Date of composition: 1670
Duration: 18 minutes
Music from Operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau
In the 17th century, Paris was the third largest city in the world after London and Beijing – a centre of power, science and culture that attracted people from all over Europe. The metropolis was deeply Catholic, which fostered close ties with the Vatican. Politically, too, France was closely allied with Italy: the Florentine Caterina de’ Medici was Queen of France from 1547 to 1559 and gave birth to three French rulers. Later, until Louis XIV came of age, the Italian cardinal Giulio Mazzarino (Jules Mazarin) governed in his place. When it came to planning new palaces, gardens and streets, the declared goal was to build a second Rome. Mazarin regarded architecture, art and music as tools for demonstrating power and prestige – but also as means of “refining” and internationalising the French court.
Being the newest and most magnificent of all art forms, opera also became an element of political strategy. In Italy, the genre that had emerged around 1600 had already begun its triumphal march. In the 1640s, Cardinal Mazarin sought to introduce musical theatre to France as well – not least to strengthen ties with the music-loving Habsburg court in Vienna. During the wedding of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain, herself a Habsburg, Francesco Cavalli’s Serse was performed in 1660. Yet even before that, Italian opera had been tested in Paris: in 1645 the court saw a performance of Francesco Sacrati’s La finta pazza, in 1646 Cavalli’s Egisto, and in 1647 the world premiere of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo. These performances were social and artistic events, but they also provoked a determined counterreaction. A distinctly French form of opera was created, conceived in conscious opposition to the Italian one: the tragédie en musique, or tragédie lyrique.
The driving force behind this development was Jean-Baptiste Lully, who in 1673 created the first work of the new genre with Cadmus et Hermione. As the director of the Académie royale de musique, which he had founded himself, Lully achieved such a dominant position that he controlled all aspects of musical life at court. When the Sun King, Louis XIV, declared in absolutist self-assurance, “I am the state,” Lully could triumphantly have added: “And I am its opera.”
Lully was born in Florence in 1632 as Giovanni Battista Lulli. During the carnival of 1646, his violin playing and clowning in the streets caught the attention of Chevalier Roger de Lorraine, who was looking for a young man to converse in Italian with his niece. Thus, the 14-year-old came to the French court as a garçon de chambre, where he surely witnessed performances of Italian operas while making a name for himself as a composer. Cavalli’s Serse already included extensive ballet music by Lully in 1660.
The starting point for innovation was the pompous ballet de cour, to which Lully himself contributed important works. This genre combined dance, spoken theatre and song in lavish performances in which the dance-loving monarch and members of the court participated, not merely as spectators, but as dancers themselves. In their tragédies en musique, Lully and his librettist Philippe Quinault ultimately merged court ballet with a musical realisation of the solemn declamatory style found in the spoken dramas of Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille. Working with the playwright Molière, Lully also developed the comic comédie-ballet, regarded as the final step toward French opera. This ballet-comedy was still a hybrid form, but now, for the first time, the dramatic action itself became the focus of the musical design.
One masterpiece of this new genre is undoubtedly Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman), composed in 1670, which remains in the drama repertoire to this day. The immediate occasion for its creation was a visit to Paris by the Turkish ambassador, which led to a diplomatic incident and an affront to the Sun King. Molière and Lully were then commissioned by Louis XIV to write a comedy featuring an ironic Turkish ceremony – heard this evening in the Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs. Yet the work must also be seen within the broader context of exotisme, or exoticism, which already had an established tradition in court ballets.
The plot is quickly told: the wealthy but uneducated bourgeois Jourdain strives by all means to become a nobleman, taking lessons in dancing, music, fencing, and so on. He also wishes to marry his daughter Lucile to an aristocrat, but she loves the commoner Cléonte. To make the wedding possible, Cléonte disguises himself as a Turkish nobleman, which suits Jourdain’s class pretensions. He also promises to elevate Jourdain to the (entirely fictional) rank of “Mamamouchi”. Delighted, Jourdain agrees, allows the marriage, and becomes the object of general mockery. The work concludes with the famous Ballet des nations, large parts of which will be performed this evening, in which French, Spanish and Italian characters appear.