Lully and the Birth of French Opera

Born in Florence, Italy on 29 November 1632 - the same year as John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, Jan Vermeer, and Christopher Wren - Giovanni Battista Lulli would rise to prominence as a performer and dancer, and as the first composer to define the generic conventions for the emergent genre of opera in France under the reign of Louis XIV.

Italian opera had gradually established itself in the early seventeenth century as the new musical genre of continental Europe.  While a number of stage works informed the creation of the genre, particularly the intermedio of the late sixteenth-century, the private music drama productions and manifestos of the Florentine Camerata, led by Count Giovanni Bardi in the first two decades of the 1600s, established the form and style paradigms for opera. The Camerata was a group of intellectuals - poets, musicians and philosophers - who banded together to resurrect the ancient Greek principles of drama and music, particularly the importance of plot and dramatic unity, and the primacy of text and recitation. The earliest operas took their subjects from Greek mythology: Orpheus and Euridice and the metamorphosis of Daphne both received multiple settings.  By 1638, five years after Lulli's birth, the first public opera house opened as the Teatro San Cassiano in Venice.

START HERE As indicative of the early Baroque spirit (witnessed in the philosophy of Locke and Spinoza, the zoological discoveries of Leeuwenhoek, the art of Vermeer and the architecture of Wren), opera did not remain tied to a single geographic area, and fast became one of Italy's chief exports.  Jean-Baptiste Lully arrived in Paris at age 14 to serve as an Italian tutor to Louis XIV's cousin, Grande Mademoiselle Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orleans.  He changed the spelling of his name to assimilate and to gain favor with his new French employers, and he quickly rose through Parisian court society.  Italian opera followed one year later when Cardinal Mazarin summoned Luigi Rossi to perform Orfeo at the Palais Royal. Lully was surrounded by Italian opera from his childhood, and when King Louis XIV married Maria Teresa, Infanta of Spain (1660), another Italian (Cavalli) provided the opera, Serse, but Lully included his own ballets to give the work a French character. It would be another 13 years before Paris saw the first French opera - Lully's Cadmus et Hermione.

Lully was brought to France in the service of the king's cousin Mademoiselle de Montepensier who practiced her Italian with the Florentine. In 1652, he left to take a position in Louis XIV's court having distinguished himself as a violinist and dancer. As the compositeur de la musique instrumentale, Lully composed court ballets with Isaac de Benserade - including the one performed at Louis' wedding. When Lully took over Les petits violons, he shaped them into the most disciplined group of instrumentalists France (or Europe) had seen. This was an important step in the development of the orchestra and was carried over in the use of four and five-part string writing in his operas.

Lully continued to gain importance in the court and in 1661 was appointed surintendant and compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roi. One year later he was granted the title maître de la musique de la chambre which placed him in regular contact with the king. With his directorial duties dispersed to others, Lully began working with the playwright Molière on a series of comédies-ballets -- a new genre combining spoken comedy with singing and dancing. By the end of the decade, Lully witnessed the first attempt to perform opera in Paris. Pierre Perrin and Robert Cambert were given royal permission (a "monopoly") to found the Académie Royale de Musique and staged two operas (or pastorales) set by Cambert. Though they were bankrupt three years later, Lully was keenly aware of the possibilities and persuaded the king to transfer the monopoly to himself.

From 1673 until his death in 1687, Lully produced a new opera every year (save 1681). Lully's operas, called tragédie lyriques, borrowed from spoken tragedy several conventions: a five-act structure, a reliance on mythological subject matter, and "heroic" characters who resolve their situations through discussions with minor characters. However, the French tragédies of Molière, Racine, and Corneille were centered around moral issues (man's inability to escape fate or vengeance) and were not conducive to the inclusion of the dramatic elements demanded by audiences: machines, scene transformations, battles with triumphant marches and casts of thousands, and ballet divertissements. It was the genius of Philippe Quinault, Lully's principal librettist, that slowed down the action and distilled it to one or two main characters, usually in the form of a love triangle (or quadrangle): A loves (and is loved by) B. C loves A. C banished B to win A. A defeats C and is reunited with B.

Whether these characters were men or women did not matter. Indeed, Lully's female characters often exhibit intense psychological awareness and form the center of several operas (for instance Armide, Polixene, and Cérès (from Proserpine). Most of the operas are paeans to King Louis XIV. The prologues regularly allude to triumphant battles and territories won, or the clemency of the king over his enemies. Louis chose the subjects of Persée, Amadis, Roland, and Armide - all but the first based on tales of medieval chivalry.

Court life was portrayed in the veiled references of power struggle between the king's mistress and the queen as represented by similar antagonism between nymphs and the jealous goddess Juno. One such representation (Isis) caused Quinault to be temporally banished from court. Costumes, too, reflected contemporary rather than "period" dress - even when the locales were exotic.

Lully's contribution to the tragédie lyrique was his completely original setting of French text to music. Lois Rosow calls this, "a supple, expressive type of recitative, which combines characteristics of Italian recitative, French airs de cour and French theatrical declamation" (New Grove Opera, grovemusic.com). French recitative often changes meter to accommodate the syntax and expression of the language. Though often contrasted with Italian recitative as slower and more complex because of these meter changes, Lully himself warned: "Mon récitatif n'est fait que pour paler" ("My recitative is made only for speaking").

Interspersed throughout the scenes were vocal airs. These are moments of reflection by a character (as in Italian arias) and include the repetition of text to complete a binary or ternary form. They are lyric in nature and satisfied the audience's desire for a "singable" melody. This desire on the part of the audience is evident from the prologue of John Dryden's 1685 Albion and Albanius:

    In France the oldest man is always young,
    Sees operas daily, learns the tunes so long,
    Till foot, hand, head, keep time with every song:
    Each sings his part echoing from pit and box,
    With his hoarse voice, half harmony, half pox.

Lully's operas remained in the Parisian repertory a century after they were first performed. This caused much distress when the new operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau premiered and a querelle broke out between the Lullists and Ramists. Though they remained historically important during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lully's operas have fueled a revival of French baroque music and, along with the operas of Rameau and Christoph Willibald Gluck, are being reprised and recorded today. We hope that this collection of first and second edition prints - themselves a witness to Lully's popularity in the seventeenth century - will continue to provoke interest into the twenty-first.