these danced entrées, in the company of the young Giambattista Lulli.9
Les Amants magnifiques, the divertissement created by Molière and Lully for the carnival in 1670, is sometimes considered to be the last participatory ballet: it is made up of two small poetic and musical units, bookending a comédie-ballet. Each of them is organised around the figure of the king as Neptune (first intermède) and Apollo (‘Les Jeux Pythiens’). The king, however, did not dance.10
The ballet de cour is emblematic of the popularity of dance within the court and, more broadly, among the French aristocracy. This explains why the 1669 status of the newly formed institution, the Académie Royale d’Opéra, allowed the nobility to participate in operas, whether as dancers or as singers, without endangering their privileged social rank. The situation was slightly different outside the court: although four courtiers took part in the première of the first opera performed at the Académie Royale de Musique – Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (1673), a medley of court intermèdes reused by Lully11 – over the years, the separation on stage between amateur dancers (courtiers) and professional ones became increasingly marked. Participatory dance persisted only within colleges, especially those of the Jesuits: pupils who played in Latin tragedies would also dance on stage during intermèdes, often mingling with professional dancers.12
Having taken the reins of the Académie Royale de Musique, Lully attached to it a professional ‘corps de ballet’ (which included several members of the Académie Royale de Danse that had been created in 1660) and a permanent maître de ballet.13 During the academy’s first decades, professional female dancers, such as the celebrated Mlle Verpré, performed at the court; they were dismissed during the 1670s but continued to be hired by the Académie Royale de Musique.14 For the Parisian performance of the ballet Le Triomphe de l’Amour (Philippe Quinault, Lully; Palais-Royal, 6 May 1681), Lully hired new professional female dancers to replace the female courtiers who had created those roles earlier in the year at the court (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 21 January). From that point on, female dancers came to be among the most celebrated performers of the Académie Royale de Musique’s company.
Italian Opera in Paris
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the strengthening of the absolute monarchy was affirmed, justified by the divine-right theory of kingship. Cardinal de Richelieu, Chief Minister of Louis XIII, displayed his artistic patronage through the creation of the Académie Française (1635), the protection of authors, and the development of theatre. Designed on the Italian model by the architect Jacques Lemercier, Richelieu’s own theatre was built in his Palais Cardinal (later Palais-Royal) and inaugurated in January 1641 with a ballet, La Prospérité des armes de la France (Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, François de Chancy, Mollier, Michel Verpré), which he had himself commissioned.15 It is in this context that Jules Mazarin (Giulio Raimondo Mazarini, 1602–1661) arrived in Paris in December 1643 as the Pope’s extraordinary nuncio. Richelieu designated Mazarin to succeed him as Chief Minister to the king. Pursuing Richelieu’s politics of state interventionism in artistic life, but also seeking to strengthen the ties between France and the Papal states, Mazarin emulated the example of the Barberini family in Rome, who had been among the most important patrons and mentors of his youth.16
In order to foster spectacles in the Roman style, Mazarin, beginning in 1641, invited the composers Marco Marazzoli (c. 1602–1662), Mario Savioni (1606–1685), and Caproli, as well as Italian singers, to the French court.17 The presence of an Italian itinerant company, the Febiarmonici, is documented for the year 1644.18 During the autumn, other musicians arrived at the court, answering the French invitation: the singer Anna Francesca Costa (‘la Checca’; fl. 1640–1654), the castrato Atto Melani (1626–1714), and his brother, the composer and singer Jacopo Melani (1623–1676), were sent by the Médici. The castrato Marc’Antonio Pasqualini (1614–1691) was sent by the Pope; and the tenor Venanzio Leopardi (as Venanzio d’Este), at the service of Cardinal Colonna, was called to Paris by the Duke of Modena. One of the greatest singers of her time, Leonora Baroni (1611–1670), accompanied by her husband, arrived at the French court in 1644 on the invitation, mediated by Mazarin, of Anne of Austria, the queen regent of France. They all participated in the première of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo at the Palais-Royal in 1647 (more on this later). After that, the company was disbanded, but the habit of bringing Italian musicians to the French court had begun. After the end of the Fronde conflicts, the famous Roman singer Anna Bergerotti arrived in Paris in 1655.
The first attempt to perform musical plays occurred in February 1645 at the Louvre. This was probably an allegorical play, staging the ties between France and Rome: the ‘dramma per musica’ Il Giudizio della ragione tra la Beltà e l’Affetto (Buti, Marazzoli or Marco dell’Arpa; Rome, 1643).19 Complemented with ballets by Giambattista Balbi, La Finta pazza (Giulio Strozzi, Francesco Sacrati; Venice, 1641) was performed a few times in December 1645 at the Petit-Bourbon in the presence of the queen regent and the young Louis XIV, with machines and stage sets by Giacomo Torelli, who had been sent expressly to Paris by his patron, the Duke of Parma.20 According to a contemporary review from the Gazette de France, the audience was as much dazzled by the music and poetry as by Torelli’s décors, his machines, and ‘admirable changes of scenery, so far unknown in France’.21
In February 1646 at the Palais-Royal, several performances were given of the opera Egisto, ovvero, Chi soffre speri (1637), originally written for the Barberini theatre in Rome on a libretto by Giulio Rospigliosi (1600–1669) with music by Virgilio Mazzocchi (1597–1646) and Marazzoli.22 An Italian traveller, Giambattista Barducci, noted the success which greeted the Italian ‘manner of singing’.23 But, apart from this, the concert version did not meet with much enthusiasm: on Fat Tuesday (13 February 1646), ‘only the King, the Queen, the cardinal [Mazarin], and the inner circle of the Court’ attended. In her memoirs, Françoise de Motteville, the première femme de chambre of Anne of Austria (Louis XIV’s mother) lamented the fact that ‘we were only twenty or thirty people in this place, and we thought that we would die of boredom and cold there. Entertainments of this sort require company, and solitude isn’t in keeping with the theater.’24 Such reactions may have discouraged performances of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea (Venice, 1643) that had been planned ‘only with beautiful costumes’.25 But Mazarin prepared a brilliant première: in June 1646, he brought Rossi, the Roman composer in the service of the Barberinis, to Paris. The machinery of the Palais-Royal was renovated with the help of the French painter and architect Charles Errard in order to accommodate Torelli’s stage settings. Beginning on 2 March 1647, Rossi’s opera Orfeo (Buti) was performed eight times as Le Mariage d’Orphée et d’Euridice, tragi-comédie en musique et vers italiens, avec changement de théâtre et autres inventions jusqu’alors inconnus en France, with machines by Torelli and ballets by Balbi – the music of which was mostly composed by French court musicians.26
Once again, the queen regent and Louis XIV attended these performances. The Gazette de France praises the décors and machines, notably those of Apollo, noting that the spectators did not know ‘what to admire most’ between ‘the variety of scenes, the diverse ornaments of the theater, and the novelty of the machines’, or ‘the grace and the voice of those who recited’.27 The expressive quality of the music remained nevertheless the main object of admiration. While pointing out that a part of the audience was bored due to their ignorance of the Italian language, a reviewer from the Gazette de France stresses that the music ‘could express no less than the verses all the affects of those who did recite these’.28 Nevertheless, this lavish Orfeo became the target of attacks by the Frondeurs against Mazarin.
Triumph of the Machine
Private companies followed this vogue for the spectacular. Considered since 1644 the most beautiful public theatre in Paris, the Théâtre du Marais reopened in 1647; it accommodated theatrical machines designed by Georges Buffequin and staged monumental plays with musical accompaniment. At around the same time, in 1648, Mazarin commissioned Corneille and Charles Coypeau d’Assoucy (1605–1679), the former lute master of Louis XIII, to create a mythological tragedy mixed with music that could reuse the machines from Rossi’s Orfeo. Andromède was finally premièred in February 1650 at the Petit-Bourbon, after some delay caused by the illness of the child king, then by the Fronde. Composed of four airs, a dialogue in music, and nine choruses, Andromède was favourably received and served to strengthen the association between music, machines, and mythology. Thus, opera made its way into the French public through the importation of Italian décors and the insertion of ballets in the French manner, as in Caproli’s Le Nozze di Peleo e di Theti featuring Torelli’s machines. Some French singers appeared for the first time among a cohort dominated by their Italian peers.
This period saw the French monarchy reaffirming its authority: the victory over the Fronde was followed in 1659 by the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrénées. The termination of the long war between France and Spain (1635–1659) culminated in a reconciliatory gesture, the wedding of Louis XIV and the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain. Festivities lasted for three years: Italian opera was prominently featured. Francesco Cavalli, who travelled from Venice to Paris in the spring of 1660, was commissioned to compose an opera for the occasion, adapted to the greatest indoor theatre ever constructed in France, the salle des machines at the Tuileries, commissioned in 1659 to Gaspare Vigarani, who was employed by the Duke of Modena. As the construction was still in progress, a new performance of Cavalli’s Xerse (Venice, 1655) took place in November 1660 with six ‘entrées de ballet’ set to music by Lully. The young violinist, who had been admitted as musician to the court in 1652, quickly became extremely popular, first as a dancer and then as a comic pantomime in his own ballets, which featured operatic dialogues (sung by the company of Italian singers) in combination with French récits (L’Amor malato, 1657; Ballet royal de l’Impatience, 1661). Lully staged a competition between the two styles in his Ballet de la Raillerie (1659).
Finally completed after the Fronde, Mazarin’s new theatre was inaugurated on 7 February 1662, after his death in March 1661. Cavalli’s opera Ercole amante (Buti) was premièred there, augmented with eighteen entrées de ballet composed by Lully, in which members of the court and the royal family participated. The cast comprised two French singers, Hilaire Dupuis and Anne de la Barre, and an Italian company led by Bergerotti. The audience was impressed by the imposing size of the décors: the Gazette de France noted that the machine in the final scene could carry ‘as many men as the Trojan horse’.29 Italian guests were more critical. Barducci praised the ballet, the magnificent décors, the costumes, and the machines, but he lamented that the music, which should have been the main ‘reason for the celebration, is entirely lost in the middle of the racket’ caused by the greater part of the audience, who did not understand the libretto.30 The Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Grimani, attributed this failure to the theatre’s poor acoustics.31
The Franco-Italian experiment of Ercole amante was abandoned, but the influence of using such vast frescoes in combination with machines remained paramount for the inception of a specifically French form oriented towards the spectacular. Yet the issue of language remained to be addressed, since the majority of French audiences did not understand Italian. This explains the parallel development of the pastorale en musique, a work not only of much smaller proportions but also one that offered the possibility for conveying the passions of the libretto with a typically French musical language.
Return to the Pastorale en Musique
Such smaller dramatic works sung throughout appeared from the middle of the century: the pastoral comedy Les Charmes de Félicie, tirés de la Diane de Montemayor (Jacques Pousset de Montauban, Cambefort; Hôtel de Bourgogne, 1654) and Le Triomphe de l’Amour sur des bergers et bergères, a pastorale in one act (Charles Beys, Michel de la Guerre, music lost; concert version performed on 21 January 1655; slightly revised staged version on 26 March 1657). In his preface to the pastorale La Muette ingratte (concert version, 1658–1659), Cambert referred to his desire to ‘introduc[e] plays in music as has been done in Italy’:
I began in 1658 to compose an elegy for three different voices in a type of dialogue, as are heard in concerts, and this elegy is entitled La Muette ingratte. M. Perrin, having heard this piece which was successful and did not become tiresome – even though it lasted, with symphonies and solos, a good three-quarters of an hour – became inspired to compose a little pastoral.32
Cambert and Perrin collaborated again with the Pastorale d’Issy (music lost), which premièred in early April 1659 in a private context and was subsequently given, with success, at the court. According to Ménestrier, the work was an attempt to introduce more recitative into French music and render it ‘capable of expressing the most pathetic feelings without losing any of its words’.33 Going back stylistically to earlier court divertissements, if not to narrative models from the beginning of the century, these works failed to rival the tragedies that had been blossoming on the Parisian stage for more than twenty years. Perrin decided to set to music a serious play, La Mort d’Adonis (Antoine Boësset, music lost), which was performed at the ‘petit coucher’ of the king in 1661. This, as well as a comic play – Ariane ou le mariage de Bacchus (Cambert, rehearsed in public, music lost) – met Perrin’s main purpose, which was to prove that ‘it is possible to succeed in all dramatic genres’.34
Comédies Mêlées
Today referred to as comédies-ballets, comédies mêlées (mixed comedies), which featured songs or musical and danced intermèdes that had been first performed at the court and then in Parisian theatres, began to be incorporated into pastoral plays. Considered the first comédie-ballet, Les Fâcheux (Molière, Pierre Beauchamps; July 1661) was given as part of a lavish series of celebrations in honour of Louis XIV organised by Nicolas Fouquet, the Surintendant of Finances, in his own residence, the castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Since the dancers had to change their costumes between the different entrées, Molière decided to insert comic scenes within the danced divertissement. In public theatres, the practice of mixing spoken scenes and musical or danced sequences had started to gain momentum, with an increasing number of plays integrating musical scenes. For instance, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, a comédie-ballet by Molière and Lully first performed at the court in October 1670 and then at the Palais-Royal in November, is a comic play that incorporates intermèdes, the most celebrated of which are ‘La cérémonie turque’ (The Turkish Ceremony), conceived and performed by Lully himself in the manner of his own ballets, and ‘Le Ballet des Nations’, which evokes different European countries and was inspired by the Ballet royal de Flore (Lully, 1669).
The Turning Point: 1671
By the end of the 1660s, the various options available for musical performance, whether at the court or in the city, were ready to converge and fully realise the union of ballet, court entertainment, and plays with machines. Commissioned for the reopening of the salle des machines at the Tuileries Palace, Psyché, a tragedy in vers mêlés (poetry composed of lines featuring different metres) with five musical and danced divertissements, premièred on 17 January 1671. Conceived by Molière, partly versified by Corneille and Quinault (the latter for the sung parts), and choreographed by Beauchamps, Psyché was inspired by Andromède. Its mythological subject justified the use of machines, exemplifying the monumental proportions assumed by the divertissement during Louis XIV’s reign – nevertheless, spectators were particularly sensitive to the suffering of a young girl confronted by the gods’ wrath.
Among Psyché’s highlights, ‘La plainte italienne’ – a scene imitating the Italian lamento – and the final scene – a wedding celebration in the heavens – incorporate both the opulent old tradition of the Florentine divertissement and the French ballet de cour. In a letter relating the event, the Marquis of Saint-Maurice, ambassador of the court of Savoy, counted no less than seventy ‘maîtres à danser’ and more than three hundred violinists, ‘all lavishly dressed’, the singers and musicians suspended by machines, and producing ‘the most beautiful symphony in the world, with violins, theorbos, lutes, harpsichords, oboes, flutes, trumpets and cymbals’.35
In the meantime, a royal privilege dated 28 June 1669 granted to Perrin the authorisation to establish ‘Royal Academies of Opera, or representations in music in French, on the model of those from Italy’. On 3 March 1671, Pomone, his pastorale in five acts, was performed in Paris (Jeu de Paume de la Bouteille; the music by Cambert is mainly lost, except for the overture, Act I, and part of Act II). Presented as an ‘opera or representation in music’, it featured machines built by the Marquis of Sourdéac (who became, later in December, one of the business managers of Perrin’s Académies d’Opéra, with the financier Laurent Bersac, Sieur de Champeron). Entirely sung, its half-pastoral, half-mythological plot narrates in a rather comic vein the loves of Vertumne, the god of the seasons, and Pomone, the goddess of fruitful abundance. Pomone was performed continually over the course of seven to eight months (146 performances), making this work the greatest triumph of its century.
Like Psyché, Pomone offered all the necessary ingredients for the tragédie en musique. It was performed on the Parisian stage at considerable expense, financed by individuals but under the strict control of the royal authority; fully sung and in five acts, it featured dances and machines – the opulence of which recalled the court divertissement – and a prologue praising the king as the protector of the ‘Académie Royale des Opéras’. 36 Nevertheless, the libretto, obviously comic, was generally considered weak and ridiculous, comparing unfavourably with Lullian opera, which, with the help of the librettist Quinault, tended more toward the dignity of Psyché.
In the wake of Pomone’s success, Molière’s company invested generously in a series of new performances of Psyché at his own theatre, the Palais-Royal. The machines were repaired and readjusted for new effects; new musicians, dancers, singers, and acrobats were hired. The intention was clearly to attain a pomp comparable to that of court performances, but also to reaffirm the prestige of the comédies mêlées in response to the triumph of opera. Molière’s attempt was successful, as is shown by the public reception of these new performances of Psyché, as would later be the case for the comedy Le Malade Imaginaire (Molière, 1673), the mythological tragedy Circé (Thomas Corneille, 1675), and, in 1682, Pierre Corneille’s Andromède – all three plays with scores composed by Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704).37 This success can also explain the aggressiveness with which Lully, as leader of the Académie Royale de Musique, defended his privileges against other Parisian stages.
Lully and the New Académie Royale de Musique
Lully arrived in Paris in 1646 as Giambattista Lulli. In 1653, he became composer of the king’s instrumental music. He succeeded Cambefort in 1661 as ‘Surintendant de musique et compositeur de la musique de chambre du Roi’. From his first ballet de cour, Le Ballet du temps (Benserade, 1654), through Psyché, Lully gradually established his control over the royal divertissements. Begun in 1664, Molière and Lully’s fruitful teamwork (Le Mariage forcé) lasted until 1671: the causes of their rupture were the success of Psyché and, above all, Molière’s decision to restage the work, most likely without Lully’s permission. In addition, the success of Pomone led the king to encourage other composers: in November 1671, Les Amours de Diane et d’Endymion (Henry Guichard) on a score by Jean Granoulhiet (Grenouillet) de la Sablières (1627–c. 1700) was performed in Versailles, then repeated with ballets in February 1672 at Fontainebleau with the title Le Triomphe de l’Amour.38 In Paris, Sourdéac and Champeron presented another pastorale, Les Peines et les Plaisirs de l’Amour (Gabriel Gilbert, Cambert). Hoping to maintain control over virtually every musical production given on Parisian stages, Lully bought Perrin’s privilege and received a new patent in March 1672 from the king, which gave a quasi-monopoly to the brand-new Académie Royale de Musique. The Académie could from then on exercise complete control over the amount of music in any given performance as well as the number of musicians. For instance, shortly after the première of Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, Lully stipulated on 30 April 1673 that the orchestra, which had already been dramatically reduced, would number no more than two singers and six violinists – the usual configuration for musical entr’actes in spoken theatre. Protests from other theatres helped to loosen some of these rigid rules, but the Académie kept the privilege for performances that were entirely sung. After Lully’s death, the privilege authorised his successors to trade with private managers willing to open opera houses in the provinces: Lyons in 1687; Rouen in 1688; Aix-en Provence, Marseilles, and Montpellier in 1689; cities in Brittany, Bordeaux, and Toulouse in 1690; Toul, Metz, and Verdun, and other cities in the French Lorraine in 1699.39
The very first première at the Académie Royale de Musique was Quinault and Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione, a tragédie en musique on a mythological plot based on Ovid (Jeu de paume de Béquet, 27 April 1673). It was received with great success, and the king attended the performance. Following Molière’s death in February 1673, Lully was granted royal permission to move the opera house to the Palais-Royal, a venue which had up to that point been occupied by Molière’s company and the Italian comedians. The Palais-Royal could accommodate up to 1300 persons, out of which 700 could be seated in the loges. Although Lully seemed to have wanted at the beginning of his tenure at the Académie to attract a wide audience, the price of admission remained in general much higher than that for spoken theatre.40
After Cadmus and the exceptional performance of Alceste at Versailles on 4 July 1674 (see Figure 8.4), almost all of Lully’s operas were first performed at the court in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.41 The king financed the décors and rehearsals, as well as the exceptional honoraria for his protégé, who usually composed one opera per year, in January, at the beginning of the carnival season: Alceste, ou le Triomphe d’Alcide (1674), Thésée (1675), Atys (1676), Isis (1677), Proserpine (1680), Persée (1682), Phaëton (1683), Amadis (1684), and Roland (1685) were all composed on Quinault’s libretti. Lully also wrote two operas on libretti by Thomas Corneille and Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle: Psyché in 1678 – the score of which reuses the intermèdes Lully had composed for Molière’s Psyché in 1671 – and, in 1679, Bellérophon.
Lully’s masterwork, Armide (Quinault, 1686), was received with unprecedented enthusiasm even though it was not performed at court due to the king’s developing disinterest in opera. A contemporary spectator described the theatre as filled over its maximum capacity and ‘so profusely overcrowded that one could not understand the quantity of people who attended’.42 In the title-role, Marthe Le Rochois eclipsed all the other actresses of the Académie Royale. Her imprint on the role lasted until the second half of the eighteenth century, especially in the most celebrated scene, Armide’s monologue, ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’ (Act V scene 2):
In what rapture weren’t we … to see her, dagger in hand, ready to pierce the heart of Renaud, asleep on a bed of grass! Fury animated her; love had just seized her heart; both agitated her alternately; pity and tenderness succeeded them in the end; and love remained victorious. Such beautiful and truthful attitudes! How many different movements and expressions in her eyes and her face, during this monologue.43
This long soliloquy offered singers the possibility of showcasing their vocal and acting talents, and expressing theatrical passions. Until the eighteenth century, Armide’s monologue remained the most emblematic piece in the operatic French repertoire.
Following Lully’s death in March 1687, his son-in-law Jean-Nicolas de Francine (1662–1735) became the director of the Académie Royale de Musique until 1704. In 1714, the Académie required that all of Lully’s operas be inscribed in the repertoire of the theatre. The predominance of Lully’s works had already cast a considerable shadow over those of other composers. David et Jonathas, Charpentier’s first tragédie en musique, was performed in 1688 at the Jesuit college Louis-le-Grand: its acts were performed as intermèdes for a Latin tragedy, Saul (François de Paule Bretonneau). Yet Charpentier would have to wait until after Lully’s death for his opera Médée (Thomas Corneille, 1693) to be brought to the stage of the Académie Royale de Musique. Judged exceedingly difficult, it was poorly received.44 The composer Henri Desmarets (1661–1741) had more success the same year with Didon (Louise-Geneviève Gillot de Saintonge).45
Francine was able to rely on the works of other composers: Lully’s secretary Pascal Collasse (1649–1709) composed the successful Thétis et Pélée (Fontenelle, 1689), which would then be performed over the course of seventy-six years at the Académie Royale. Another major success was Alcyone (Antoine Houdar de Lamotte, 1706) by Marin Marais (1656–1728). Himself a musician of the orchestra of the Académie, Marais solidified the Lullian legacy in Paris before the arrival of a second generation of composers whose works had first been noticed at the court. Such was the case for André Cardinal Destouches (1679–1742) and André Campra (1660–1741), who enjoyed their first successes with ballets and opéras-ballets.46 Nevertheless, the genre that continued to bring artistic recognition was the tragédie en musique.
Tragédie en Musique
Lully’s favourite librettist, Philippe Quinault (1635–1688), was renowned not only as a librettist but also as a playwright – he authored several spoken tragedies and plays in a lighter vein.47 His double competence served French opera well. The product of a synthesis between diverse forms of court entertainments, it adopted as its referential frame the paradigmatic genre of tragedy.48
A paramount requirement of French classical aesthetics was to adapt the theatrical representation to the concepts of vraisemblance (verisimilitude) and bienséance (decorum, implying a general sense of suitability and plausibility).49 The fictional plot must adequately observe moral standards and answer to the cultural expectations of the audience. Yet music poses a major problem with regard to verisimilitude, as it creates a distance between the object and its imitation – an issue that was also discussed in Italian opera. The recourse to themes defined as galant and merveilleux (marvellous), encompassing mythological and supernatural worlds and beings, helped to reduce this distance.
Machines were justified by the presence of supernatural characters and their otherworldly powers, increasing the theatrical illusion – thus, magicians and gods fill the universe of the tragédie en musique.50 As Charles Perrault put it, tragédie en musique is justified because it belongs to an ‘opposed species’ to comedy, which ‘only accepts the vraisemblable [verisimilitude]’. On the other hand, tragédie en musique can accommodate ‘extraordinary and supernatural events, and this is what operas and plays with machines are about, while the tragedy stands in the middle, mixing the marvellous with the vraisemblable’.51
Other commentators pointed to the issue of characters who sing instead of speak. Saint-Evremond criticised the prosaism of specific scenes: for instance, a master asking his valet to run errands, dictating military orders through song, singing while ‘killing by sword and spear’, and so forth.52 Opera should solve this difficulty by adopting mostly ‘gallant’ subjects. Saint-Evremond’s argument is that some passions and actions are better rendered through song than others, as they harm neither the bienséance nor the reason: ‘tender and painful passions are naturally expressed through some sort of song’.53 Thus one must exclude ‘cold’ passions such as ambition or political reasoning. Pierre Perrin criticised Italian operas for being exceedingly narrative, lacking in passion and lyricism – thus the widespread French criticism of Italian operas based on historical figures such as Nero or Alexander the Great. These characters were deemed generally ‘unfit to song’: these operas are rather ‘recited comedies’ characterised by ‘lengthy intrigues, cold and serious reasonings, as they would happen in a spoken play’.54 As late as 1741, Mably declared that tragic heroes, usually cold and sententious with their ‘feelings often locked deep down in their heart’, are unfit as operatic characters.55 All is then better in the marvellous universe of French opera: its characters, because completely imaginary, are also more apt to express themselves through song.
The relatively late surge of opera in France can be explained by a general distrust of the efficacy of music for conveying dramatic interactions and by issues surrounding the intelligibility – or absence thereof – of sung lyrics. With his deep knowledge of court tastes, Lully was perfectly aware of the expectations of French audiences in terms of vocal style. Psyché was not entirely sung, while Pomone presented a succession of airs: the invention of French opera had to wait for Lully’s achievement, in which musical scenes would be coordinated with the help of the recitative. By offering a vocal style that could render all the nuances of affect, whether in monologues or dialogues, Lullian recitative became the most remarkable response to these constraints.56
Tragédies en musique were built on a hybrid succession of musical sequences: recitative scenes;57 ‘airs sérieux’ or ‘petits airs’ – that is, short lyrical airs intertwined within scenes; longer récits for soliloquies imitated from spoken theatre that often privilege the narration of hallucinations, dreams, or laments;58 and symphonies – that is, instrumental pieces, often with a descriptive purpose. The ‘chansons’ – dances and choruses inspired by the former tradition of comédies mêlées, and usually the most alien to the dramatic fabric – were gathered within scenes to provide poetic coherence. These scenes were used to represent ceremonies (religious rituals, weddings, sacrifices); popular or pastoral celebrations, including supernatural manifestations of otherworldly creatures; magical rites; infernal demons; allegorical representations of passions; and so on – in short, any type of situation in which music is diegetically or aesthetically justified.59
The spectacular dimensions of the tragédie en musique reveal its princely origins. Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (1690) defines opera as a ‘public spectacle, a magnificently staged representation of some dramatic work, the verses of which are sung and are accompanied by a great symphony, dances, ballets with costumes, lavish decors and surprising machines’.60 Alongside dances and choruses, the presence of machines first required musical preludes, then descriptive symphonies: for instance, the evocation of spectres in Lully’s Amadis, the unleashing of demons in Charpentier’s Médée, the tempests in Collasse’s Thétis et Pélée, and Marin Marais’ Alcyone.61
While Lully enjoyed mixing comic characters with pathetic heroes, the comic became increasingly proscribed in the tragédie en musique. By the end of the seventeenth century, the genre had become perfectly well defined, its dramaturgy remarkably stable until the last decades of the eighteenth century.
A ‘Ballet Moderne’
By the end of the 1680s, as Louis XIV was losing interest in the tragédie en musique, his son, Louis de Bourbon, the Grand Dauphin (1661–1711), became the new arbiter of taste at the court.62 This led to the return of older forms of entertainment: in 1681, for the Grand Dauphin’s wedding, the ballet de cour Le triomphe de l’amour was performed in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. In 1685, the prince commissioned a ballet from Lully, Le Temple de la Paix (Quinault; Fontainebleau), and, in the following year, the pastorale Acis et Galatée (Jean Galbert de Campistron; Château d’Anet). Court residences began to offer representations of ‘petits opéras’ (small operas), works of smaller dimensions, often on a pastoral theme.63 Such works met with great success in Paris, including Issé, a pastorale héroïque in three acts (Antoine Houdar de La Motte and Destouches; Fontainebleau, 1697), which was presented in the capital in 1708.
These shifts also explain the necessity to better define the genre of tragédie en musique at a time when the Académie Royale de Musique was struggling with recurrent financial issues. This led the institution to rationalise its offerings: on the one hand, tragedies reinforcing the spectacular and the pathetic, especially at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, on the other, the development of a new genre, the modern ballet, today referred to as opéra-ballet. Intended to alternate with tragédies en musique and to fill the slower summer season, the opéra-ballet favoured lighter themes. It also attempted to bring to the Parisian stage the distinctive spirit of courtly festivities.
In 1695, the ballet in three acts Les Amours de Momus (Duché de Vancy, Desmarets) paved the way to comedies in music, such as Le Carnaval et la Folie (La Motte, Destouches, 1703). Similarly, separated acts or ballet entrées, each focused on an independent plot, could be connected through a common theme that had been previously developed in the prologue. This strategy was profitable to the permanent company of singers and dancers: they could fully showcase their talents while offering Parisian audiences a wider range of musical styles.64 Prime instances of these opéra-ballets are Les Saisons (Jean Pic, Collasse, 1695), which was followed by the triumph of L’Europe galante (La Motte, Campra, 1697). In 1754, Louis de Cahusac gave a well-known definition of the genre in which the hierarchy between action and divertissement seems reversed: compared to the five acts of the tragédie en musique, ‘a vast composition, as those by Raphael and Michelangelo’, opéras-ballets feature ‘several different acts, each representing a single action mixed with divertissements, song and dance. These are pretty Watteaus, witty miniatures that require all the precision of the design, the graces of the brushstroke, and the whole brilliance of the color.’65
This taste for lightness goes hand in hand with the revival of the Italian influence, now present inside and outside the court, from the entourage of the Grand Dauphin to Italophile circles in Paris.66 Several Italian composers were settled in Paris at that time: Paolo Lorenzani (1640–1713) beginning in 1678; Theobaldo di Gatti (c. 1650–1727) beginning in c. 1675; and later, around 1705, Jean-Baptiste Stuck [Stück] (Battistin, or Batistin, 1680–1755). Lorenzani received two commissions: the pastorale Nicandro e Fileno (Fontainebleau, 1681) followed by an opera in the Venetian style, Orontée (Chantilly, 1688), modelled after Cesti’s Orontea (1649). Fashionable divertissements granted a substantial space to an Italian imaginary world, as in Campra’s L’Europe galante: one of its acts, entitled ‘L’Italie’, brings Italian music to the stage of the Académie Royale. Campra’s subsequent works, Le Carnaval de Venise (Jean-François Regnard, 1699) and Les Fêtes vénitiennes (Antoine Danchet, 1710), evoke the famous entertainments of the Republic.67 The Italian style is primarily noticeable in the vocal writing, allowing for the increased virtuosity that would soon launch the swift success of the French cantata.68
This Italian vogue explains the controversy provoked by the publication in 1702 of François Raguenet’s text, Parallèle des Italiens et des Français en ce qui regarde la musique et les opéras. Essentially praising Italian music and its musicians, this argument motivated Jean-Laurent Le Cerf de Viéville to publish his Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (1704), a text considered to be the first to discuss the ‘goût français’ in music, defining the tragédie en musique versus Italian opera and its aesthetic impact on contemporary audiences.69
Beginnings of the Opéra-comique
The comic musical style had been traditionally associated with Italian culture since the end of the sixteenth century. It gained ground at the beginning of the eighteenth century at the Académie Royale de Musique as well as on other stages, affecting the specialisation of theatres that had been carefully decreed by the king at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1680, the reunion of the spoken theatre companies gave birth to the Comédie-Française, which continued to perform comedies featuring divertissements with musical scores composed from 1692–1693 by Nicolas Racot de Grandval (1676–1753) and Jean-Claude Gillier (1667–1737).70 On the other hand, the Comédie-Italienne granted a larger place to music: two-thirds of the plays, including the canevas plays printed in the anthology Le Théâtre italien first published in 1694 by Evariste Gherardi, contain sung airs – serenades, burlesque ceremonies, drinking songs, masquerades, and so forth.71
Following the creation of the Académie Royale de Musique, competition between the different theatres increased: it would lead at the beginning of the eighteenth century to a real war between the different stages. A much favoured tactic was to ridicule the taste for opera. Saint-Évremond’s Les Opéras (around 1676) portrays a young mad girl only able to express herself through song: the theme reappears in the first original play to be staged at the Comédie-Française, Les Fous divertissants (Raymond Poisson, 1680), in which passages from Lully’s tragédies en musique Proserpine and Bellérophon are quoted. Dancourt satirises victims of the opera craze in Angélique et Médor (1685) and in Renaud et Armide (1686). These latter three plays have a score by Charpentier.72
While these practices were a blow to the Lullian hegemony, they also took advantage of the popularity of his works.73 The Comédie-Italienne transposes the intrigues into a lighter setting by presenting comic characters dealing with trivial matters. They sing tragic laments on original music (by Angelo Constantini, known as Mezzetin), but also ‘vaudevilles’ – that is, well-known tunes or famous operatic airs, the lyrics of which are altered following the example of the canevas.74 L’Opéra de campagne by poet and musician Charles Rivière Dufresny transports Quinault’s and Lully’s Armide to a rustic farm: Renaud’s air ‘Plus j’observe ces lieux’ (Act II scene 3), in which he is lulled to sleep, is parodied by Arlequin, who sings in praise of a roasting spit.
Eventually, such practices led to full-blown parodies that tweaked the plots of tragédies en musique staged at the Académie Royale de Musique, and, in so doing, opened the path to the genre of the opéra-comique.75 Following the expulsion of Italian actors from Paris in 1697, the Parisian fairs (the Foire Saint-Laurent and the Foire Saint-Germain) attempted to take their place. The Académie Royale responded by banning the use of song in works performed at such fair theatres; similarly, the Comédie-Française forbade them to use speech. The fair theatres were obliged to come up with imaginative alternatives to compensate for the loss of spoken and sung dialogues: they required that the audience sing well-known operatic airs (‘timbres’) and vaudevilles.76 This type of interaction between the public and the actors was itself viewed as desirable by the Académie Royale, since its audience enjoyed singing along with the actors, especially during the divertissements. Attending a performance of Campra’s L’Europe galante in 1698, the English physician Martin Lister could thus marvel at the large audience and at the ‘great numbers of the nobility that come daily to [the operas], and some that can sing them all’.77 This in turn explained the enduring success of the fair theatres where this practice continued, even after they had regained the right to use song and speech.
Eventually, after strenuous negotiations between the Académie Royale and the fair theatres, two directors of the latter, Charles Alard and the widow Maurice (Jeanne Godefroy), obtained in 1709 the authorisation to hire singers and dancers, and to change the décors, the sole condition being that they would not present plays with continuous musical accompaniment.78 The convention signed later in December 1714 marked the birth of the opéra-comique, perpetuating in its own terms the legacy and specificities of the French tragédie en musique.
Translated from the French by Jacqueline Waeber and Laura Williams
