One of the great monuments of French culture is the opera of the ancien régime, the musical equivalent of the sumptuous architecture of Versailles. As it happens, this epitome of French culture was largely created by an Italian, the poor son of a Florentine miller. We probably wouldn’t have heard much about Jean-Baptiste Lully if he hadn’t somehow managed to win a place in the entourage of the Grand Mademoiselle, Louis XIV’s cousin, while she was on a tour of Italy. On their return to Paris in 1646 he soon became one of the stars of the French stage, a singer and dancer whose comedic talents caught the eye of everyone at court, particularly the young King Louis XIV. The fifteen-year-old monarch danced with Lully in the Ballet de la nuit, where Louis’ splendid solar costume won him the nickname “The Sun King.”
Within a year Lully had begun his meteoric rise to the very peak of French culture. By the time he was twenty-one, the King had appointed him to be court instrumental composer. Eight years later, he had attained the exalted position of Surintendant de la musique de la chambre du Roy. His collaboration with Molière produced a series of masterful comedies; his work with the great librettist Phillipe Quinault resulted in an even more impressive series of brilliant tragédies-lyriques. By the time he was forty, he had taken over the direction of the Académie royale de musique, and in the process virtually single-handedly invented the French grand opera. He ruled his musical monopoly with an iron fist. Even in his hand-picked orchestra, the Petite bande, he was known to break violins over the heads of hapless players who dared to add ornaments. His mastery of French declamation and his sure sense of musical structure ensured that his operas remained in repertory for nearly a century after his death.
We begin tonight’s survey of Lully’s genius with, appropriately enough, a “French overture” in the style that he made famous throughout Europe, with a regal, sharply dotted opening that gives way to a quick imitative section. One of the celebrated features of Lully’s orchestra was its rigorous discipline, and the striking effect of its utterly unanimous premier coup d’archet, the first downbeat, became legendary. This overture comes from Lully’s second collaboration with Quinault, a tragédie-lyrique on the story of Alceste. Despite his rivals’ efforts to discredit it, Alceste became one of those operas that everyone in 17th-century France knew by heart.
Another huge success was Armide. This was the last opera Lully created with Quinault, and contemporaries regarded it as their masterpiece. The opera revolves around the title character, a powerful magician who seeks to destroy the great Christian crusader Renaud. Because of the remarkable development of Armide’s psychological state, it was known in Paris as “the ladies’ opera.” Our first scene comes from Act One, where Armide has just revealed a troubling dream about her sworn enemy Renaud. Her uncle Hidraot and two companions seek to distract and reassure her with a divertissement celebrating Armide’s power. Here Lully creates one of his most impressive large-scale musical structures, elaborately interweaving solo song, choruses, and instrumental dances. Apparently it was not uncommon for opera audiences to join in singing the choruses of this popular opera; although you may not want to imitate this period procedure, we encourage you to follow the action in the texts and translations.
After this sizeable piece of musical architecture, we have the first of five smaller-scale intermèdes or interludes, this one featuring the musette. This little instrument was an aristocratic version of the French bagpipe, and became very popular among the upper classes; tonight we’ll hear some selections from the first published essay on how to play your musette, a treatise written in 1672.
Our next excerpt from Armide is one of its most famous moments, the sommeil or sleep scene in Act Three where Renaud is lulled by Armide’s magic. A sleep scene was a standard feature of nearly every 17th-century opera, but here Lully invents a wholly new sound for this genre, with muted strings evoking the murmuring brooks and rustling breezes that seduce Renaud into slumber. In the following scene, various of Armide’s helpers (disguised as nymphs and shepherds) arrive to sing and dance around the sleeping Renaud.
After this pastoral episode, Armide arrives to gloat over her victim in a monologue that soon became the touchstone of Lully’s art. She is just about to destroy her enemy when she is overcome with love and realizes she can’t possibly kill him. This extended scene was critiqued at length by J.J. Rousseau in his Lettre sur la musique française of 1753. None other than Jean-Philippe Rameau rose to Lully’s defense, and rebutted Rousseau’s criticisms in a detailed 37-page analysis of this monologue.
The following intermède introduces the sound of the vielle or hurdy-gurdy, an instrument which had (like Lully himself) transcended its rustic origins to become extremely fashionable in court circles. We also hear another domestic instrument, the guitar (in its elegant Baroque version). Robert De Visée was Louis XIV’s personal guitar teacher, and frequently played his guitar at the king’s bedside in the evening. Along with De Visée, another of Lully’s court colleagues was the harpsichord player and composer Jean Henry D’Anglebert. A favored player of the King, D’Anglebert was close enough to Lully that the latter served as godfather to his son. Among his large collection of Pieces de clavecin are many keyboard arrangements of stage works by Lully. D’Anglebert himself doubtless performed in Lully’s productions at court, and his versions of these theatrical works are deftly executed to suggest a much larger ensemble than simply one harpsichord.
After this interlude of the King’s private music, we move to the royal chapel at Versailles, where Lully also contributed a number of significant works. According to a contemporary, the practice in the chapel was always to have three concerted works: a grand motet for soloists, choir, and instruments, generally lasting about fifteen minutes while the officiant busied himself at the altar; a petit motet for solo voices that would be sung during the elevation of the host; and for the post-communion, a setting of the last verse of Psalm 19, “Domine, salvum fac regem”— Lord, preserve the health of the King.
Tonight you will hear two settings of this text, one the finale of a very large-scale grand motet which sets an entire psalm, and the other, after intermission, a separate setting of this text alone. Our excerpt from Exaudiat te Dominus begins with an austere supplication in a dotted rhythm, first by the chorus, then by soloists. The full ensemble (complete with trumpet) then breaks in with a wonderfully festive “Gloria” full of energetic syncopations, a mark of Lully’s Italianate background.
Following intermission, we hear another setting of the Domine, salvum fac regem text. This grand motet opens in a grave triple-time, with alternations between a small trio of instruments and the full orchestra. Likewise, the voices alternate between the four-voice petit chœur and the five-part grand chœur.
After the chapel, we turn to the King’s daily dancing lesson. From Louis on down the social ladder, anyone who had any class was expected to know how to dance, and dance well. (There’s a wonderful scene in Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme that makes fun of a nouveau-riche businessman desperately trying to master the minuet.) Louis himself began every day with a lesson on the courante, an especially challenging dance. The traditional tool for teaching this important social skill was the dancing-master’s pochette, or pocket-fiddle, sometimes known as a “kit” in English. A tiny instrument that could be slipped into the commodious pocket of a greatcoat, the pochette was indispensable in those days before portable CD players. Tonight we’ll see a bransle morgué, a theatrical version of a peasant’s dance, whose tune you will recognize as “Ding, dong, merrily on high.” Our dance lesson will also include a more elegant gavotte, another peasant dance that entered the aristocratic repertoire.
We return to the theater for one of Lully’s greatest chaconnes, from his 1684 opera Amadis. Louis himself suggested the theme for this work, an episode from the medieval legend of Amadis of Gaul. Its premiere was delayed for a year after the death of Queen Marie Thérèse, but once it was staged, it became a huge success: the Mercure exclaimed “Never have we seen anything more magnificent or heard anything more listenable!” Its closing chaconne, an extended dance over a repeating triple-time bass-line,celebrates the liberation of an army of lovers who have been held under an enchantment until the hero Amadis, that “most faithful of lovers,” breaks their spell.
With La Grotte de Versailles, we move outside the palace of Versailles to its magnificent gardens. This pastoral was the first collaboration between Lully and Quinault, and its premiere en plein air in 1668 was such a hit that it was revived many times. Our excerpt begins with a plaintive lament from the shepherdess Iris. Her first chanson is remarkable for the detailed “graces” that Lully provides as a double, or ornamented repeat. The following triple-time air uses a device beloved of 17th-century composers, an echo that repeats various telling words. (An echo was in fact a celebrated feature of the Grotte de Thétis in the gardens, which had just been completed three years before.) The chorus answers Iris with their own version of an echo piece, and then a dance called “L’Echo” continues the theme, to close the grand divertissement.
Along with the harpsichord and lute, perhaps the most favored instrument of the French baroque was the viola da gamba, which reached the height of its powers in the 17th century with composers like Lully’s great colleague Marin Marais. Perhaps most famous today from his appearance in Tous les matins du monde, Marais was another poor child who made good. He entered the Opéra orchestra at a fairly young age, and by 1676 was a continuo player for Lully’s Atys. He soon became one of the King’s chamber musicians, and began to produce a stream of divertissements, operas, and motets, all of which were well received; but his fame, then and now, rested on his five books of Pièces de viole. In his second book, published in 1701, he included a moving tombeau or elegy for his friend and mentor Lully.
Our evening ends as it began, in the enchanted world of the sorceress Armide. The last act of this opera takes place in Armide’s enchanted palace, with the only love scene in the entire opera. Despite the spellbound Renaud’s assurances of love, Armide is troubled and leaves him to consult her sources in the underworld. During her absence, she commands a troupe of “pleasures and happy lovers” to entertain Renaud with an extended divertissement. This spectacular scene is a series of variations on the descending passacaille bass-line, similar to the chaconne we heard earlier; the orchestra begins with an extended dance, which is followed by various combinations of solos, ensembles, and choruses. Normally, this would form the grand finale of the opera, but in Armide this happy ending is wrecked by the arrival of Renaud’s companions who break Armide’s spells and leave with their hero. Armide, distraught, orders her palace destroyed and departs in a fiery chariot. Tonight, however, we end with this idyllic vision of love, a piece of musical architecture on a par with the elegant symmetries of Versailles itself.
Notes on the Dance
Our two Baroque dancers tonight, Carlos Fittante and Caroline Copeland, have reconstructed their dances based on surviving 18th-century dance notations. (We are lucky that one of the by-products of the French Enlightenment was the development of a sophisticated code to notate the subtle and complex dance movements of the great French Baroque dances.) The chaconne from Lully’s Amadis uses a choreography by Anthony L’Abbé from c.1725, reconstructed by Mr. Fittante, while the steps for the passacaille from Armide is by the celebrated choreographer Louis-Guillaume Pécour, from c.1713, reconstructed by Ms. Copeland.