Cesti’s operas likewise contain many passages evidently intended for the horn, although the instruments are not specified in the score, which was nothing unusual at the time. Lulli composed the incidental music for a ballet, La Princesse d’Elide, which formed part of Molière’s divertissement, “Les plaisirs de l’île enchantée,” written for a great festival at Versailles on the 7th of May 1664. A copy of the music for this ballet, made about 1680, is preserved in the library of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The music contains a piece entitled “Les violons et les cors de chasse,” written in the same style as Cavalli’s scena; there are but two staves, and on both the music is characteristic of the horn, with which the violins would play in unison. The piece finishes on B♭
and to play this note as the second of the harmonic series, the fundamental not being obtainable, the tube of the horn must have been over 17 ft. long. Among Philidor’s copies of Lulli’s ballets preserved in the library of the Paris Conservatoire of Music (vol. xlvii., p. 61) is a more complete copy of the above. The second number is an “Air des valets de chiens et des chasseurs avec les cors de chasse,” which is substantially the same as the one in the Fitzwilliam Museum, but set for five horns in B♭. Here again the use of D, the fifth note of the harmonic series, indicates that the fundamental was
a tone lower than the C horn scored for by Cavalli, and known as B♭ basso. Victor Mahillon[56] considers that the music reveals the fact that it was written for horns in B♭, 35 degrees (chromatic semitones) above 32-ft. C, or
having a wave-length of 1.475 m. To this statement it is not possible to subscribe. The quintette required four horns in B♭ over 8 ft. long and one B♭ basso about 17 ft. long. It is obvious that the present custom of placing the bass notes of the horn on the F clef an octave too low, as is now customary, had not yet been adopted, for in that case the bass horn would in several bars be playing above the tenor.
In 1647 Cardinal Mazarin, wishing to create in France a taste for Italian opera, had procured from Italy an orchestra, singers and mise-en-scène. That he was not entirely successful in making Paris appreciate Italian music is beside the mark; he developed instead a demand for French opera, to which Lulli proved equal. The great similarity in the style of the horn scène by Cavalli and Lulli may perhaps provide a clue to the mysterious and sudden apparition of the natural horn in France, where nothing was known of the hybrid instrument thirty years before, when Mersenne[57] wrote his careful treatise on musical instruments.
The orchestral horn had been introduced from Italy. It is not difficult to understand how the horn came to be called the French horn in England; the term only appears after Gerber and other writers had repeated the story of Count Spörken introducing the musical horn into Bohemia.[58] By this time the firm of Raoux, established in Paris a hundred years, had won for itself full recognition of its high standard of workmanship in the making of horns.
This use of the horn by Lulli in the one ballet seems to be an isolated instance; no other has yet been quoted. The introduction of the natural horn into the orchestra of the French opera did not occur until much later in 1735 in André Campra’s Achille et Deidamie, and then only in a fanfare. In the meantime the horn had already won a place in most of the rising opera houses and ducal orchestras[59] of Germany, and had been introduced by Handel into the orchestra in London in his Water-music composed in honour of George I.