THE POLITICS OF PATRONAGE

Chapter:

CHAPTER 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored

Source:

MUSIC IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

The irrational, though, can have its rational uses, and nobody knew that better than Jules Mazarin, the seventeenth century’s most artful politician. It was Cardinal Mazarin (né Giulio Mazzarini), the Italian-born de facto regent of France, who took the first steps, in the earliest years of the boy-king Louis XIV’s reign, to establish opera in his adopted country. He recruited the services of Luigi Rossi (ca. 1597–1653), the leading composer of Rome, to write an opera expressly for the French court. Fittingly, indeed all but inevitably, this first officially sponsored French opera, performed at the Palais Royal on 2 March 1647, was another Orfeo, another demonstrative setting of the myth of music’s primeval power to move the soul.

Forty years after Monteverdi’s treatment of the same tale, the new work showed the influence of opera’s commercial popularization, so that it resembled Monteverdi’s Poppea more than it did his Orfeo. Where Monteverdi’s Orfeo had only the briefest of duets for Orpheus and Eurydice (to celebrate their happiness, not express their love), Rossi’s gave the nuptial pair (both sopranos) no fewer than three extended love scenes. Orpheus, a natural tenor in Monteverdi’s setting, is a soprano castrato in Rossi’s, so that these scenes closely resemble the ones for Nero and Poppea in Monteverdi’s last opera. Also in the spirit of Poppea rather than Monteverdi’s Orfeo, Rossi’s Orfeo has a pair of comic characters (one of them a satyr) who mock the lofty passions of the main characters.

But like Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and like all the early aristocratic musical tales, Rossi’s Orfeo was fitted out with sumptuous scenery, with dancing choruses, with lavish orchestral scoring and with machines (the most splendid one reserved for Apollo, who descends in a fiery chariot that illuminates a fantastic garden set). Above all, it had the requisite sycophantic prologue that showered praises on the young King Louis from the mouths of gods and allegorical beings.

By masterminding this display, Cardinal Mazarin secured for himself a prestige that rivaled that of his own mentor, the Roman cardinal Antonio Barberini, Rossi’s patron. The Italian spectacles, full of everything merveilleux, bedizened the French court more gloriously than any rationalistic drama could do, for “the purpose of such spectacles,” wrote the moralist Jean de la Bruyère (1645–96), a court favorite and a converted operatic skeptic, “is to hold the mind, the eye and the ear equally in thrall.”⁶

And there was something else as well. Rossi, in his turn, recruited for his performances a troupe of Roman singers and instrumentalists, a little colony of Italians in the French capital who were personally loyal to Mazarin, and who, in the time-honored fashion of traveling virtuosi, could serve him as secret agents and spies in his diplomatic maneuvers with the papal court. All of this was a lesson to Mazarin’s apprentice, the young king, who thus received instruction, as a French historian has put it (using the French word for lavish arts patronage), in “the political importance of le mécénat.”⁷ The foundations were laid for what the French still call their grand siècle, their great century, and opera was destined to be its grandest manifestation.

Yet it was a very special sort of opera that would reign in France, one tailored to accommodate national prejudices, court traditions, and royal prerogatives. The French autocracy was the largest ethnically integrated political entity in Europe. Its royal court was the exemplary aristocratic establishment of the day, and its musical displays would classically embody the politics of dynastic affirmation. Like every other aspect of French administrative culture, the French court opera was wholly centralized. Its primary purpose was to furnish “propaganda for the state and for the divine right of the king,” as the music historian Neal Zaslaw has written, and only secondarily to provide “entertainment for the nobility and bourgeoisie.”⁸ No operatic spectacle could be shown in public anywhere in France that had not been prescreened, and approved, at court.

At the same time, however, French opera aimed far higher than the “musical tale” of the Italians, which was essentially a modest pastoral play. The French form aspired to the status of a full-fledged tragédie en musique (later called tragédie lyrique), which meant that the values of the spoken drama, France’s greatest cultural treasure, were as far as possible to be preserved in the new medium despite the presence of music.

To reconcile the claims of court pageantry with those of dramatic gravity was no mean trick. Only a very special genius could bring it off. At the time of Luigi Rossi’s momentous sojourn in France, another far less distinguished Italian musician—just an apprentice, really—was already living there: Giovanni Battista Lulli, a Florentine boy who had been brought over in 1646, aged thirteen, to serve as garçon de chambre to Mme. de Montpensier, a Parisian lady who wanted to practice her Italian. She also supported his training in courtly dancing and violin playing. When his patroness, a “Frondist” (that is, a supporter of a failed parliamentary revolt against Louis and Mazarin), was exiled in 1652, Lulli secured release from her employ and found work as a servant to Louis XIV’s cousin, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orleans (known as the “Grande Mademoiselle”), and as a dancer and mime at the royal court, where he danced alongside, and made friends with, the teenaged king. Upon the death of his violin teacher the next year, Lulli assumed the man’s position as court composer of ballroom music.

His rise to supreme power was steady and unstoppable, for Lulli was a veritable musical Mazarin, an Italian-born French political manipulator of genius. Shortly after the founding in 1669 of the Académie Royale de Musique, Louis XIV’s opera establishment, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who like Mazarin had been naturalized and Gallicized his name, managed to finagle the rights to manage it from its originally designated patent holder. From then on he was a musical Sun King, the absolute autocrat of French music, which he re-created in his own image.

He had a crown-supported monopoly over his domain, from which he could exclude any rival who threatened his preeminence. He squeezed out his older, native-born contemporary Robert Cambert (ca. 1628–77), who, despairing of ever producing his masterpiece, Ariane (1659), withdrew embittered to London where in 1674 he did finally see a much-modified version of it performed in Drury Lane to a partially translated libretto. Likewise Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643–1704), a younger competitor who, though trained in Italy and employed by the king’s cousin and later by the dauphin (the future Louis XV), had to wait until the age of fifty before he could get a tragédie en musique (Medée, 1693) produced at court, several years after Lully’s long-awaited death in 1687. (The old monopolist had died with his boots on, so to speak, following a celebrated mishap with a time-beating cane that resulted in gangrene.) By then Lully had produced thirteen tragédies lyriques, averaging one every fifteen months. The pattern that he set with them became the standard to which any composer aspiring to a court performance had to conform. Two generations of French musicians thus willy-nilly became Lully’s dynastic heirs. His works would dominate the repertory for half a century after his death, in response not to market forces or to public demand but by royal decree, giving Lully a vicarious reign comparable in length of years to his patron’s and extending through most of the reign of Louis XV as well. His style did not merely define an art form, it defined a national identity. La musique, he might well have said, c’est moi.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 21 Jan. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-03002.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored. In Oxford University Press, Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries. New York, USA. Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-03002.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 3 Courts Resplendent, Overthrown, Restored." In Music In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 21 Jan. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume2/actrade-9780195384826-div1-03002.xml