Jean-Baptiste Lully

French composer

• Born: November 29, 1632
• Birthplace: Florence (now in Italy)
• Died: March 22, 1687
• Place of death: Paris, France

The Italian-born Lully, considered the founder of national French opera, developed, with librettist Philippe Quinault, a new—and controversial—genre of music called tragédie en musique, or tragédie lyrique, about life at court. Also, he set the patterns and guidelines for French Baroque musical style.

Early Life

The youngest child of a merchant in Florence, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was given the name Giovanni Battista Lulli at birth, had an irregular education. He apparently learned to play the violin and guitar, taking music lessons from a local Franciscan friar. What other training he received is unknown, as are any contacts he made.

At age thirteen, Lully was taken into the service of a powerful French noblewoman, the duchesse de Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, a cousin of King Louis XIV and popularly known as La Grande Mademoiselle. To assist her study of the Italian language, she had her uncle, on a visit to Florence, recruit Lully to tutor her. It is not known how or why Lully was chosen, only that he set out for France in late February, 1646.

Legend says that Lully first worked in the lady’s kitchens, but, actually, he was one of La Grande Mademoiselle’s salaried garçons de chambre. Lully mastered the French language, Gallicized his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully, and learned the ways of the courtier. La Grande Mademoiselle was a devotee of music in particular, and at her court in the Tuileries the young Lully attended performances by the best musicians of the day. He cultivated his contacts while diligently acquiring further instrumental training, thus becoming an outstanding violinist and a competent keyboard player. He also became a skilled dancer and comic actor.

In 1652, at age nineteen, Lully composed a choreographic piece for his patron in which he also danced. His dancing skills had attracted the attention of the young king, himself an ardent terpsichorean (interested in dance). When, in 1652, La Grande Mademoiselle suffered disgrace and exile, the king arranged Lully’s transfer to royal employment. Two months later, Lully, then twenty years old, danced in a spectacular court production, together with the king, who was then fourteen years old. The young monarch was so impressed that in less than one month he made Lully composer of instrumental music at his court.

Life’s Work

From the outset, Lully faced rivals and hostile intrigues. His grace, precision, and cleverness as a dancer, however, won the king’s personal favor and support. Acquiring his own orchestral ensemble, he first contributed to collaborative court ballets. From 1656 onward, he advanced aggressively, composing his own dance and vocal scores. In 1660, and again in 1663, Lully won attention with his earliest sacred works.

As an Italian by birth, Lully enjoyed the support of the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin (also a French-naturalized Italian), who sought to introduce into French cultural life Italian musical styles, especially opera, an Italian invention and monopoly until then. To this end, Mazarin imported the leading Venetian operatic master, Francesco Cavalli, to compose a lavish opera to celebrate the king’s marriage in 1660. The project became mired in delays and was not realized until early 1662, when its foreign character—with long recitatives in Italian—ran counter to French tastes. Mazarin died during this time of delay, on March 9, 1661. That, combined with the Cavalli failure, doomed the efforts of cultural Italianizers at court, to whom Louis was not really sympathetic.

With Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV assumed full personal power. One of his first acts was to appoint Lully superintendent of the music of the King’s Chamber. The ambitious composer had recognized that his future depended upon shedding Italian associations and fully accepting French identity. In December, 1661, Lully received from the king formal naturalization as a French subject. Soon after (July 16, 1662), Louis appointed Lully master of the royal family’s music. Eight days later Lully married the daughter of the distinguished singer and composer Michel Lambert. The contract witnesses included the king, the queen, the Queen Mother, and the chief minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert .

Lully’s soaring status in France was matched by a growing reputation abroad. Ever self-serving, Lully cultivated important collaborators, such as Pierre Corneille . In 1664, he launched a partnership with the great comic playwright and actor Molière, resulting in several comédies-ballets . Their collaboration produced the immortal Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670; The Would-Be Gentleman , 1675), in which Lully also danced. Their collaboration foundered on financial disputes, however, and ended as Lully plunged into his greatest project.

In 1669, the king had created the Académie d’Opéra, contracted to Pierre Perrin. Lully was very critical of Perrin’s efforts, arguing ostentatiously that the French language was unsuitable for opera. However uneven, though, Perrin’s experiments in French opera had shown that possibilities existed. When Perrin was beset by financial troubles in early 1672, Lully bought out his rights and then secured a royal grant (March 13, 1672) authorizing the new Académie Royale de Musique (now the Grande Opéra), which replaced the Académie d’Opéra. A series of royal decrees then guaranteed Lully almost total control of musical theater in France. This process reflected the king’s determination to centralize control over all areas of French life, notably by creating academies in each sphere of cultural activity. Lully, meanwhile, by this time had the power to stymie and hobble his musical competitors.

Converted to the idea of a distinctly French opera, Lully quickly found a congenial new literary partner—librettist Philippe Quinault, who was to write eleven of the librettos for the sixteen operas that were to become Lully’s great achievements. The first of their tragédies lyriques , or tragédies en musique, as he called them, was Cadmus et Hermione (1673). Molière’s death enabled Lully to take over Molière’s theater: With that, Lully’s company became known as the Paris Opéra. Alceste: Ou, Le triomphe d’Alcide (1674) provoked such harsh criticism from Lully’s enemies that the king had the opera’s successors—Thésée, Atys, and Isis (1675-1677)—produced in a royal theater. Suspicions of court satire in the last of these operas brought temporary disgrace to Quinault, obliging Lully to seek new collaborators. He used librettos by Thomas Corneille for his next two operas, Psyché and Bellérophon (1678-1679), but could resume work with Quinault for six more operas: Proserpine, Persée, Phaëton, Amadis, Roland, and Armide (1680-1686).

The king stood as godfather to Lully’s eldest son (1677), and allowed Lully the new title of counsellor to the king, conveying noble status. Nevertheless, strains developed between them: Lully’s homosexuality caused the increasingly religious Louis to withdraw favor. The composer found patronage elsewhere, and his last completed opera, the pastorale Acis et Galaté (1686), was performed privately outside Paris. Still, despite difficult legal entanglements, Lully ran his enterprises skillfully and accumulated considerable wealth.

Matching the king’s religious bent, Lully composed more sacred music in these last years. It was at a performance of his Te Deum in a ceremony in January of 1687 that he injured his foot with a blow of the staff with which he was directing. The wound’s infection led to his death two months later.

For all his dancing skill and courtly grace, Lully was often coarse—even violent—in manners and language. While he carefully nurtured his musicians, he often fell into fits of rage and brutality: When one female singer threatened to withdraw from a production because of pregnancy, Lully kicked her in the stomach, forcing her miscarriage and saving his schedule.

Significance

Lully’s style set the obligatory guidelines for French composition during and after his lifetime. In church music, he consolidated the distinction between the petit motet (for soloists and instruments) and the grand motet (for soloists, chorus, and orchestra), leaving admirable models. He revitalized French dance and ceremonial music, blending an Italian clarity with the French love for ornamentation.

In his operas, Lully developed a pliant vocal line, avoiding the sharp Italian distinction between recitative and aria, while fitting the rhythms and flow of the French language. He set the ABA pattern for the French form of the overture: slow, in dotted rhythm; fast, fugal; and the reprise of the opening. He favored the French love for dance by decreeing the inclusion of danced divertissements in opera scores, culminating in a formal chaconne or passacaille. The next century of French Baroque music would have been inconceivable without him, while his style and forms were imitated widely abroad, especially in Germany.

Bibliography

Anthony, James R. French Baroque Music: From Beaujoyeulx to Rameau. 1974. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1978. An authoritative work, placing Lully’s music in the larger context of French development.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. French Baroque Masters. New York: Norton, 1986. Introducing essays about four other composers, Anthony’s own useful sketch of Lully, with a full bibliography, is expanded and updated from its original form in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980).

Heyer, J. H., et al., eds. Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Important studies of aspects of the composer’s career and art by leading specialists.

Isherwood, Robert M. Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. A probing study that relates Lully and his music to patterns of French royal image-building.

Newman, J. E. W. Jean-Baptiste de Lully and His Tragédies Lyriques. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979. An important analysis of the composer’s chief musical legacy.

Scott, R. H. F. Jean-Baptiste Lully. London: Peter Owen, 1973. A brief but still-useful study of the composer’s life and work.

Wood, C. Music and Drama in the Tragédie en Musique, 1673-1715: Jean-Baptiste Lully and His Successors. New York, 1996. Traces the evolution of the Lulliste tradition in French opera.