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Jean-Baptiste Lully

Florence, 1632 - 1687, Paris

BiographyLC name authority rec. id n79072787
LC Heading: Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 1632-1687

BnF noitce d'autorite personne n.FRBNF13896861
Compositeur d'origine florentine. - Violoniste et danseur. - Au service de la Grande Mademoiselle (1646-1653). - Surintendant de la Musique du roi

Biography:

French composer of Italian origin. The son of a miller, he had only simple instruction in music during childhood, from a monk who taught him the guitar and the violin. He was taken to France in 1646 as garçon de chambre and Italian teacher to Louis XIV's cousin, Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans. At her court in the Tuileries his musical talents soon attracted attention and he became famous for his skill as a violinist; he probably also studied with the organists Nicolas Métru, Nicolas Gigault, and François Roberday.

By the time, in 1652, that Mademoiselle d'Orléans was exiled from Paris because of her sympathy with the Fronde uprising Lully had made an impression at court for his dancing, and the next year he was taken into court employment as compositeur de la musique instrumentale to Louis XIV, a position that involved writing music for the court ballets and dancing in them, bringing him into close contact with Louis XIV. He was admitted to the Vingt-Quatre Violons du Roi but found the band lacking in discipline and obtained permission to set up his own Petits Violons of 16 players. From 1656 to 1664 he trained this band, which became widely famous for its precision.

Meanwhile Lully was becoming known as a composer, especially of ballet. In 1660 his ballet entrées for Cavalli's Xerse and Ercole amante attracted more attention than the operas themselves, and the following year Louis made him surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi. He became a naturalized French citizen, and a further mark of the royal favour, his appointment as maître de musique to the royal family, enabled him to marry the daughter of the composer Michel Lambert. They had three sons, all of whom became musicians, and three daughters. Lully continued to compose ballets and in 1664 he wrote entrées for a revival of Pierre Corneille's Oedipe and his first comédie-ballet in partnership with Molière (in some of which he sang), a collaboration which was to culminate in 1670 with Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, a minor masterpiece of witty words with music to match.

By the end of the 1660s the idea of opera was growing increasingly popular in Paris. A privilege to establish opera academies in France was granted in 1679 to Pierre Perrin; in spite of Lully's initial scorn at the idea of large-scale dramatic works sung in French he was quick to take advantage of Perrin's fall from favour at court and bought his privilege in 1672. Soon after, and following some vicious intriguing, he was granted the right to compose and produce opera at the Académie Royale de Musique, a monopoly he held for the rest of his life. He went into partnership with the designer Carlo Vigarani, obtained premises in a tennis court, and staged the first tragédie en musique: Cadmus et Hermione, produced in 1673. The libretto was provided by Philippe Quinault, who also wrote texts for ten further tragédies for Lully in spite of the composer's constant criticisms and cuts. Louis then provided him with a theatre, at the Palais Royal. Lully stifled any potential rivals by imposing arbitrary and often crippling limits, as his privilege entitled him to do, on any other theatrical productions: for example, no one was permitted to use dancers, more than two voices, or more than six violins.

Lully was unscrupulous in his greed and ambition and capable of ruthless plotting against his rivals. He made numerous enemies. Royal favour saved him from prosecution for homosexual practices, though even Louis reprimanded him on this account in 1685. In the 1680s the court became more sober and restrained in its entertainments, and Lully turned his attention to church music. It was during a performance of his monumental Te Deum before the king in 1687 that Lully struck his foot with his conducting cane (it was normal practice to keep time by striking it upon the floor), and later that year he died after the foot had turned gangrenous. He left a considerable fortune, including five houses in Paris and the monopoly of the performing rights to his music. His greater legacy was a series of traditions that died hard and transformed the face of French music.

Lully's central achievement was the creation of French opera, and with it he established a style tradition that continued to dominate French musical theatre for more than a century—indeed his operas were unique at this time in retaining a place in the performing repertory for several decades after his death. They inspired several controversies among Paris intellectuals (French v. Italian; Lully v. Rameau; French tragédie v. Italian comedy; even Gluck v. Piccinni was affected by his shade).

Lully brought to the composition of lyric drama in French an acute understanding of French declamatory traditions and the non-metric structure of the language, devising a new musical style to accommodate them, one in which a uniquely flexible form of recitative (much slower-moving than its Italian counterpart, and unfettered by rhythmic constraints) could give full value to the words and their sense. He devised too a simple form of air, often using a dance rhythm, that could capture faithfully the nature of the sentiment expressed. He also created, using chorus and dancers, spectacular and effective divertissements, often with picturesque effects (tempests, sleep scenes, the underworld, for example). His dances, which abound in the operas, are often highly attractive melodically, with unusual rhythmic structures; and his five-part orchestration (even if he may have engaged assistants to fill in the parties de remplissage, the inner voices) is rich and resourceful.

Lully's musical gifts as such have sometimes been questioned, but recent revivals of his operas (among them Atys, Alceste, and Armide) have shown them to be more appealing in the theatre than the printed page seems to promise. Lully's works for the church consist mainly of grands motets (among which the Miserere of 1663 and the 1677 Te Deum are the most famous and admired), which have a grandeur and formal solemnity appropriate to the context for which they were composed.

Denis Arnold / Stanley Sadie
(Arnold, Denis and Stanley Sadie . "Lully, Jean-Baptiste." The Oxford Companion to Music. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, accessed January 26, 2016, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2344/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e4089.)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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