We're off to visit Lully in Paris

In this blog post we are jumping slightly ahead and flying to Paris in the Baroque period, so stow your tray tables, return your seats to the upright position and buckle your seatbelt.

Now, Baroque opera is a subject I am much more familiar with, having sung various arias by Handel and his contemporaries. Opera started to develop in the early 17^th century in Italy. Venice alone had seventeen rival opera houses and that was a city smaller than Christchurch is today. The French resisted opera for a long time, preferring its own tradition of spoken theatre and the plays of Molière and Racine. The first attempt to bring opera to Paris was in the 1640s however this was rather unsuccessful. Cardinal Mazarin was a great patron of the arts and was interested in Italian opera. In a very bold move he brought Francesco Cavalli to Paris in order to write an opera, Ercole amante (Hercules in love), as part of the celebrations for Louis XIV’s marriage to Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660. The new opera wasn’t ready in time so one of Cavalli’s existing operas, Il Xerse, was performed instead. Unfortunately, the audience did not enjoy it as it was long and in a foreign language. They did, however, enjoy the ballet music, composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian born, French composer, that was performed with it. Lully was not a fan of Italian opera and thought that sung drama was not possible in the French language. This is rather ironic as he went on to pretty much invent French opera in the 1660s.

Lully moved to France as a dancer when he was thirteen. He spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV so he knew what the king enjoyed and this enabled him to bring together music, singing and dancing to create French Baroque music. He created the 'French overture' which comprised of two parts, the first slow and stately with dotted rhythms followed by a lively fugue in compound time. This form of overture became widely used across Europe, notably by Bach and Handel. Have a listen to the overture to Lully’s opera, Armide, now. 

Lully gained the exclusive right to produce ‘sung’ opera and also had a monopoly on creating them, writing roughly one a year. He would usually premiere them at Court in Versailles before taking them to the Paris Opera, the Académie Royale de Musique.

In 1670, Lully collaborated with Molière to produce the political satire, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This was created to gently criticise the monarchy with the main character, Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy man who wants to use music to make him more cultured and hires people to help him achieve this, depicting the king. It pokes fun at the pretentious, social climbing middle classes and snobbish aristocracy. 

Lully is probably infamous for his tragic death. In those days, instead of a using a baton to conduct, a long stick was used to beat time on the floor. Lully sadly stabbed his stick through his foot and died of a rather nasty, terminal infection.

Right, that's it for this week. I'm off to immerse myself in some more French Baroque opera.