Mariam Chincharauli

Divertissments in lully’s earlier operas

“Opera is a spectacle made as much for the eyes as for the ears.”

Durey de Noinville, Histoire du Théâtre de l’Opéra en France (Paris, 1753), I, 6

Introduction

In the seventeenth century dancing became an essential social skill and the mastery of
the most popular social dances of the day was necessary for participation in elite society. The
dances of aristocratic society were largely international in flavor, although subject to regional
variations. Greater variety characterized the music played to accompany dances throughout
Europe.

Besides dance’s role as a cultivated social pastime, the art had long played a role in the
theatrical spectacles staged by kings and princes as well. In France, dance played a central role in
royal fêtes and spectacles, and in the staging of ballets de cours. The ballet de cour made use of a
printed libretto that was circulated among the audience, and its long performances included
songs, musical interludes, dances, and poetry that treated a mythological theme or story. Its
primary purpose was to glorify the figure of the monarch, but at the same time, the ballets de
cour also made use of the knowledge recently unearthed by Renaissance humanism concerning
ancient dance, music, and poetry.

As a result, dances performed in the theater became increasingly the preserve of

professional dancers and dance began to acquire enhanced status as an art form with poetry,
music, and drama. At the same time, the modern institution of the ballet emerged in close
connection with the opera. Ballet troupes, for example, were most often connected to opera
houses, and ballets played a key role within the action of operas or as a diversionary
entertainment within theatrical and musical productions. This pattern developed in Paris at the
end of the seventeenth century as the ballet’s rise to prominence as an art form occurred in close
connection with the city’s main opera house.

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In 1672, Louis XIV chartered the Royal Academy of Music, a production company that
throughout its long history came to be known most frequently merely as the Opera, since its
operatic productions were a primary source of its revenue and fame. Within a few years the king
also gave the Academy’s director, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, the use of a theater in the
Palais Royale, a popular theatrical and commercial development near the Louvre. Dance figured
prominently in most of the operas staged there, and Lully soon founded a permanent dance
troupe within the opera to support his grand musical creations.

The dancers who performed in the troupe were initially all men, and they also performed
for the king at the court and some choreographed productions staged elsewhere. Women entered
the troupe quite early. The first female performer, Madame de Lafontaine (1655-1738), appeared
at the Opera in 1681 in a production of Lully’s opera The Triumph of Love. As amateur
performers, women had long been active in court productions, although they had usually
appeared in scenes with other women, or they had relied on masques to hide their true identities.
Madame Lafontaine’s appearance thus set an important historical precedent, and female dancers
soon made inroads into the troupe.

The operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully dominated the musical life of late seventeenth-century
Paris and of the royal court at Versailles. Lully had a long history of using dance in his musical
productions. During the 1660s he cooperated with France’s great comic playwright, Molière, to
produce a series of “comedy-ballets” in which dances were interspersed between the spoken
scenes of the drama. His greatest achievements, though, were in the production of operas
known as tragédies en musique, or lyric tragedies. Lully composed thirteen of these tragic
operas, all of which show careful attention to the integration of dance into the drama’s action. He
apparently worked quite closely with his librettist, Phillippe Quinault, to ensure that dance was
an accompaniment and enhancement to the sung drama.

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 Let us mingle our loveliest songs with the most beautiful dances.

Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, prologue

(The feasts of love)

These words, sung by three of the Muses at the end of the prologue to Jean-Baptiste
Lully’s first opera, invite the members of the audience into the world of the spectacle they are
about to watch. At the same time they articulate a statement of aesthetic purpose: the new art was
to unite song and dance. Words, music, and dance – their alliance lies at the heart of the world
that Lully and Quinault were to create together. They remained a powerful model for newly
created works. The basic template could be manipulated, but it could not be abandoned. In the
operas of Lully and Quinault the dancing is so thoroughly intertwined with the vocal music that
the two arts must be viewed together: dance cannot be separated from its dramatic
underpinnings.

In general, the dancing occurred during the part of every act that came to be called the
“divertissement,” when groups of performers flooded the stage in a musically and visually
sumptuous display that became one of the hallmarks of French opera. “divertissement” is a
structural term, which refers to a conventionally circumscribed portion of every act, regardless of
its contents. A divertissement generally constitutes a single scene, but may spill over into others
or even occupy most of an act. Within all, however, the dances are treated with restraint, in
keeping with Lully’s overall aesthetic, which eschewed excess. In fact, Lully’s divertissements
typically include only two or three instrumental dances, each usually quite short. No one in
Lully’s day would have complained about dancing drowning the opera. This is not to say that
dancing was restricted to instrumental music; dancers were also set in motion during some of the
choruses, and the structures that Quinault and Lully crafted are what made the integration of the
arts of song and dance possible.

The fundamental fact that dance in Lully’s tragédies is embedded within a vocal
framework, regardless of whether the dance piece is instrumental or sung, has crucial
implications; it impacts how we hear both vocal and instrumental music, interpret the sung texts,
think about staging practices, and conceptualize Lully’s musical architecture. Lully’s stage is
crowded. One or two of the main characters may give their names to the opera, but inside it they
are never treated in isolation.

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Dancers are heavily implicated in the functioning of these social worlds, but they do
not act alone. Almost always the dancing characters belong to a collective entity in conjunction
with singers; within this group the dancers provide the movement, the singers the voices. More
often than not, the groups are at the beck and call of a powerful being, human or divine; the
libretto often makes this explicit by identifying them as someone’s “followers.” In other cases
the group may have a leader from among its number – or even two.

The menuet and passepied are the most recognizable, because they always involve at
least some menuet steps, even on the stage. The bourrée and the gavotte, on the other hand, have
distinguishable musical profiles, but few if any differences in the range of steps. Whatever the
basis for the distinction – musical, choreographic, or both – Lully did label some of the dances in
his scores as to type. The following list includes only those dance-types so labeled in his opera
scores; these account for approximately one third to one half of the dances in any opera. Lully’s
operatic dance-types are:

Bourrée, canarie , chaconne, gavotte, gigue, menuet, passacaille, passepied ,

sarabande.

The allemande was no longer danced in this era; the courante and the various types of
branles belonged to the ballroom; and the Folies d’Espagne, for which four theatrical
choreographies survive, do not appear in any of Lully’s scores. Although the contredanse and the
rigaudon already existed in France, they only appeared in operas with the next generation of
composers. The dance-types in the above list do not begin to account for all the dances found in
Lully’s operatic scores. Most are simply called “entrée” or “air,” sometimes followed by the
name of the characters performing them, such as the “Air pour les nymphes de Flore” from the
prologue to Atys (1676). The music for such dances aims to express the essence of the
characters dancing.
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It has been claimed that the menuet is the Lully dance par excellence: the most frequently
used dance in his operas. There are, indeed, quite a few menuets – approximately 30 in his
thirteen tragédies – but a blanket statement about numbers masks the fact that menuets are much
likelier to appear in Lully’s prologues than elsewhere in his operas. Armide, for example, has
three menuets in the prologue and none thereafter. (When menuets do appear outside of
prologues, they figure as part of celebrations, such as the party given by Sangaride’s father for
his fellow river gods in Act IV of Atys.) One hypothesis for the prologue–menuet connection has
to do with the menuet’s status as the pre-eminent ballroom dance of the day, one danced
frequently at court. Its use in the prologue, a paean to the king, may have favored associations
between the dance and the monarch. The geographic origins imputed to some dance-types (e.g.,
the bourrée d’Auvergne, passepied de Bretagne, menuet de Poitou) have no discernible impact
on how the dances are used in Lully’s operas, for the simple reason that characters from these
French regions do not show up in his mythologically based tragedies.

However, Lully did make use of such associations in other contexts: the Spaniards in the
“Ballet des nations” that closes the Bourgeois gentilhomme dance a sarabande and the Breton
characters in Le Temple de la Paix, a ballet put on at court, dance passepieds. In his operas, Lully
does occasionally seem to invoke an association between a dance-type and certain characters,
such as the chaconne danced by Africans playing guitars in Cadmus et Hermione (I/4) 36 or the
two sarabandes in rondeau form in Armide I/3, which are musically akin to the Spanish
sarabande from the Bourgeois gentilhomme.

In fact, the choice of this variant on the sarabande for a divertissement offered to Armide
(1686) by the people of Damascus may be a means of marking her kingdom, and by extension
herself, as exotic. In the generation of composers following Lully, when works set in existing
locales were put on the stage, geographic associations grew stronger. It has a musical affinity to
the opening section of a French overture, in that it is in duple meter and characterized by dotted
figures . The tempo has to be slow because there are two – often technically demanding – step-
units per measure. There are several entrée grave choreographies in Beauchamps-Feuillet
notation, all of them assigned to men, whether as a solo, duet, or group dance. Most entrées
graves have the same musical features throughout both sections, but there is a subgroup in which
the second strain retains the same meter, but moves the dotted figure to the next smallest note
values.

Conclusion

In conclusion, although dance was still considered a divertissement, a diversion to the

main plot of his operas, Lully’s operas were long remembered after his death as a particularly
“French” art form, in part because of their persistent attempts to integrate dance, poetry, music,
and singing into a greater whole. Even in the eighteenth century great choreographers anxious to
develop the ballet as an independent medium looked to the operas of Lully for support in their
efforts, and French writers treating aesthetics were also quick to point to the composer’s art as an
expression of the country’s genius. Still, the connection between dance and drama upon which he
relied was largely implicit and dancing’s representation certain situations exceed by virtue of its
appeal to the emotions and senses the power of spoken words.
 Bibliography:

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Little, Meredith Ellis. “Problems of repetition and continuity in the dance music of
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“Recovering the Lullian divertissement.” In McCleave (ed.), Dance and Music, 55–80.
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58.

“The phrase structures of Lully’s dance music.” In Heyer (ed.), Lully Studies, 32–56.
“Reading Roland.” JSCM 16 (2010)
Video-audio examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMImdpNLL9w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV6kr2BOBtA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClCe0iZGVK4&t=32s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoJlIGbuW-k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJZPzi_Odw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ml8Q6KyPo