IV
This one man, Jean Baptiste Lully (or Lulli), was born in Florence or near there in 1633. He had come to Paris when a boy of twelve or thirteen in the suite of the Duc de Guise, knowing little of music, save the guitar. He had been a kitchen boy in the service of Mlle. de Montpensier, and now, in 1672, was given sole control over opera throughout the kingdom of France. The way in which he won favor with the king shows him to have been an intriguer, and the king to have had little genuine appreciation of music apart from the tunes to which he danced in the court ballets. Lully was at first admitted into the king’s band of violins, and later was made head of a special band. Not only was he a ready composer of dances to the king’s taste; he was himself a dancer and a mimic. In Molière’s comedy-ballets to which he was commissioned to compose music he often acted with much-admired skill. As to his treatment of Molière the less said perhaps the better. He was a skillful manager, he was always ready with some amusement for the court. From the start he played for the royal favor, and he won it. Not only was he given the sole authority to produce operas in France; Cambert was even denied the right to produce his as well.
Lully had no systematic training as a musician, but he learned from all he came in contact with; from Cambert, who had written music for the ballets; from Cavalli, who came to Paris with his Xerxes in 1660; and again with Ercole amante in 1662, to both of which Lully was commissioned to set ballets that they might meet with the requirements of French courtly taste. From 1672, when he gained control of the opera, to his death, in 1687, he wrote an opera, a tragédie lyrique, every year. His manner of composing, according to Lecerf de la Viéville (1705) was as follows: ‘He read the libretto until he knew it nearly by heart; he would then sit down at his harpsichord, sing over the words again and again, pounding the harpsichord; his snuff-box at one end of it, the keys dirty and covered with tobacco (for he was very slovenly). When he had finished singing and had got his songs well in his head, his secretaries, Lalouette or Collasse, came, and to them he dictated. The next day he could hardly remember what he had dictated.’
Lully was a clever, exceedingly intelligent man, a good actor, a good clown, a good dancer, an unscrupulous plotter, an iron disciplinarian. Not only did he write the music to his operas, he superintended and often remodelled the libretti furnished him by Quinault, the poet of his own choosing. He was indefatigably painstaking. He coached the singers even to the way they should enter and leave the stage, and he drilled the orchestra so that it had a precision, the traditions of which endured for more than a century. He was not a great musician. One may believe that he left the filling out of his harmonies to his secretaries, Lalouette and Collasse. His airs and his choruses are in the ballet style of the century. Only in recitative did he accomplish anything new. He wrote his operas at the same time Racine was producing many of his most famous tragedies—Racine, who was a master of verse and of declamation; and he modelled his recitative according to Racine’s art of declamation. The great law of it is that it shall be syllabic, one syllable to one musical tone. Music is here in strict bondage to words. Lecerf says that the recitative as developed by Lully is a just mean between tragic declamation and the art of music. According to L. de la Laurencie[139] a comparison of Lully’s recitative with the recitative of Carissimi or of Provenzale shows that Lully proceeded to a clearing of the Italian technique, cutting from it all the absurd weeds which the taste for bel canto and even musical taste in the strict sense had let grow in the garden of melody. We have in the recitative of Lully, then, something that is not music, but a mean between declamation and music. Often stiff and monotonous, it is only rarely impassioned and effective. Always the words, the rhyme and the verse are of paramount importance. In this regard it was so much to the taste of the French audiences, of the précieux, that Lully’s operas came to be valued far more for their recitative than for their airs. The recitative became not an artificial bond between airs and choruses, but the main burden of the opera, as indeed it should be; and in this respect he is a great reformer and akin to Monteverdi on the one hand and Gluck on the other. He is the founder of the admirable French style of declamation. Thus the opera of Lully and the opera of Scarlatti are strikingly different. Both were bound to a strict public convention, but Scarlatti wrote for the bel canto, Lully for declamation; the Italians craved the sensuous beauty of the voice in song and let the drama go; the French demanded intelligent declamation, and sacrificed music. Of the two the French opera was essentially more rational and nearer artistic truth, though even in Lully’s lifetime it became wholly stereotyped; and neither form as it left the hands of its finisher was capable of further development until infused with new life by a great reformer such as Gluck.
Jean-Baptiste de Lully.
To Lully as a musician belongs the credit of having given definite form to his overtures. The so-called French overture as he established it was generally in two parts or movements—the first slow and serious, the second lively and in vigorous, fugal style. Sometimes a third movement recalling the first was added. These overtures were much admired in their day and during the next century, and the form was adopted by most of the German composers as the first movement of the orchestral suite, and by Handel for overtures to his oratorios. Lully seems to have been most successful in instrumental music of a ‘noble and martial kind.’ Marches from his operas were actually played for soldiers in the field, and ‘when the prince of Orange wanted marches for his troops, he had recourse to Lully, who sent him one.’ All of Lully’s airs and especially his dance tunes have a simplicity and a clearness of outline which secured to them a popularity not forgotten even to-day. It is music easy to remember, vigorous in rhythm and in sentiment, positive and definite, often poor in harmony and grace and never subtle, but on the other hand never vague or weak. As far as it goes it goes unfalteringly and with a sureness that challenges respect and is at times superb.
After the death of Lully, early in 1687, French opera subsisted upon what he had left it. There was no man to take over his supreme dictatorship and until 1723, when Rameau began to write for the stage, no operas of any influence were written in Paris. Conventional form was too strong even for a man like Charpentier, whose musical gifts seem to have been higher than Lully’s. Desmarets, Des Touches and Campra are hardly more than imitators of Lully. Lully stands alone in the history of French opera during the seventeenth century as absolute a despot in the realm of music as his great patron, Louis XIV, over the lands of Europe. He won his place by intrigue, he kept it by an enormous strength of will and perseverance and by shrewd observation of the court taste.
There was no more genuine critical appreciation of music in France during the gorgeous reign of Louis XIV than there was in Italy, Germany or England at the same time. According to M. Combarieu,[140] there was no more real public than there were true critics—a few wits writing verses and publishing their dislikes or their flatteries, their naïve admiration for banal prowess in virtuosity. The mark of the king is on all music; music for the king’s ballets, for the king’s opera, for the king’s suppers, for the king’s fêtes, and above it all the haughty, majestic king. Lully and Racine, Lully and Molière!