Jean-Baptiste Lully

Jean-Baptiste Lully (Florence, Italy, November 28, 1632-Paris, March 22, 1687) was a Franco-Italian composer, instrumentalist and dancer, linked to the figure and reign of Louis XIV. Initiator of opera in France and creator of the "lyrical tragedy", a genuine form that combines the French aesthetic sense with ballet.

Biography

Born in Florence, Italy, his name, before he became a naturalized Frenchman, was Giovanni Battista Lully. His parents were Lorenzo Lulli and Caterina. In 1638 his older brother Vergini died; in October 1639 his sister Margherita. At seven years old, Jean-Baptiste remains the only son of his parents. Jean-Baptiste received his education from him with a Franciscan friar who gave him his first music lessons. He moved to France at the age of ten, after drawing the attention of the Knight of Guise. There, in March 1643, he entered the service of Mademoiselle de Montpensier as a valet, who wished to perfect her knowledge of the Italian language.

At the age of thirteen, he already manifested a gift for music and learned to play the violin. He then revealed himself as an excellent dancer and became part of the Grande Bande des Violons du Roi, made up of twenty-four violins. In 1653, Lully danced with the king in the Ballet de la Nuit.

The young King Louis XIV on the main role of Apollo in the Ballet de la Nuit1653. On that occasion, Lully danced with the king.

In 1652, at the age of twenty, he entered the service of Louis XIV as a ballet dancer and violinist. He later conducted one of the royal orchestras and in 1662 was appointed musical director of the royal family. He stood out at that time as a violinist, conductor and composer.

He quickly obtained the direction of a new orchestra, La Bande des Petits Violons. A perfect courtier and skilful businessman, he soon became the court's foremost composer, and his arias and ballets established his reputation. Supported by Louis XIV, he became chamber composer and finally Superintendent of Music for Her Majesty.

Naturalized French in 1661, at the age of twenty-nine he married Madeleine Lambert a few months later, with whom he had six children and whose father, also a composer Michel Lambert, was the musical director of Mademoiselle de Montpensier.

Starting in 1664, he worked regularly with Molière, with whom he created a new genre, ballet comedy, without renouncing court ballet definitively.

A shrewd courtier, he managed to maintain royal favor throughout his life, allowing him to manage the fate of other French composers. He composed ballets, such as Alcidiane (1658), for the court, which he himself sometimes performed before the king. In collaboration with Molière (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) he composed a series of comic ballets, such as Les fâcheux (1661). In 1672 he intrigued to obtain the post of director of the Académie Royale de Musique and from then on he turned his attention to opera. The composer had already achieved a title of nobility and had acquired numerous properties in and around Paris. His operas, which he called tragédie lyrique, were based on the classical tragedies of his contemporaries, the French playwrights Pierre Corneille and Jean Baptiste Racine. Except in Psyche (1678), Bellerophon (1679) and Acis and Galatea (1686), the librettist for him was the poet Philippe Quinault. From a musical point of view, his operas are solemn and majestic, with a special emphasis on the clarity of the text and the inflections of the French language. Its elaborate dance performances and regal choruses have their roots in the ballet de cour (court ballet). Lully's operas contrast with the Italian style of opera at the time, in which the singer's brilliance was given priority. His works include Perseus (1682), Amadis de Gaula (1684) and the aforementioned Acis y Galatea .

Jean-Baptiste Lully's bust. Work of Antoine Coysevox.

In 1681, Lully reached the zenith of his career by becoming secretary to the King. Bisexual, Lully had intimate relationships with both women and men and, despite everything, Louis XIV, who knew his inclinations, closed his eyes to his behavior, although, under the influence of Madame de Maintenon, he tolerated homosexuality less and less., called then «Italian vice».

In 1685 a scandal broke out. It was learned that Lully had a relationship with a young page from the Chapel named Brunet. The composer then lost his credit to the king. He did not attend the performances of Armide in 1686. When Lully composed his last work Acis et Galatée, a pastoral in the form of an opera, it was alone in the castle of Anet, before the Dauphin, and the work premiered on September 6, 1686. He died of gangrene in Paris, in 1687, as a result of a wound in the foot with his conductor's cane, a heavy iron bar that it was used to keep time by hitting the ground with it; this caused an infection that slowly ended his life, as his thought of being a dancer prevented him from cutting off his leg in order to save him.Lully's fame is mainly due to his contribution to religious and stage music. He is entombed in the Notre Dame des Victoires basilica in Paris, the sarcophagus is located above the arch of a door, on the left side.

Works

Some of his early works, from the time when he was primarily a violinist, and later a composer of dances and airs in the Italian style, which are:

• Ballet Royal d'Alcidiane, 1658
• Les Amours Déguisés, 1664
• La Naissance de Vénus, 1665
• Les Muses, 1666

Then come the comédies ballets, produced in collaboration with Molière:

• Le Mariage forcé, 1664
• L'Amour Médecin, 1665
• Georges Dandin, 1668
• M. de Pourceaugnac, 1669
• The Gentile bourgeois man, 1670

In the last stage of his life, he composed thirteen «tragédies lyriques», the majority on texts by Philippe Quinault:

• Cadmus et Hermione, 1673
• Alceste, 1674
• Thésée, 1675
• Atys, 1676
• Isis, 1677
• Psyché, 1678 Choeur des divinités de la terre et des eaux, from Psyché - Midi file (?·i)
• Bellérophon1679
• Proserpine, 1680
• Persée, 1682
• Phaëton, 1683
• Amadis, 1684
• Roland, 1685
• Armide, 1686
• Achille et Polyxène1687 - Prologue and Act I (Ended by Pascal Collasse)

He also composed an heroic pastoral :

• Acis et Galatée 1686

Legacy

The particularity of Lully's work, in an age where music rarely transcends the death of composers, is that it would become the model of his own genre.

Musically, it lives on for the duration of the music in the grandiose and grave manner of the court of Louis XIV. His stylets, harmonic language, and orchestration survived into the generation of composers immediately after Lully: many of them were even his students, and his style remained unchanged well into the century XVIII.

Even with the change of environment brought about by the Regency, these works continued to be performed regularly, always forming part of the repertoire until the eve of the French Revolution. Then they were admired for their theatrical aspects, their unity and coherence, and for the direct, sincere and perfect poetry of Philippe Quinault's verses.

Rameau himself, a renovator of the eighteenth-century musical language, was an admirer of Lully's work and composed lyrical tragedies as debut works when he started out in the theater, at a time when the genre was already considered outdated.

A century later, in the times of Marie Antoinette, with the beginnings of classicism in France, Armide and other works will still be protagonists and were used as base material for the reform of opera, recognizing once more the verses of Quinault.