Sunday 9 December 2007

Quintessential French attributes of the Lullian opera

Throughout his lengthy reign (1661-1715) Louis XIV systematically exploited cultural events as a means of focussing attention on the French court. The musical entertainment in the French court ranged from relatively unpretentious ballets de cour to sophisticated tragédies lyriques that utilized the full spectrum of available stage machinery and lavish costumes, not to mention singers, dancers and orchestral musicians – in the aggregate often numbering more than a hundred. As a legacy of a resplendent period of French culture, the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully, particularly his tragédies lyriques, has drawn much attention. Not surprisingly, though, that attention has centred on productions at court or by the Academie Royale de Musique, while performances in the French provinces, Germany, Belgium and Holland have received far less scrutiny.

Lully controlled every aspect of operatic composition and production in Louis XIV’s France. He was aided in this stupendous task by many individuals and groups: the king, Philippe Quinault, the Academie de inscriptions et belles-lettres, the composer’s assistants Jean-François Lalouette and Pascal Colasse, the ballet master Pierre Beauchamps, the machinist Carlo Vigarani, and others. Quinault took the initial step in the production of an opera by selecting several subjects and submitting them to Louis XIV for consideration. The monarch made the final choice of the subject. After Quinault had sketched a general design for the piece, Lully arranged the sequence of acts and conceived the special divertissements, dances, and spectacular scenes which he later worked into the operas. Quinault then composed the text. Although the final libretto was chiefly Quinault’s, the poet was obliged to adopt textual revisions made by members of the Academie. After having incorporated these modifications, Quinault turned the text over to Lully, who always had the last word. He always tried to maintain the same rigid standards and personal control over the performance of his operas that he exercised during their composition. He was a relentless drill-master with his orchestra and no less strict disciplinarian with his singers than with his instrumentalists. He always tried to forestall the popularity of an individual singer; he treated all as equals, having no favourites and sternly suppressing jealous rivalries among his performers.

However, despite Lully’s pre-eminence, the backbone of his operas was the libretto. The French opera was primarily a drama to which the embellishments of music and ballet were added – “Interest in the poem of an opera, and insistence that it should be of respectable dramatic quality, was one of the basic differences between the French and Italian viewpoints in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”[1] Although he was criticized for corrupting traditional classical drama, Quinault openly emulated Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine. In spite of the numerous diversion scenes, which interrupted the flow of the drama, and the miraculous interventions of celestial deities in the plot, Quinault’s dramas unfolded with amazing clarity, unity and logic. He avoided unnecessary complications; excluded buffoonery after his second opera, Alceste; and aimed for the order, simplicity and coherence of the classical theatre. Even the ballets and spectacles were smoothly woven into the drama; they were logically justified by the action and fitted the context of the plot. Quinault also copied the meter and retained the Alexandrian couplets of classical tragedy. He was careful, however, to endow his verse with rhythmic accents appropriate to musical expression. He composed free verse for the recitatives to enable Lully to vary the flow of the verse according to his musical design. Moreover, Quinault used many of the same classical sources that the dramatists had employed – writings of the Roman poet, Ovid (Atys); from the Greek dramatist, Euripides (Alceste); and Renaissance poets, Lodovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso (Armide). Quinault’s characters were unfettered by complex or ambiguous motives; they express clear, undiluted emotions. Love dominates the hero’s behaviour, and conforming less to the realities of seventeenth-century conduct than to its aspirations, the hero personifies fidelity. He confronts the rivalries and jealousies of love, and falls victim, occasionally, to human frailty; in the end, however, he is loyal, and he recommends constancy to the audience. “The tragédie lyrique is not content to celebrate the tenderness and to sing about the joy of love,” wrote Quinault’s biographer, Etienne Gros. “It gives the rules of conduct; it counsels, directs, decrees the laws.” The hero’s love is seldom passionate and profound; it is delicate and discreet, in keeping with the play of manners in vogue at Louis’ court.[2]

Quinault’s free, elastic verse and his own experience as composer of ballets enabled Lully to compose diversified scores. His music lacked the harmonic audacity of the Italians: he avoided startling modulations, dissonant chords and abrupt rhythmic shifts; and employed standard musical ingredients in every opera. Nevertheless he blended his formula with a sufficiently variegated assortment of solo airs, choruses, duets, ballets and concerts to ensure variety. He also kept his audience interested by using a variety of machines, decorations and fancy costumes, and by contriving spectacular combats and awesome sacrifices. He likewise used a rich assortment of musical forms and techniques to give his operas colour and variety. He introduced stylised fanfares and marches to accompany the battles, sacrifices and infernal scenes. Scored for trumpets in four parts and drums in two parts, the Marche pour le combat de la barrière from Act I of Amadis, which accompanied a ballet for contestants in a mock battle, was typical of Lully’s diversion music.
Lully’s choruses were no less massive. Eschewing contrapuntal textures, he constructed four-part tonal blocks, which moved energetically, chord by chord, to a clear resolution. Lully was especially fond of antiphonal effects and often used large and small choruses in juxtaposition. In Act 3, scene I of Amadis, for example, he achieves a remarkable musical and dramatic contrast by alternating a chorus of jailors with one of prisoners. Again, although the public and the court were doubtless drawn to the opera primarily by the spectacle, the fundamental ingredient of the tragédie lyrique was the recitative. It was the recitative that welded music and drama into a unified composition. Lully’s paramount artistic aim was to project the text lucidly and directly. The first law of his recitative style, which was reminiscent of Baif’s, was that the music must conform to the rhythm of the verse: he, therefore, observed strictly syllabic diction and accentuation on the rhyme and on the caesura. The phrasing of the vocal line, the melodic curve, the inaudible shifts in meter – all were regulated by the rhythm of the verse, or, at times, by the emotions expressed in the text. Moreover, Lully abandoned clear demarcations between recitative and aria, a characteristic of Italian opera. The seed of a Lully air was planted within the recitative and germinated imperceptibly from it. The composer created this musical metamorphosis when the text called for emotional climax. Lully reserved agréments, dissonances, abrupt key changes, and appoggiaturas for especially affective movements in the drama, and his sparing use of such devices made them all the more striking when they did appear.[3]

Lully’s harmony was, thus, basically conservative: he used cross relations and parallel motion repeatedly; his chords were consonant, and his frequent and clear cadences were usually in the tonic. Generally, the airs were in either standard binary or da capo form, and they were accompanied. Most were enclosed by orchestral ritornelli. Removed from the context of the drama and divested in the interruptions of spectacle scenes, both the recitatives and the airs of Lully’s operas might seem dull and lifeless. The absence of counterpoint and the frequency of cadences gave his music a listless, static quality. Yet, Lully’s prolix recitatives and airs were the heart and soul of the tragédie lyrique; they carried the opera and differentiated it from both the classical drama and the court ballet. The important fact is that the tragédie lyrique was, indeed, a drama, and Lully’s music was dramatic music, not concert music.

Produced in 1673, Lully’s first opera, Cadmus, was a success at court and in Paris, and Lully followed it quickly with a new opera, Alceste. It was very well received by the courtiers but reactions from other quarters were less favourable. Among other things, Quinault was criticized for the feeble verse and boring subjects. In disputes of this type, it was the monarch’s verdict that really counted. Louis indicated his approval of Alceste by coming to Paris for performances and by ordering that it be produced at Versailles.

In many of Lully’s operas, the heroes are greatly assisted by gods and goddesses, but only after the heroes have overcome overwhelming obstacles and have defeated superhuman demons and jealous deities. In Alceste, however, the god Hercules is the only male character throughout the opera who displays the human virtues of bravery, honour and compassion. It seems probable that the audience was expected to associate Louis XIV with Hercules, who for years had served in artistic and musical compositions as a symbol of the French monarchy.[4]

The libretto of Alceste provided Lully with many opportunities to employ diverse musical effects. The recitatives, which had first become the identifying characteristics of Lully’s operatic style in Cadmus, were employed effectively in Alceste. Lycomède’s d minor recitative in Act I, Scene 5 contains bold melodic leaps and intervals of the fourth, fifth and octave; it moves rapidly into a bright air for voice and two violins but clings to the sombre key of d minor. In Act II Lully effectively contrasts Alceste’s lament in A major with Lycomède’s harsh declamatory air in d minor. The conclusion of Act I gave Lully the chance to compose a pictorial storm scene: Hercules prepares to pursue Lycomède, clusters of sixteenth notes played imitatively and in quick alternation by the strings suggests gusts of wind from the north.

Lully also took advantage of the siege of Scyros to insert a long combat scene; indeed, most of Act II is devoted to the siege. Alceste marked the beginning of Lully’s musical formula for military scenes: he made a great deal out of them, especially when as opera was performed during or following one of Louis’ successful campaigns, as Alceste was. He employed large double and triple choruses, instruments used in the battlefield (trumpets and field drums), fanfare and martial motifs, and, occasionally, a contrapuntal texture in the orchestral passages. Alceste, like Lully’s other operas, concludes with a pompous apotheosis in which the heavens open up, the gods of Olympus appear, and dances of celebration are performed.

Lully’s tragédies lyriques, created in a span of fifteen years, proved to be remarkable resilient until well into the eighteenth century. His immediate posthumous reputation rested on these works, because of them, his name was remembered by countless opera enthusiasts for many decades. In actuality Lully’s operas knew few boundaries, either geographical or chronological. In spite of the increasing popularity of attractive new genres such as the opéra-ballet, Lully’s tragédies lyriques continued to hold the stage with remarkable tenacity throughout the eighteenth century. A living legend during his lifetime, Lully was rapidly canonized after his death as the patron saint of French music – through the writings of Lecerf de la Vieville, Lully emerges as the very symbol of French style.[5] With Louis’ aid and encouragement, Lully became the absolute ruler of the musical world. In return, he gave his royal patron a musical drama that was distinctively French, and he made music a part of the general policy of national self-sufficiency.


References

[1] Donald J. Grout, A Short History of Opera
[2] Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century
[3] Isherwood.
[4] Isherwood.
[5] James R. Anthony ed. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau