Biographies

Anne of Austria 

b. Valladolid, Spain, 22 September 1601 -- d. Paris, 20 January 1666. Daughter of Philip III of Spain, Queen-Consort of Louis XIII of France, and mother of Louis XIV. 

As sole regent during Louis XIV's childhood, Anne surprised many members of the French nobility by appointing Cardinal Jules Mazarin, one of Cardinal Richelieu's protégés and an ardent proponent of the absolute power of the King, as her first minister.  Louis XIV later married Anne's niece, the Spanish Hapsburg princess Marie-Thérèse of Austria.  Although Anne's influence with her son waned after his marriage, he continued to treat her with respect and consideration. She lived in retirement until her death in 1666 in Paris.

The Ballard family of printers

On July 14, 1551, Robert Ballard (c. 1525-1588), in partnership with his cousin, the lutenist and composer Adrian le Roy, were granted a privilège (license) for printing music from the French king Henri II.

In 1553, Le Roy and Ballard received the title of music printer to the king, which was re-affirmed in 1568 under Charles IX. A combination of important court connections, shrewd repertoire choices, technical expertise, and high artistic quality gave Le Roy and Ballard a near-monopoly on music printing in France through the end of the sixteenth century.

In 1594, a few years after Robert's death, a the same title was granted, under Henry IV, to the partnership of Le Roy and Lucrèce Ballard, Robert's widow. Members of the Ballard family were to bear the title of music printers to the king well into the eighteenth century. They held a virtual monopoly on music printing in France for two centuries, and continued in business into the second decade of the nineteenth century, when the final owner was the great-great-great-great grandson of Robert.

The association of the Ballard firm with Jean-Baptiste Lully began during the tenure of Robert Ballard (iii) (1610-1673), grandson of Robert and Lucrèce, whose privilège , granted in 1639 under Louis XIII, made him the first member of the family named as sole printer to the king for music. Under Robert, the Ballard firm produced its first orchestral scores, beginning with stage works by Cambert.

Christophe Ballard (1641-1715), great grandson of Robert (i), who received his patent from Louis XIV on May 11, 1673, printed the first orchestral scores of Lully's works for the theater, beginning in 1679 with the publication of Bellérophon.

After the publication of Bellérophon, each of Lully's subsequent operas and ballets was published shortly after its first performance. All the Lully operas first performed before publication of Bellérophon were also eventually published by the Ballard family. The last, Psyché, which had premiered in 1678, was published in 1720 by Christophe's son, Jean-Baptiste Christophe Ballard, who received his patent on Oct. 5, 1695 and took over management of the firm after Christophe's death.

The Ballard firm reached the zenith of its success under Christophe.  Around 1700, the house maintained four presses and employed nine helpers and two apprentices. Virtually all the music printed in France at that time came from Ballard.  Besides Lully, composers whose music was printed exclusively by Ballard included: Brossard, Campra, Charpentier, Collasse, the Couperins, Dandrieu, Hotteterre, Lalande, Lebègue, Marais and Montéclair.

At the same time, during the tenure of Christophe and his son, the firm had to endure a number of expensive lawsuits.  Among the most famous was a dispute over the printing rights to Lully's works.  Some years after the composer's death in 1687, his son attempted to reprint his father's works without Ballard's permission.  Ballard sued, and successfully defended the firm's exclusive publication rights to the works in question.

The suit was complicated, however, by the larger issue of developments in printing practice and technology.  Since its inception in the sixteenth century, the Ballard firm had printed exclusively with movable musical type.  The musical type face with lozenge-shaped notes, originally cast for LeRoy and Ballard in the 1550s by Guillaume Le Bé, continued to be utilized through the seventeenth century.  Ballard resisted converting to the new process of music engraving, which was gaining widespread popularity; such a transition would have required a substantial investment in new equipment and training.

The Parisian engraver Henri de Baussen, who published several volumes in the Jean-Baptiste Lully Collection, challenged the firm by publishing several works still under the control of the Ballard family.  Subsequently, in 1713, several musicians not connected with Ballard obtained privilège  to print music from engraved plates. Ballard entered suit against them, but was defeated. The court ruled that Ballard's exclusive privilège did not extend beyond printing with movable type.

With the death of Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard in 1750, much of the prestige and power of the Ballard firm was diminished.  His son, Christophe-Jean-Francois Ballard (1701-1765) was described as "lazy and untalented" in a contemporary police report.  A lack of effective business leadership, combined with the firm's unwillingness to adapt to changes in technology and aesthetics, led to their decline. The last of the direct line, Christophe-Jean-Francois (iii) Ballard, great-great-great-great grandson of the founder, died in 1825.

Henri de Baussen 

b. c.1690 -- d. 1718. French engraver. He is credited as the engraver on the title pages of four second editions among the volumes in the UNT Lully collection: Atys (de Baussen 1708), Atys (de Baussen 1709), Thesée (de Baussen 1711) and Roland (de Baussen 1709).

In 1690, claiming falsely that he had been in the employ of the late Mademoiselle de Guise, de Baussen obtained a privilège allowing him to engrave music. However, when he attempted to bring out an engraved edition of a work by Moreau, a composer whose work was published exclusively by Ballard, the printer brought suit against de Baussen and received a judgment against him and his partner, Henry Foucault. Despite this inauspicious introduction, de Baussen later worked as an engraver for the Ballard publishing house.

The de Baussen second editions of Lully works in the UNT collection are among those which sparked a second lawsuit brought by Ballard against M. Guyenet and Lully's eldest son.  In 1713, the Ballard monopoly on the Lully repertoire finally ended.

Jean Bérain

bap. Saint-Mihiel, Lorraine, 4 June 1640 -- d. Paris, 24 January 1711.  French designer and engraver.  From 1674, he held the prestigious position of Dessinateur de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi.  During this time, his costume and set designs were used for all royal and Parisian operatic productions, including Lully's operas.

Le Cerf de la Viéville

b. Rouen, 1674 -- d. Rouen, 10 November 1707.  French music critic who argued that French music in general--and Lully's operas in particular--was more expressive than Italian music, which he viewed as being merely sensual.  His Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise (1704-6) remains a seminal work in eighteenth-century reception history and national music constructs.

Pascal Collasse 

bap. Reims, 22 January 1649 -- d. Versailles, 17 July 1709. French composer. Pascal Collasse spent most of his professional life under the shadow of his teacher and friend, Jean-Baptiste de Lully.  As Lully's secretary, Collasse was responsible for taking down music from the master's dictation, and writing inner parts for choruses and instrumental numbers. After Lully's death in 1687, this experience made Collasse ideally suited to complete Achille et Polyxène, for which Lully had written only the overture and the first act.

The UNT volume of Achille et Polyxène has two signatures at the end of the prologue on p. xxxviij which appear to be those of Pascal Collasse and the publisher, Christoph Ballard.

Achille et Polyxène achieved only a modest success. However, Thétis et Pélée, Collasse's next opera, was very well received. Of particular note was the tempest scene, which was so complex that it could not be printed using Ballard's movable type and had to be engraved instead. Collasse's innovative use of the orchestra in this highly dramatic scene was much admired and inspired other composers to try similar orchestral effects. Thétis et Pélée was successfully revived in 1708, a year before the composer's death.

Unfortunately, Thétis et Pélée turned out to be the high point of Collasse's career. His only later work to achieve even marginal success was an opéra-ballet, Ballet des saisons (1695), which pre-dated Campra's more famous L'Europe galante by two years. Collasse's attempt to found an opera company in Lille failed when the theater burned down. According to one of his contemporaries, Titon du Tillet, Collasse spent much time and money in his later years in alchemical research, which " . . . served only to ruin him and weaken his health." His last opera, Polyxéne et Pyrrus (1706), was a miserable failure.

Pierre Corneille

b. Rouen, 6 June 1606 -- d. Paris, 1 October 1684. Widely regarded as the creator of French classical tragedy, Corneille was a prolific playwright who expanded the boundaries and raised the level of dramaturgy on the French stage.  With a rhetorical style that emphasized psychological reaction over superfluous spectacular action, a respect for the theatrical unities, and the use of machinery and exoticism in the service of the drama, Corneille redefined the expectations for French tragedie.  He collaborated with Quinault and Molière for the libretto of the tragédie-ballet, Psyché, which was set by Lully in 1671, and later served as the basis for the tragédie lyrique of the same name by  Lully and brother, Thomas Corneille.

Thomas Corneille

b. Rouen, 20 August 1625 -- d. Les Andelys, 8 December 1709.  Though perhaps overshadowed by his brother, playwright Pierre Corneille, Thomas Corneille established himself as an academician, dramatist, and editor (Mercure galant), and a librettist of the first order.  In collaboration with Lully, Corneille served as a replacement for Quinault, whose court disgrace following Isis (1677) led to his temporary dismissal.  Two works resulted from this collaboration: Psyché (1678), the tragédie lyrique adaptation of his brother Pierre's 1971 tragédie-ballet, and the tragédie en musique, Bellérophon (1679).   In addition to his collaboration with Lully, Corneille also collaborated with Charpentier.

Fronde

An alliance of French nobles and the judges of the Parlement during the minority of Louis XIV who resented the Regent, Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin, her Italian foreign minister, and who supported parliamentary reforms to limit the power of the monarchy. Between 1648 and 1652, the debate escalated into civil war. Royal troops besieged Paris, which was controlled by the Frondists. Lully's first patron, Mlle. de Montpensier, was a leader in the Fronde. The defeat of the Fronde in 1652, returned power to the monarchy.

Isaac Lloyd Hibberd 

b. 1904 -- d. 1965.  Musicologist Lloyd Hibberd, Professor of Music at North Texas from 1945 to 1965, was an avid book collector who exerted tremendous influence over collection development in the Music Library both during and after his tenure. Rare books and scores, purchased on his recommendation, were acquired by the library with the help of his vast network of professional connections with rare book dealers.  Upon his death, the university acquired his entire 10,000-volume personal library from his estate. These volumes are shelved not only in the Music Library, but also in many other subject areas. Rare materials from his library have greatly enhanced UNT's music rare book collection.

Mlle. de La Fontaine

b. 1655 -- d. 1738.  Prima ballerina who performed major roles in Lully's operas and ballets from 1681 until the composer's death.

Madeleine Lambert

Wife of Jean-Baptist Lully and daughter of composer Michel Lambert, who helped Lully become established as a composer.

Louis XIII

b. Fontainebleau, 27 September 1601 -- d. Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 1643 May 14. King of France 1610-1643, father of Louis XIV.  Louis XIII succeeded to the throne of France in 1610 upon the assassination of his father, Henry IV. However, his mother, Marie de' Medici, acted as regent until he came of age in 1614, and continued to govern for three years thereafter. In 1615, she arranged the marriage of her son with Anne of Austria, the daughter of the powerful King Philip III of Spain.

In 1624, Louis made Cardinal Richelieu his principal minister, and became increasingly dependent on the Cardinal's keen political sense. Richelieu put his attention to consolidating the King's powers at home, and undermining the power of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs abroad.

Richelieu died in December, 1642, and was succeeded as principal minister by his protegée, Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Louis XIII died of tuberculosis in May, 1643. He was succeeded by his five-year-old son, under the regency of Anne of Austria.

Louis XIV

b. Saint-Germain, 5 September 1638 -- d. Versailles, 1 September 1715.  Louis XIV of France had the longest reign in European history (1643-1715). He became king at the age of four years on the death of his father, Louis XIII.

Louis XIV of France was born September 5, 1638, in the twenty-third year of the marriage of King Louis XIII of France and his Spanish Hapsburg queen Anne of Austria. This pregnancy, which happened in the face of an estrangement of long standing between the King and Queen, was widely considered miraculous. The child was christened Louis-Dieudonné - Louis, the God-given.

Louis XIII died May 14, 1643, when his son was not even five years old. The king's will stipulated that the care of young Louis be divided between his mother and his uncle, Gaston d'Orléans. However, Anne successfully challenged the will and became sole Regent. Her alliance with the unpopular Prime Minister, the Italian Cardinal Mazarin, undermined her initial popularity with the French nobility and paved the way for the uprising among a group of nobles known as the Fronde.

The circumstances of his upbringing shaped the king that Louis was to become. Far from being a spoiled and indulged child of privilege, he and his younger brother, Philippe, endured poverty, misfortune, fear, humiliation, cold and hunger as his mother and the French Parlement squabbled over control of the royal Treasury and the other trappings of power. On two occasions, the royal family was driven out of Paris, and at one point Louis and his mother were held under house arrest in the royal palace.  Louis learned at an early age that weakness, indecisiveness, ill-advised alliances, and misplaced trust were not the agents of effective leadership.

Louis XIV came of age Sept. 5, 1651, on his thirteenth birthday, and was crowned three years later on June 7, 1654. Although he took a personal interest in matters of state even at this exceptionally young age, he continued to defer to his mother and Mazarin until the latter's death.

It was during this period, in February of 1653, that Louis first encountered Jean-Baptiste Lully. Louis, who inherited both musical talent and dancing ability from his father, danced six roles in a production of Isaac Benserade's Ballet de la nuit, a production in which the young Lully also performed. Louis' later nickname, the "Sun King," derived originally from his performance as the Sun in this ballet.

Louis also began his first serious love affair during this time with Mazarin's niece, Marie Mancini.  This liaison, the first of many, was interrupted by Louis's political marriage on June 3, 1660 to his cousin, the Infanta Marie-Thérese of Spain.  This marriage, which sealed the Peace of the Pyrenees and thus concluded a long war with Spain, made Louis one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe.

After Mazarin's death the following year, the young king announced his intention to take over the responsibilities of government himself.  To many in the French court, the move came as a surprise and marked a profound and disturbing break from tradition.  Even more troubling, Louis chose as his ministers and advisors, not members of nobility and the royal family, but, rather, individuals whom he could govern and control.  Despite widespread skepticism, however, Louis proved to be a serious and dedicated ruler, who took a personal interest in all matters of the monarchy, from the arrangements for weddings of royal family members to the punctilious supervision of the Treasury.  While his diligence wrought the disapproval of the nobles, who condemned such mundane concerns as "bourgeois," it helped to bring the national budget into balance.

Louis XIV was an avid patron of the arts and provided support to many artists, including Lully.  Three years after founding the Académie Royale de Musique, Louis turned over management of it to Lully; during these years, the Académie exclusively performed works by Lully.  The close relationship between Lully and Louis XIV played a significant part in the development of French opera. The King was the primary patron of opera, and all of Lully's operas included preludes praising the monarchy. Louis suggested a number of the plots for the operas to Lully, notably those with subject matter focused on the conflict between glory and duty on the one hand, and love on the other. In his published scores, Lully always included a preface dedicating the work to his patron.

Jean-Baptiste Lully

b. Florence, 29 November 1632 --d. Paris, 22 March 1687.  Jean-Baptiste Lully, the most significant composer of the French Baroque and the progenitor of the French operatic genre, the tragedie en musique, was born Giovanni Battista Lulli on November 28, 1632, in Florence, Italy.  He was the son of a miller, Lorenzo di Maldo Lulli, and his wife, Caterina del Sera, a miller's daughter. Lully first arrived in France in March of 1646 in the entourage of Roger de Lorraine, the Chevalier de Guise, as a garçon de chambre for De Guise's niece, Mlle. de Montpensier, who had requested that her uncle provide her with someone with whom to practice her Italian language skills.

During his six years in the household of Mlle. de Montpensier, Lully, who was already expert at the guitar and violin, polished his skills as a performer and composer. According to an interview published posthumously in the Mercure galant, Lully insisted that he had "never learned more about music than he had known at the age of 17 but that he had worked all his life to perfect this knowledge." Above all, Lully was known for his artistry as a dancer in the court ballets.

In 1652, volatile French politics brought Lully's cultivated and secluded station to an end.  Mlle. de Montpensier, who had been a leader of the revolutionary Fronde, was exiled to her chateau at St. Fargeau after the defeat of the Frondists.  Lully asked to be released from her service and returned to Paris.

On February 23, 1653, three months after leaving Mlle. de Montpensier's service, Lully danced several parts in Isaac Benserade's Ballet de la nuit at the court of the young King Louis XIV. Apparently Louis was favorably impressed by the young composer, since a few weeks later Lully replaced the Italian Lazarini as "composer of instrumental music for the king."

Lully began in Louis' service as a composer of ballets de cour (court ballets), in which he danced together with the king and members of the royal court. At first, as his title suggests, Lully was responsible only for instrumental music. However, he rapidly expanded his field of influence and began to take responsibility for entire ballets. Some time before 1656, he also took over responsibility for the string ensemble called the Petits violons, which he transformed into a group widely renowned for their discipline and artistic excellence.

During the 1660s, Lully's influence grew. In 1661, he received French citizenship. In his letters of naturalization Lully re-wrote his own history, changing the spelling of his name from Lulli to Lully and elevating his father to the status of "gentilhomme Florentin"--a Florentine gentleman. In the same year, Lully was appointed "composer of chamber music for the king." The following year, he married Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the composer Michel Lambert. The marriage contract was signed by Louis XIV, his queen and his mother, Anne of Austria. Between 1664 and 1670, Lully collaborated on a series of comédies-ballets with the playwright Molière. These works, which combined comic dialogue with singing and dancing, were the beginnings of native French opera.

Six Italian operas were performed in Paris between 1645 and 1662 under the aegis of the Italian First Minister Cardinal Mazarin. Despite the Cardinal's support, these operas did not appeal to the French courtiers, who objected to the Italian language of the librettos and the length of the performances. Lully was no more impressed by the Italian operas than his contemporaries; curiously, Lully allegedly maintained that opera was a peculiarly Italian art form, impossible to realize using the French language. However, when the first French opera, produced by the Académie d'Opéra under a privilège granted to the poet Pierre Perrin, proved to be a success, his interest was piqued.

Lully's influence with the King gave him the leverage to have the privilège lifted.  Perrin, incarcerated for debt after his business partners pocketed the production profits, was only too willing to comply.  In March of 1672, Lully was officially granted the exclusive right to produce operas in Paris. He later consolidated his control over the lyric stage in Paris through a series of additional patents which, through austere limitations and excessive bureaucracy, precluded any opportunities for theatrical rivals;  for example, one patent severely limited the number of musicians permitted to appear in productions outside of his Académie Royale de Musique.

For his librettist, Lully chose the poet Philippe Quinault. The first tragédie lyrique, Cadmus et Hermione, with libretto by Quinault and music by Lully, was performed April 27, 1673. The form of the tragédie lyrique, which Lully created with Quinault, remained the dominant form in French opera for a hundred years after Lully's death.

From his acquisition of the privilège until his death in 1687, Lully's attention focused entirely on the writing and production of his operas, with a steady output of one major production a year.  His involvement was not limited to musical composition, however, but rather he exerted control over every aspect of the operatic vehicle. Lully collaborated with his poets in the production of libretti, on which he had the final say; he took an avid interest in the training, singing and musicianship of the performers, whom he forbade from engaging in lavish ornamentation; he dictated means of declamation and gesture in acting, and choreographed a number of the dances.  His insistence on discipline, high artistic standards, and ensemble unity in the opera orchestra was legendary.

Between 1673 and 1686, Lully composed 13 tragédies lyriques. After the success of Bellérophon in 1679, Lully contracted with the printing firm of Ballard to publish his operas. He maintained close control over the publishing rights, and refused to allow Ballard to put any of the printed volumes up for sale until they had been inventoried and initialed or stamped by Lully or one of his agents.

In 1681, Lully realized a lifelong dream when he was able to purchase the office of "secretary to the king," which granted him noble rank.  From that time on, he signed his name "de" Lully, and the title pages of his operas proclaimed him "Monsieur de Lully, escuyer, conseiller, Secrétaire du Roy, Maison, Couronne de France & de ses Finances, & Sur-Intendant de la Musique de sa Majesté." ("Monsieur de Lully, esquire, adviser, Secretary of the King, House, Crown of France & of its Finances, and Superintendent of the Music of his Majesty")

Louis' secret marriage to Mme. de Maintenon in 1683 changed the atmosphere of the court. The libertine excesses of the King's youth were discarded in favor of more conservative, even puritanical, behavior.  A rift formed between Louis and Lully, who had been one of the king's closest companions, and in whose opera libretti a particularly worldly philosophy, formerly espoused by Louis, was made manifest.

On January 8, 1687, Lully conducted a performance of his sacred Te deum to celebrate the king's recovery from an operation.  While beating time on the floor with a cane (in the French manner of conducting), Lully struck and injured his toe. In what remains one of the more legendary and bizarre deaths in music history, the toe wound developed an abscess, gangrene set in, and the composer died shortly after on March 22, 1687, at the age of 54.

Jean-Baptiste de Lully (ii)

b. Paris, 6 August 1665 -- d. Paris, 9 March 1743.  Composer, second son of Jean-Baptiste de Lully's three sons.  Very little of his music has survived, but his pastorale, Le triomphe de la Raison sur l'Amour, is extant, as are some of his instrumental compositions.

Jean-Louis Lully

 b. Paris, 23 September 1667-- d. Paris, 23 December 1688. Composer, youngest son of Jean-Baptiste de Lully.  After his father's death, Jean-Louis acquired the posts of surintendant and compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roi ("composer" and "superintendent of the chamber music of the king") that his father had held. Between his father's death in 1687 and his own premature death in 1688, he collaborated with his brother, Louis, on the opera Zéphire et Flore.

Louis Lully

b. Paris, 23 September 1667 -- d. Paris, 23 December 1688. Composer, oldest of Jean-Baptiste de Lully's three sons. His family connections were not enough to overcome his lack of talent; after the death of his brother, Jean-Louis, the post of surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi ("superintendent of the chamber music of the king") passed out of the Lully family to the composer Lalande.  In addition to Zéphire et Flore, which Louis Lully composed in collaboration with his brother Jean-Louis, he composed operas, occasional pieces and airs. Besides his brother, Louis also collaborated with the composer Marin Marais.

Marie Thérese of Austria

b. El Escorial, Spain, 10 September 1638 -- d. 30 July 1683, Versailles. Daughter of King Philip IV of Spain, Queen-consort of Louis XIV of France.

Marie Thérese married her cousin, Louis XIV of France, as part of a peace resolution between France and Spain.  She remained dutiful in spite of a succession of royal mistresses.  She bore Louis five children of whom only one, the Dauphin Louis (d. 1711) survived to adulthood.

Cardinal Jules Mazarin [Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino, Mazarini]

b. Pescina, Abruzzi, Kingdom of Naples 14 July 1602 -- d. 9 March 1661, Vincennes, France. First minister of France after the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642.

Mazarin succeeded Cardinal Richilieu as First Minister of France, a position that he retained during the regency of Anne, mother of the young King Louis XIV, and after Louis' ascendancy.  He remained Louis' most respected advisor until his death in 1661. Even after Mazarin's death, Louis did not replace him, but rather took over the reins of government himself.

Mazarin strongly pushed for performances of Italian operas in France, in part to hire Italian performers who also worked as spies for him.  The extravagance of these operatic productions were a source of conflict, both due to the "Italianate" nature of the music and the huge financial cost.  Lully's own operas were somewhat indebted to the imported Italian models.

Molière [Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste]

bap. Paris, 15 Jan 1622 -- d. Paris, 17 February 1673.  Perhaps one of the best known playwrights of the seventeenth century, Molière collaborated as librettist with Lully in creating the genre of comédies-ballets.  Their combined efforts yielded a number of works, including: Les fâcheux (1661), L’impromptu de Versailles (1663), Le mariage forcé (1664), La princesse d’Elide (1664), L’amour médecin (1665), La pastorale comique (1666), Le sicilien, ou L’amour peintre (1667), George Dandin (1668), Monsieur de Porceaugnac (1669), Les amants magnifiques (1670), Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).  Their final work, Psyché (1671), the only tragédie ballet the two produced, was later revised into a tragédie en musique.

Pierre Perrin

b. Lyons, c.1620 -- d. Paris, buried 26 April 1675.  Librettist who owned the privilège that was acquired by Lully, giving Lully almost exclusive control over musical theatrical productions in France.  When Lully acquired the privilège from Perrin in 1672, the librettist was in prison, due to debts that had accumulated from his operatic productions.  Lully's connection to the king helped him secure the monopoly from Perrin.

Philippe Quinault

bap. Paris, 5 June 1635 -- d. Paris, 26 November 1688.  Having achieved early success in the court of Louis XIV as a poet and dramatist, Quinault began his association with Lully in 1671 when he was asked, along with Molière and Corneille, to write the text for Psyché, a court divertissement, to be set by the composer.  In the following fifteen years, Quinault and Lully collaborated on a further thirteen works, including eleven tragédies en musique and two  ballets (Le tríomphe de l'Amour and Le temple de la paix).  Their collaboration was only briefly interrupted by the scandale in 1677 surrounding the libretto of Isis, which featured in its dramatis personae two unfavorable characters who bore a remarkable resemblance to two of Louis' concubines.  Though Quinault fell out of favor and was disbanded from Lully's creative team, he was shortly thereafter reinstated.