Magnificence in Motion: Stage Musicians in Lully`s Ballets and Operas

0DJQLILFHQFHLQ0RWLRQ6WDJH0XVLFLDQVLQ/XOO\
V%DOOHWVDQG2SHUDV
$XWKRUV5HEHFFD+DUULV:DUULFN
5HYLHZHGZRUNV
6RXUFH&DPEULGJH2SHUD-RXUQDO9RO1R1RYSS
3XEOLVKHGE\Cambridge University Press
6WDEOH85/http://www.jstor.org/stable/823731 .
$FFHVVHG
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cambridge
Opera Journal.
http://www.jstor.org
6, 3, 189-203
Cambridge
OperaJournal,
Magnificencein motion: Stage musicians in
Lully's ballets and operas
REBECCA
HARRIS-WARRICK
Those fortunate enough to have seen the recent production of Jean-Baptiste
Lully's Ays mounted by Les Arts Florissants will remember the sumptuously
staged realm of sleep in Act III, during which costumed lute and recorder players
appeared alongside the singers and dancers. Although conductor William Christie
and director Jean-Marie Villegier made no attempt to reproduce the original
seventeenth-century staging, they did adhere to Quinault's instructions for this
scene to the extent of making musicians prominently visible.1 Ays is not
exceptional in calling for stage musicians: Lully regularly included instrumentalists
among the dramatispersonae of his tragediesen musique, the genre on which he
lavished most of his creative energies after 1672, and the practice is even more
evident in the thirty or so ballets he composed for Louis XIV's court during the
preceding two decades. The phenomenon of on-stage instrumentalists - much
more extensive than the use of the bandain nineteenth-century Italian opera - has
been studied only for the information it affords about the development of Lully's
orchestra or the iconography of French Baroque opera.2 This article is concerned
rather with why instrumentalists appeared on stage at all, what they represented,
how they functioned as characters, and the impact they had on the visual
spectacle.
Such an enquiry is necessarily somewhat speculative: it is often difficult even to
establish wheninstrumentalists stepped onto the stage, let alone who they were or
what they were playing. The most important sources for such information are the
livrets published at the time of the performances. These may describe stage events,
such as trees parting 'to reveal woodland divinities who play various instruments' in
the prologue to Alceste ('les arbres s'ouvrent, & font voir les Divinitez Champetres
qui joiient de differents instruments'; see Fig. la); or they may list the names of the
instrumentalists participating in a particular scene (see Fig. 2 from the Ballet de
2
The production did not, however, use as many stage musicians as the 1676 livret indicated,
omitting, most notably, the two viol players. Villegier explained some of his views regarding
the staging of Atys in the programme booklet for performances of the opera at the Salle
Favart in Paris in 1987 ('Un reve noir habite par un soleil'): 'We defined the main outlines
of our performance by listening to Ays - to the words and music that Quinault and Lully
joined so well - and by refusing to read the stage directions furnished by the livret. Instead
of the six sets, the scene changes in full view of the audience, and the stage machines
requiredby the livret, we have substituted a single, stripped-down location. The multiple
roles embodied by the chorus are reduced to two aspects: diurnaland nocturnal.'
Because almost no records survive from the Paris Opera during Lully's tenure as director
and because the scores of his operas indicate orchestrationonly partially,historians have
investigated the information about on-stage musicians as a means of learning more about
Lully's orchestra. See in particularJerome de La Gorce, 'Some Notes on Lully's Orchestra',
Jean-BaptisteLully and the Music of the French Baroque:Essays in Honour ofJames R Anthony, ed.
John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge, 1989), 99-112.
RebeccaHarris-Warrick
190
(a)
LA NYMPHE DE LA SEINE.
Nayades, Dicux des bois, Nymphes, que tout
s'affemblc,
Qu'on entcndcnos chantsaprestantde foCpirs.
LA
NYMPHE DES THUILLERIES
s'avance
avec unetroupede NYMPHES qui danfent,les
4rbress'ouvrent, &font voir les Divinitez
Champetresqui joient de diferents infrruenNAY aments, & lesfontaintsfe cbhangent
D s
qui chantent.
(b)
TOU
S.
Que tout retentifle,
Que tout rdpondea nos voir.
Que le chantdes Oyreaux s'unifie,
Avec le doux fon des Haut-bois.
Que tout reteniife,
Que tout riponde a nos voix.
Uts Divinitez des Fleuves & les rymhtes
forment unedanfegenerale, tandisqueles
injfrments& toutesles voix s'uniJ?ent.
Fig. 1 Two excerpts from the prologue to Lully's opera Alceste(1674) as published in the
Recueilgeneraldes operarepresentez
Royalede Musique,vol. I (Paris: Christophe
par 1'Academie
Ballard,1703).
PREMIERE
ENTRE'E.
N Granddonnevne Sercnadea fa MaLtrcflcimpatientde la yoir.
V
POYR
YNE SERENADE.
Chant'eparM. le Gros,
d'vnConcert
Idc
4Ccomnpgne
pifrurs inftrmmcnts.
Melieurs cd la BWrrcVincent, Itier Grenerin, le
Moine, & Hurcel. THorkes,Piefche,Defcoufleaux
pcre& fils,ls troisOptercs,Paifible,Alais,& Deltouchcs, Flukes. Marchand,la
Caiffc,la Fontainc, e
Bre,la Picrrc,IcComtc,Magny,lesdcicxls Vignc, Ics
deux Ic Roux, RoQUle
IcGrcs,Huguenccc. iolons.
Fig. 2 The opening of Lully'sBalletde l'Impatience
(Paris:Robert Ballard,1661), in which a
lord serenades his mistress whom he is impatient to see. The twenty-nine instrumentalists
listed as accompanyingthe serenadewere all members of the king's musical establishment.
Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas
191
l'Impatienceof 1661). During Lully's lifetime only the livrets published for
performances at court - and only some of those - included performers' names. A
livret from a 1677 performance of Alceste, for example, identifies the abovementioned divinities playing from the trees as four oboes and a musette. However,
even the court livrets vary considerably in the level of detail they provide.
Sometimes only lists of instrumentalists' names confirm their appearance on stage.
In the fourth act of Theseethe stage direction says that 'the other inhabitants of the
enchanted isle dance to the sound of rustic instruments' ('Les autres Habitants de
l'Isle enchantee dansent au son des instruments champetres') - by itself a remark
too vague to indicate whether the players were seen or merely heard. Lists of
performers' names in three court livrets, however, reveal that woodwind players did
appear on stage in this scene.3
Furthermore, when livrets do mention instrumentalists, it is often only in general
terms, such as the 'rustic instruments' in Thesee or the even vaguer 'various
instruments' in Alceste. A comparison between livrets and scores offers only limited
help: ballet scores provide almost no verbal instructions concerning instrumentation, the opera scores just a few.4 To complicate matters still more, the terminology
of instrument names is notoriously imprecise: 'oboe' might mean any kind or size
of double reed, or even another woodwind such as the flute.5 These difficulties
notwithstanding, it is clear that Lully made a regular practice of placing costumed
instrumentalists on stage, often several times in the same work.6 Performances of
Alcestein 1677 involved stage musicians in the prologue and four out of the five acts,
while performances of Atys the same year required their presence in three. In
investigating the implications of such an extensive practice, it is helpful to compare
Lully's operas with his ballets and to consider the reciprocities between the
musicians' roles, the choreography of their movements and staging.
The operas
In Lully's operas the most likely places for instrumentalists to appear on stage are
in the prologue or in the divertissement
incorporated into each of the five acts. In the
3
Although the list in the Balletde l'Impatience
(shown in Fig. 2) breaks down by family of
instruments, many lists do not. In such cases it is only possible to deduce instrumentation
by comparing players'names with personnel records for the king's musical establishment.
This documentation may be found in MarcelleBenoit's Musiquesde cour:Chapelle,chambre,
ecurie1661-1733 (Paris, 1971).
4 The most
thorough study to date of Lully's orchestrationis Jurgen Eppelsheim, Das Orchester
in den Werken
Jean-Baptiste
Lullys(Tutzing, 1961). Clef usage and the range of the individual
parts offer some help where instrumentaldesignations are lacking. Regardingrepresentative
problems in the ballets, see Rebecca Harris-Warrick,'From Score into Sound: Questions of
Scoring in Lully's Ballets', EarlyMusic,21 (1993), 354-62.
5 A vivid illustrationof this last problem may be seen in La Gorce, 'Some Notes', 101 and
102, where costume designs by Jean Berain for the 'flutists' on stage in Theseeand Isis show
the musicians holding oboes.
6 Given the paucity of documentation, it is not clear whether Lully's use of stage musicians
was the same in public performances in Paris as in court performances at
Saint-Germain-en-Laye.However, enough Parisianlivrets refer unambiguouslyto stage
musicians to show that the practice was not confined to the court.
192
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
last act of Alceste, for example, the arrival of Apollo with the Muses and Les Jeux
sets off celebrations of Alceste's return to life in which the principals of the opera
become spectators while deities, nymphs and shepherds express their joy in chorus,
song and dance. In this expansive scene, time slows down as the emphasis shifts
from the musically declaimed word to more purely musical and visual forms of
the
expression. Although celebrations or ceremonies motivated many divertissements,
librettist Quinault structured acts so that these scenes would be fully integrated into
the action of the opera. In Ays, the dreams that dazzle the audience are sent by the
goddess Cybele as a warning to the sleeping hero, while in Bellerophon,the king of
Lycia offers a sacrifice to the oracle of Apollo in an attempt to persuade the god to
save his country from the monster that is ravishing it. Although the demand for
visual spectacle was satisfied by these interludes, the word 'divertissement' or
'diversion' does an injustice to scenes so central to the progress of the plot.
When they appear on stage in such scenes, instrumentalists have the same status
as the singers and dancers. The prologue to Isis (1677), for example, centres on an
encounter between Renown, Neptune and Apollo, each of whom has a group of
attendants: the Rumours following Renown include a chorus of twenty-six singers
and five trumpets; Neptune is accompanied by two singing tritons, six tritons
playing the flute, and eight dancing marine gods; Apollo arrives in the company of
the seven Liberal Arts and the nine Muses. The Liberal Arts are represented by
dancers, whereas among the Muses Clio, Calliope, Melpomene, Thalie and Uranie
sing, while Erato and Euterpe play the flute and Terpsichore and Polymnie play the
violin. These various characters may express themselves differently - through song,
dance or instrumental music - but the equivalence accorded them suggests that the
audience was intended to read them as interlocking elements in a single system of
meaning. Stage musicians do not serve merely as a source of sound, but participate
fully in communicating the drama.
Given that in Lully's operas particular settings or situations tend to recur, the
significance of these characters was at least partly emblematic. Just as a character's
costume could instantly identify him as, say, a shepherd, so the sound of an oboe
could immediately evoke his rustic world. Long-standing conventions governed
associations between instrument types and particular settings: trumpets and drums
evoked warfare, flutes divinities, oboes the pastoral. But these associations do not
explain what emblematic value the other main group of instruments found on
stage - continuo ensembles composed of lutes, theorbos and viols - might have
had, nor why the violin family, with the exception of the two violins in Isis, is
conspicuous by its absence from the operatic stage. Nor is it readily apparent why
Lully and Quinault considered it essential that these instrumentalists be seen as well
as heard. Their status as characters demonstrates, nonetheless, that their signification did not depend on sound alone; it was not sufficient for the audience to hear
such instruments playing from the pit - it also had to see them.
One obvious but partial explanation has to do with versimilitude. In a world in
which all speech is represented by song, casting musicians as characters signifies to
the audience that what it hears is to be perceived as 'real' music. The contexts in
which instrumentalists figure are often ones that in the everyday world generally call
Stagemusiciansin Lully'sballetsand operas
193
for music, such as weddings, festivities or religious ceremonies. When such
situationsare depicted on the stage, the inclusion of actualinstrumentalistsindicates
that a shift has occurred from a spoken to a musical realm. Quinault'stexts often
acknowledge this point by alluding to the fact that the charactersare, at such a
moment, singing. As the chorus states in the prologue to Alceste(Fig. 1b): 'Let
everythingresound, / Let everythingrespond to our voices. / Let the song of the
birds unite / With the sweet sound of the oboes'.7
Lully'sand Quinault'sinsistence on calling attention to the act of music-making
may be due in part to French unease at the idea of sung drama.Despite repeated
attemptsby CardinalMazarinto introduceItalianopera into France,the French did
not take to the foreign import and developed an opera of their own only late in the
seventeenth century.8One of the stumbling blocks for the French- who had a
highly developed spoken theatre- was that opera had to be sung from beginningto
end. Even Lully himself remained unconvinced for a long time that opera was
possible in the French language.CatherineKintzlerhas observed that French opera
emerged only after it had been thoroughly conceptualisedon the basis of French
enmusique
'inverted'the tragedie
experiencewith spoken tragedy.Although the tragedie
its
reliance
on
the
both
dramatique
through
supernatural,
genres rested on three
fundamental principles: necessity, appropriateness and verisimilitude. All stage
events, along with the composer's musical responses, had to be justifiableunder
these principles;music found a raisond'etreboth in celebrationsand rites and in the
realmof the supernatural.9
Visible stage music thus served to reassurethe spectators
that what they were hearingwas both appropriateand realistic.
Given this conceptual framework, it is not surprising that in Lully's operas
instrumentalistsnot only participatein festivities on earth, but also fly in cloud
machines with goddesses, or serenade the lords of the Underworld.In some cases
their presence clearlymarksa shift to the realm of the supernaturalin which music
and dance, not speech, become the means of communication.The strikingsonority
of recorders,theorbos and viols played in view of the audience by ten Dreams in
Act III of A_ysdelineatesthe realm of sleep even before dancers set Atys's dreams
in motion.
In a genre that moves back and forth between the world of mortalsand the realm
of the merveilleux,
a markerthat is both visual and auralmight seem a useful and even
necessary distinction. But in attempting to discern how systematically Lully
may have marked the supernaturalas musical, we are hampered by incomplete
7
In his book Opera:TheExtravagant
Art (Ithaca, 1984), Herbert Lindenbergerpoints out the
extent to which opera incorporates 'literal'music, frequently structured(as is often the case
with Lully) as charactersperforming for other characters.See especially 139-42.
8 RegardingMazarin'sefforts, see Neal Zaslaw, 'The First Opera in Paris:A Study in the
Politics of Art',Jean-Bapfiste
Lully,7-23. Following a few unsustained efforts, French opera
en musique,Cadmuset
finally became institutionalisedin 1672 with Lully's first tragedie
Hermione.
9 These ideas are
fully developed in Kintzler's book, Poetiquede l'opirafranfaisde Comeillea
Rousseau(Paris, 1991). A brief discussion of some of the central issues may be found in her
from
article, 'La trag6dielyrique et le double d6fi d'un theatre classique', La tragddie
Iyrique,
the collection 'Camets du Theatre des Champs-Elys6es'(Paris, 1991), 51-63.
194
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
information in the scores and livrets. As far as we can tell, his practice appears
inconsistent: deities may 'sing', but they may also 'speak' in recitative and short airs.
Divertissementslocated in supernatural realms do not always signal a switch to a
musical mode of expression via texts that allude to singing or by introducing visible
instrumentalists; rather, the dramatic situation seems more influential in determining
when to put instrumentalists into costume and on stage. If a ceremony or
celebration normally involves music- whether it takes place on earth or in a
supernatural realm - the music-making will often be made visible. The frequency
with which musicians step onto the stage suggests that the very act of making music
is part of what these operas is about.
Operatic stage music not only calls attention to its status as 'real' music, but also
influences the audience's perceptions of the passage of time. Luca Zoppelli has
pointed out that, in nineteenth-century Italian opera, stage music unfolds in real
time, in contrast to arias and other closed numbers, which the audience recognises
as amplifications of brief moments.10 In Lully's operas, however, stage music
operates quite differently by affording an opportunity for musical and temporal
indulgence. French principles of verisimilitude demanded that characters who
'speak' through music do so simply and naturally (the word 'naturel' recurs
repeatedly in French comparisons of their own music with that of the Italians), thus
with minimal text repetition in a style that blurs the boundaries between air and
recitative.11 Because the little airs embedded seamlessly in the recitative barely slow
the progression of time and permit none of the vocal display that Italian audiences
craved, they operate in something akin to real time. But in dramatic situations
involving 'real music', verisimilitude invited musical expansiveness. The divertissementscontain the most substantial musical numbers in the operas: long stretches of
purely instrumental music in closed forms, strophic dance songs, and lengthy
choruses that indulge in a great deal of textual and musical repetition. Moreover,
Lully often repeated entire numbers in order to form still larger, rounded units.
Because a more purely musical expression controls the divertissements,
time seems
much more static.
The musical expansiveness of the divertissements
allows for a greater emphasis on
the visual, especially on dance. In Lully's operas dance has two main functions: to
mime actions or to represent actual dancing, as in scenes of celebration. (The most
famous example of mimetic dancing involves the people who live in frozen climes
in Act IV of Isis, whose shiverings were reportedly choreographed by Lully himself.)
Although the latter type is more likely to involve stage musicians, even the former
sometimes requires their presence. In Act I of Thesee,following an off-stage battle
10
LucaZoppelli,' "StageMusic"in EarlyNineteenth-Century
ItalianOpera',this journal2/1
(1990), 29-39; see especially36-7.
In his Memoires
(1787), CarloGoldonireportedthe impressionFrenchoperamadeon him
the firsttimehe attendedthe AcademieRoyalede Musique:'I waitedfor the aria... The
dancersappeared:I thoughtthe act was over,not an aria.I spokeof this to my neighbour
who scoffedat me and assuredme thattherehad been six ariasin the differentscenes
whichI had justheard.How couldthis be? I am not deaf;the voice was always
.. . but I assumedit was all recitative.'Citedin JamesR.
accompaniedby instruments
Music
to Rameau,
rev. edn (New York,1978), 84.
Anthony,French
Baroque
fromBeaujoyeulx
Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas
195
won by the Athenians, the grand priestess thanks Minerva for the victory and offers
prayers for her continued protection. Soldiers, among whom are four trumpeters
and two drummers, bring in the spoils from the battle, then mime a combat as a
kind of charm to ward off future wars. Even here, however, it is the performance
of a ritual within the larger performance of the opera that justifies the presence of
stage musicians.
The ballets
Lully brought to the operatic stage two decades of experience composing ballets for
the king. These allegorical representations of the monarchy and the court - often
offering a curious hybrid of the solemn with the comic or grotesque-were
performed by the king and his courtiers alongside professional dancers in royal
employ.12 Despite the semi-public character of the ballets (the publication of the
livrets allowed their political messages to reach beyond the audience of courtiers),
the court tradition to which they belonged helps account for many features of their
staging, including the deployment of stage musicians. When Lully turned to
composing operas, works performed not only before the king but also before a
paying public in Paris, he maintained both the politicised framework of the ballet
and a number of its structural features.13
Lully's operas exhibit a functional and aural differentiation between the instruments in the pit and those on stage. This differentiation rests upon both intrinsic
and extrinsic conditions: the structure of the work, in which the drama is expressed
primarily by singing, and the nature of the performance space, which defines the
orchestra pit and the stage as separate areas. Neither of these conditions necessarily
obtains in the ballets, which were structured as an episodic series of dances around
a theme, but lacked a developed plot and had very little vocal music. Because every
entree had its own set of characters, it was essential that they be recognisable as
soon as they set foot on stage. As in the operas, the presence of stage musicians
could reinforce the visual signs provided by costumes; in an entree from the Ballet
de ['Impatience,
for example, the sight and sound of two hurdy-gurdies in the on-stage
instrumental ensemble support the characterisation of the dancers as blind men.
But stage musicians are not limited to emblematic roles. Ballet livrets mention
instrumentalists much more frequently than the opera livrets, and in much greater
numbers. In fact, it is exceptional for a ballet livret not to call for stage musicians.
All families of instruments participate: woodwinds are mentioned most frequently,
but there are many roles for continuo groups, brass instruments and - in contrast
to the operas - string ensembles. These groups almost always appear as consorts of
12
13
See Charles I. Silin, Benserade
andHis Balletsde Cour(Baltimore, 1940; rpt. New York, 1978)
and Marie-Fran;oiseChristout,Le Balletde courde LouisXIV: 1643-1672 (Paris, 1967).
Regardingthe politics of Lully'sworks, see Robert M. Isherwood, Musicin theServiceof the
Century(Ithaca, 1973) and Manuel Couvreur,Jean-Baptiste
Lully:
King:Francein theSeventeenth
au serviceduprince(Brussels, 1992). For a more general treatment of the
Musiqueet dramaturgie
political ends to which various types of spectacles were put during the Renaissance and
Festivals1450-1650 (Woodbridge,
early Baroque, see Roy Strong, Art andPower:Renaissance
Suffolk, 1984).
196
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
like instruments; only exceptionally are members of different instrument families
mentioned together. The orchestra as we conceive of it had not yet been
institutionalised; in fact, I deliberately avoid the term 'orchestra' even in connection
with Lully's operas because it evokes modern organisational practices that do not
necessarily apply there.14
Very few of Lully's ballets were performed in proscenium theatres - the normal
venue was either a large room in a royal palace or the out-of-doors. In either case
whatever was needed by way of a stage and seating was specially constructed for the
occasion. At least some of the time these temporary theatres did include a pit for
the musicians, as engravings occasionally show, such as an outdoor performance of
La Princessed'Elide in 1664 (see Fig. 3). But the livrets of a number of ballets hint
that all the musicians, not just the occasional wind ensemble, were costumed and
visible to the audience.
The Ballet de lImpatience,for example, opens with an impatient lover serenading
his beloved, accompanied by 'un concert de plusieurs instruments', all of whom are
named (see Fig. 2). 'Plusieurs' turns out to mean twenty-nine: six 'theorbos'
(judging from the names of the players this probably means a mixture of lutes,
theorbos and viols), nine flutes and fourteen violins. The violin ensemble is
particularly interesting because the names reveal that these are the famous petits
violonsof the king, the ensemble that Lully cultivated when he began his meteoric
rise through the ranks of the royal musical establishment. Payment accounts suggest
that the petits violonsplayed more frequently for ballets than did the grandsviolons,the
ensemble also known as the 'twenty-four violins of the king'.
When one compares this list with the score, the number of instrumentalists seems
to overwhelm the requirements of the immediate musical context: the instrumentalists supposedly accompany a recit,scored for one voice above a figured bass line,
followed by a ritournelle in trio texture. (As usual, the score gives no instructions
regarding instrumentation.) This large group- including strings, winds and continuo, and featured prominently near the start of the livret - must be the ensemble
not just for the serenade, but for the entire ballet.
The livret for Le Carnavalof 1668 is exceptional not only for the long list of
instrumentalists it provides, but also for its extended description:
Le Carnavalhabille d'une maniere qui le fait d'abord reconnoistre, paroist sur un petit
Throne, dans le fonds du Theatre. I1 est environne de sa Suite ordinaire,vestue de ses
Livrees, & composee d'un grand nombre de Personnes qui chantent, & qui jouent de
plusieurs sortes d'Instruments.Les Violons qui le suivent, commencent a celebrer son
retour,& Luy-mesme,par un R6cit qu'il chante, excite les Enjoiiementsqui l'accompagnent,
a delasser le plus Grand des Monarquesde ses glorieux Travaux.
14
Given the preponderanceof wind instruments in Lully's stage ensembles and their
emblematic use, one wonders if in his early operas the pit musicians might not have
consisted entirely of strings and continuo instruments,with the winds reserved for on-stage
appearances,where their presence and sonority was demanded by the dramaticsituation.
Perhaps even the oboes - later a staple of the French orchestral sound - came into the pit
only gradually.The manuscriptscores of Lully's early operas (the printed scores of the
same works postdate Lully's death and may reflect later practices) have yet to be
thoroughly studied.
teatre fait
~n~?-r
mur--
Oec o-nde.,-
dactu n, mme.,
de lta ?ritr "e 9c ! jJ
?rr.?~r?~war-_~
r
..t
c~~r__r _i~
ou rn
me_
la Co,n
a,
reFrrfeUat
YI-
h'
,
t(./.
altlet
A.-----------?r_-*a-~u?eCLW
Fig. 3 Temporary theatre constructed in the gardens of Versailles for a performance in 1664 of Lully
ienchantee . . divise en troisj
d'Elide. The engraving, bv Israel Silvestre, was published in Les Plaisirs de ise
de may',de I'annee1664 (Paris, 1676).
198
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
[Carnival,dressed in a manner that makes him immediatelyrecognisable,appearson a little
throne at the back of the stage. He is surroundedby a large group of his usual followers,
wearing his livery, some of whom sing and some of whom play various kinds of
instruments.The violins who follow him begin to celebratehis return,and he himself, in a
sung recit,calls upon the Pleasuresthat accompanyhim to help the greatest of all monarchs
relax from his glorious works.]15
The followers of Carnival, dressed in his livery, number no fewer than seventy,
listed in four groups: twenty-one people of unidentified function (whose names
show them to be singers and continuo players), twenty-two grands violons,eighteen
petits violonsand eight flutes. At the head of this enormous ensemble appears the
name of Lully himself. These are obviously the musical forces for the whole ballet,
not just for the opening, which is only slightly more expansive than the start of the
Ballet de l'Impatience(a chorus follows the opening recit). If there are seventy
musicians on stage - the majority of the king's instrumentalists - a pit ensemble
would surely be superfluous. In this particular ballet it is quite possible that raised
benches were constructed on the perimeter of the stage from which the musicians
could be both seen and heard, while leaving the centre free for the dancers. (Fig. 4
shows an arrangement of this type for a mascarade at Versailles in 1683.) Some such
arrangement is suggested by the fact that no instrumentalists are mentioned again
until the end, when
Le Carnavaldescend pour accompagnerla Galanterie,& tandis qu'ils chantent une maniere
de Dialogue, ou tous les choeurs, tant des voix que des instrumentsse meslent, & repondent
tour a tour; ce qui a paru dans les Entrees precedentes se reinit, & dance ensemble.
[Carnivaldescends [from his throne] in order to accompany Gallantry,and while they sing
a sort of dialogue,in which all the ensembles, both voices and instruments,participateand
respond in turn, everyone who has appearedin the preceding entrees returns and dances
together.]
Although Le Carmavaldoes not necessarily require that the instrumentalists
move around the stage, other ballets do. During the closing scene of the Ballet de
Flore (1669) a procession appears, led by two trumpeters, of peoples from the
four corners of the world: Europe, Asia, Africa and America. Each is represented
by at least four dancers (Louis XIV himself led the 'Europeans') plus either ten
or twelve violins, all costumed according to geography and gender (the livret
identifies the assignment for each). The eight flutes and oboes are not identified
by role, but appear to be attached to the 'Americans'. The livret does not say
what the fifty-eight instrumentalists do once they arrive on stage; the raised
benches it mentions in passing appear to be reserved for the chorus, which also
participates in this scene. Perhaps what we think of as the natural order is
reversed: the chorus remains immobile on its benches, while the instrumentalists
move about.
Although the limitations of the performing spaces may have influenced the
decision to place instrumentalists within view of the audience, what undoubtedly
15
Le Camaval(Paris: Ballard, 1668), 3.
Fig
i
G
BX~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ertzn~~~~~~~~~~~~~
l
Fig. 4 A mascarade performed in a private apartment at Versailles in 1683. The two groups of costumed violinis
constructed in the window openings on the left. The woman seated on the throne between them is the Pr
illegitimate daughter, in her role as Queen of Egypt. The engraving by Le Pautre after a design by Jean Berain w
issue of the Mercuregalant.
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
200
matteredmuch more was the desire for display.A majorelement of the raisond'etre
for a court ballet is the representation of the court to itself. Such works are
deliberatelyself-referentialand often surprisinglyfrankin what they revealabout life
in court circles. Little poems written for inclusion in the livrets by Isaac de
Benserade,librettistfor most of Lully'sballets,cleverlyconfound the characteristics
of the role with those of the person playing it: in the BalletdesArts of 1663, for
example, a verse in honour of Louise de La Valliere,playinga shepherdess,alludes
slyly to her position as the king's mistress (the king representeda shepherd in the
same entree):
Non, sans douteil n'estpoint de Bergereplus belle,
Pourelle cependantqui s'ose declarer?
La pressen'estpas grandea soupirerpourelle,
Quoy qu'ellesoit si proprea fairesoupirer.
Maispourquoyla dessuss'estendredavantage?
Suffitqu'onne sgauroiten diretrop de bien,
Et je ne pense pas que danstout le village,
II se rencontreun coeurmieuxplaceque le sien.'
[No, withoutdoubt no shepherdessis more beautiful,/ Yet who would dare make a
declaration
to her?/ Even thoughshe deservesto solicitsighs./ ... / Butwhypursuethis
further?/ Sufficeit to saythatone cannotspeaktoo highlyof her/ And thatI don'tthink
thatin the entirevillage/ A morehighlyplacedheartcan be foundthanhers.]
In the same ballet a verse about Lully in his role as a surgeon refers to his recent
marriageas the cure for his crippled condition- presumably an allusion to his
homosexuality.16
But the display inherent in court ballets is also aimed outwards, especially
towards the foreign ambassadorswho, after the royal family, always had the best
seats. The degree to which bodies of courtiers and paid servants alike could be
set magnificently in motion, whatever the ostensible theme of the ballet,
represented to the world the control the king exerted over his court and his
nation. As participantsin the rituals of the king's daily life, his musicians were
necessary parts of the visible display. In the ballets they are paraded before the
audience in great numbers. In the operas their numbers are often reduced to
symbolic levels, but their functions on stage closely paralleltheir real-life roles at
the court, which involved them in festivities, rituals and religious ceremonies.
The fact that some of these ceremonies are set in the realm of the supernatural
only emphasises the hyperbolic trope that Louis XIV's power extended to 'all
the universe'. Like the king in his own ballet roles, the king's musicians were, in
a sense, always portrayingthemselves.
16
see Couvreur,Musiqueet dramaturgie,
RegardingBenserade's mastery of the doubleentendre,
111-15.
Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas
201
Instrumentalists in motion
The livrets for Lully's theatrical works reveal that at least some of the time
instrumentalists moved around the stage and participated in the overall choreography of a scene. They do not, however, offer more than vague hints as to how
instrumentalists might interact with the singers and dancers with whom they share
the stage. Fortunately,Le Mariagede la GrosseCathos(Fat Kate'sWedding),
a ballet by
Andre Danican Philidor performed at Versailles in 1688, the year after Lully's death,
suggests some answers to the staging questions raised by Lully's works. The unique
choreographic notation by Jean Favier that preserves all the dances from this
mascarade also includes movement indications for the singers and instrumentalists,
making explicit connections between groups of performers only hinted at in Lully's
livrets. Although this work is on a much smaller scale than any of the Lully
compositions mentioned here, it is particularly useful in the present context because
it combines elements from both the ballet and operatic traditions.17
In this one-act mascarade, the cast consists of a nine-member oboe band, eight
dancers and nine singers, who perform both as soloists and collectively as the
chorus. All twenty-six performers remain on stage for the duration of the
work - approximately forty-five minutes. The plot, such as it is, is carried by sung
dialogue among the principal singers, and as in an opera, the dances are performed
by lesser characters - in this case guests at the wedding. The oboes represent the
village waits whose job is to provide music for the festivities.
This ballet was performed in a large room of a private apartment in the
chateau of Versailles. No information is available as to what sets, if any, were
used, but beyond whatever there may have been, the bodies of the performers
are deployed to provide a frame for the performance space. Once the performers
have entered the stage in a procession led by the oboes, each group establishes a
territory for itself around the perimeter in a flattened U. The 'home positions'
for the oboes consist of two straight lines on either side of the stage; the singers
assemble in a flattened semi-circle across the back of the stage; and the dancers
take up positions in the two upstage corners. The 'U' frame assumed by the cast
is defined as passive, the interior area as the active part of the stage into which
individual performers or groups move when the dramatic focus falls on them,
only to retreat into their home positions when the focus shifts. If two singers
have a duet, for example, they step forward from their home positions to the
front of the stage, sing their lines, then rejoin the other singers as the next group
of performers advances. The performers' positions relative to the space thus
define the ways they are viewed by the audience: in their home positions they are
perceived collectively as villagers; in the centre they call attention to themselves
as individuals.
17
The scoreand dancenotationsfor this workarepreservedat the BibliothequeNationalein
Paris,Res. F. 534a-b.A facsimileof the entiremanuscriptplus a discussionof the workand
its uniquesystemof dancenotationmaybe foundin RebeccaHarris-Warrick
and CarolG.
at theCourtofLouisXIV: 'LeManagedela Grosse
Cathos'
Marsh,MusicalTheatre
(Cambridge,
for whichall the choreography
1994).This is the only knownBaroqueentertainment
survives.
202
Rebecca Harris-Warrick
Dances are choreographed not only to instrumental pieces, but also to two
choruses. In one case the dancers react to the singers' words, which exhort everyone
to run up and hear exciting news. The other chorus, celebrating the pursuit of
pleasure, alternates sung phrases during which the dancers remain still with
instrumental passages during which they move: audience attention thus shifts back
and forth from the sung word to its choreographic embodiment until in the last
phrase voices, instruments and dance join together. Both choruses make explicit
what cast lists for Lully's ballets only imply - that full casting requires singing bodies
and dancing bodies to represent essentially the same people. It is not the singers
who act out their own words, but rather the dancers who are, in a sense, their
doubles. The division of labour observed here is supported by evidence from the
Paris Opera suggesting that the chorus there did not move, but used the dancers as
surrogates.18
Other parts of the mascarade show that the visual and verbal expressions of a
single idea may be consecutive rather than simultaneous. After the bride and groom
allude in a bouncy duet to the pleasures of wine, a guest reveals the consolation he
finds in drinking all day long. Immediately following his confession, two drunken
dancers vividly portray the results of such overindulgence, staggering through what
tries to be a noble entreegrave.They make visible what others have already expressed
in words. In the economy of this ballet it does not seem necessary that there be a
one-to-one correspondence between singing bodies and dancing bodies: the danced
duet represents the idea of drunkenness, not the person of the one drunken singer.
Like the dancers and the singers, the oboists contribute to the webs of meaning
through movement as well as music. Their choreography indicates that they fulfil a
double function. When they stand in their home positions on the two sides of the
stage, they form part of the village community and recede into the background,
while individual actions take place centre stage. Within the artificial world of musical
theatre, where speech is replaced by song, the instrumentalists support the artifice
by providing the musical accompaniment. From this position they also accompany
many of the dances. On four occasions during the mascarade, however, the oboes
move to centre stage along with the dancers and by so doing call attention both to
their reality as musicians and to their participation in the life of the community. The
places where the oboes become visually prominent are ones that require music in
real wedding festivities: processionals, recessionals and dances of communal
celebration. The musicians' contribution to the community thus becomes part of
the subject of the dance. This idea, apparent in all four choreographies, comes
particularly to the fore in the passepied, where dancing villagers make visible their
connectedness with the village musicians by first encircling and then weaving among
them.
There is no way of knowing how precisely this staging represents Lully's
practices, but the likelihood of correspondence is high. Both the composer Andre
18
Even cast lists make this division of labour explicit by defining charactersas, say,
'shepherds who dance' and 'shepherds who sing'. See also Lois Rosow, 'Performing a
Choral Dialogue by Lully',EarlyMusic,15 (1987), 325-35, especially 329-31.
Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas
203
Danican Philidor and the choreographer Jean Favier had spent almost their entire
professional lives performing Lully's works under his direction. Philidor clearly
modelled the music of this mascarade on Lully, even to the point of parodying the
opening of Ays. Although this particular work is too limited in scope to resolve all
the issues that arise in staging a Lully opera, it does enable us to extrapolate certain
useful aesthetic principles. The first is the notion of a single focal point: audience
attention is directed to only one kind of activity at a time. Second is the division of
labour between singers, dancers and instrumentalists, each group having a clearly
defined sphere of activity based on its role in the spectacle as a whole. The task of
choral singers is to make ideas heard, of dancers to make them visible; solo singers
and stage musicians may operate in both spheres. Third is the way in which
choreography, sung text and music use independent modes of expression to express
a single larger idea, be it (in this work) courtship, community or drunkenness. Single
governing ideas often embrace a group of related musical numbers. Lully's practice
of forming a series of small pieces into a larger unit has often been noted as a
principle of his musical construction;19 Philidor adopts the same practice, while
Favier constructs the choreography in such a way as to reinforce the connections
made by the music. Finally, the distinction between mimetic dances that represent
actions such as drunken staggering and dances that represent dancing - that is, such
as might occur at a wedding - finds a correspondence in the way instrumentalists
are deployed on stage. When the dancing represents something that is not ordinarily
accompanied by music, the instrumentalists remain undifferentiated from the mass
of performers; when communal dancing becomes the subject, thus representing a
situation in which a dance band would normally participate, the instrumentalists are
included in the choreography. All four of these principles appear consistent with
what can be inferred about Lully's practices.
Comments about choreography might seem to fall outside the bounds of a study
about instrumentalists, but the point I hope to have made is that the nature of
Lully's theatrical works makes it impossible to view groups of performers
independently. Although everyone knows that French opera accorded a prominent
position to dance and visual spectacle, music historians often tend to devalue dance
music and to dismiss divertissements
as mere parentheses, as convention-bound
of
the
drama.
Yet
the
combined
evidence from the Lully sources and
interruptions
the Philidor mascarade demonstrates that such scenes rely not on independent
elements but on an integration of different modes of expression in the service of a
single artistic goal. Granting stage musicians their full status as characters requires
recognising the complex interdependence of their relationships with the dancers and
singers, much of which is visual. Like Lully's audiences, we need not only to hear
his stage musicians, but also to see them - if only in our mind's eye.
19
See, for example, Lois Rosow, 'Lully,Jean-Baptiste', TheNew GroveDictionaryof Opera,III
(London, 1992), especially 87-9, and Herbert Schneider, 'Strukturender Szenen und Akte
in Lullys Opern',Jean-Baptiste
Lully:Actes du Collogue/Kongreflbericht,
Saint-Germain-en-LayeHeidelberg1987, ed. Jerome de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider (Laaber, 1990), 77-98.