Jean-Baptiste Lully
Jean-Baptiste Lully born Giovanni Battista Lulli was an Italian-French composer, dancer and instrumentalist, who is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV and became a French subject in 1661. He was a close friend of the playwright Molière, with whom he collaborated on numerous comédie-ballets, including L'Amour médecin, George Dandin ou le Mari confondu, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Psyché and his best known work, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.
Biography
Lully was born on November 28 or 29, 1632, in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, to Lorenzo Lulli and Caterina Del Sera, a Tuscan family of millers. His general education and his musical training during his youth in Florence remain uncertain, but his adult handwriting suggests that he manipulated a quill pen with ease. He used to say that a Franciscan friar gave him his first music lessons and taught him guitar. He also learned to play the violin. In 1646, dressed as Harlequin during Mardi Gras and amusing bystanders with his clowning and his violin, the boy attracted the attention of Roger de Lorraine, chevalier de Guise, son of Charles, Duke of Guise, who was returning to France and was looking for someone to converse in Italian with his niece, Mademoiselle de Montpensier. Guise took the boy to Paris, where the fourteen-year-old entered Mademoiselle's service; from 1647 to 1652 he served as her "chamber boy". He probably honed his musical skills by working with Mademoiselle's household musicians and with composers Nicolas Métru, François Roberday and Nicolas Gigault. The teenager's talents as a guitarist, violinist, and dancer quickly won him the nicknames "Baptiste", and "le grand baladin".When Mademoiselle was exiled to the provinces in 1652 after the rebellion known as the Fronde, Lully "begged his leave ... because he did not want to live in the country." The princess granted his request.
By February 1653, Lully had attracted the attention of young Louis XIV, dancing with him in the Ballet royal de la nuit. By March 16, 1653, Lully had been made royal composer for instrumental music. His vocal and instrumental music for court ballets gradually made him indispensable. In 1660 and 1662 he collaborated on court performances of Francesco Cavalli's Xerse and Ercole amante. When Louis XIV took over the reins of government in 1661, he named Lully superintendent of the royal music and music master of the royal family. In December 1661, the Florentine was granted letters of naturalization. Thus, when he married Madeleine Lambert, the daughter of the renowned singer and composer Michel Lambert in 1662, Giovanni Battista Lulli declared himself to be "Jean-Baptiste Lully, escuyer
From 1661 on, the trios and dances he wrote for the court were promptly published. As early as 1653, Louis XIV made him director of his personal violin orchestra, known as the Petits Violons, which was proving to be open to Lully's innovations, as contrasted with the Twenty-Four Violins or Grands Violons, who only slowly were abandoning the polyphony and divisions of past decades. When he became surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi in 1661, the Great Violins also came under Lully's control. He relied mainly on the Little Violins for court ballets.
Lully's collaboration with the playwright Molière began with in 1661, when Lully provided a single sung courante, added after the work's premiere at Nicolas Fouquet's sumptuous chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Their collaboration began in earnest in 1664 with Le Mariage forcé. More collaborations followed, some of them conceived for fetes at the royal court, and others taking the form of incidental music for plays performed at command performances at court and also in Molière's Parisian theater.
In 1672, Lully broke with Molière, who turned to Marc-Antoine Charpentier. Having acquired Pierre Perrin's opera privilege, Lully became the director of the Académie Royale de Musique, that is, the royal opera, which performed in the Palais-Royal. Between 1673 and 1687, he produced a new opera almost yearly and fiercely protected his monopoly over that new genre.
After Queen Marie-Thérèse's death in 1683 and the king's secret marriage to Mme de Maintenon, devotion came to the fore at court. The king's enthusiasm for opera dissipated; he was annoyed by Lully's dissolute life and homosexual encounters. Lully had avoided getting too close to the secret homosexual grouping that had gathered in the court around the Duc de Vendôme, the Comte de Tallard and the Duc de Gramont. But in 1685 he was accused of improper relations with a page boy living in his household called Brunet. Brunet was removed after a police raid, and Lully escaped punishment. However, to show his general displeasure, Louis XIV made a point of not inviting Lully to perform Armide at Versailles the following year.
Lully died from gangrene, having struck his foot with his long conducting staff during a performance of his Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from surgery. He refused to have his toe amputated. This resulted in gangrene propagating through his body and ultimately infecting the greater part of his brain, causing his death. He died in Paris and was buried in the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, where his tomb with its marble bust can still be seen. All three of his sons had musical careers as successive surintendants of the King's Music.
Lully himself was posthumously given a conspicuous place on Titon du Tillet's Parnasse François. In the engraving, he stands to the left, on the lowest level, his right arm extended and holding a scroll of paper with which to beat time. Titon honored Lully as:
Music, style and influence
Lully's music was written during the Middle Baroque period, 1650 to 1700. Typical of Baroque music is the use of the basso continuo as the driving force behind the music. The pitch standard for the French opera at the time was about 392 Hz for A above middle C, a whole tone lower than modern practice where A is usually 440 Hz.Lully's music is known for its power, liveliness in its fast movements and its deep emotional character in its slower movements. Some of his most popular works are his passacailles and chaconnes, which are dance movements found in many of his works such as Armide or Phaëton.
The influence of Lully's music produced a radical revolution in the style of the dances of the court itself. In the place of the slow and stately movements which had prevailed until then, he introduced lively ballets of rapid rhythm, often based on well-known dance types such as gavottes, menuets, rigaudons and sarabandes.
Through his collaboration with playwright Molière, a new music form emerged during the 1660s: the comédie-ballet which combined theater, comedy, incidental music and ballet. The popularity of these plays, with their sometimes lavish special effects, and the success and publication of Lully's operas and its diffusion beyond the borders of France, played a crucial role in synthesizing, consolidating and disseminating orchestral organization, scorings, performance practices, and repertory.
File:'Portrait of several musicians and artists' by François Puget 1688 - Brunel 1980 p31.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|Portrait of Several Musicians and Artists by François Puget. The two main figures have been identified as Lully and the librettist Philippe Quinault.
The instruments in Lully's music were: five voices of strings such as dessus, haute-contre, taille, quinte, and basse, divided as follows: one voice of violins, three voices of violas, one voice of cello, and basse de viole. He also utilized guitar, lute, archlute, theorbo, harpsichord, organ, oboe, bassoon, recorder, flute, brass instruments and various percussion instruments.
He is often credited with introducing new instruments into the orchestra, but this legend needs closer scrutiny. He continued to use recorders in preference to the newer transverse flute, and the "hautbois" he used in his orchestra were transitional instruments, somewhere between shawms and so-called Baroque oboes.
Lully created French-style opera as a musical genre. Concluding that Italian-style opera was inappropriate for the French language, he and his librettist, Philippe Quinault, a respected playwright, employed the same poetics that dramatists used for verse tragedies: the 12-syllable "alexandrine" and the 10-syllable "heroic" poetic lines of the spoken theater were used for the recitative of Lully's operas and were perceived by their contemporaries as creating a very "natural" effect. Airs, especially if they were based on dances, were by contrast set to lines of less than 8 syllables. Lully also forsook the Italian method of dividing musical numbers into separate recitatives and arias, choosing instead to combine and intermingle the two, for dramatic effect. He and Quinault also opted for quicker story development, which was more to the taste of the French public.
Lully is credited with the invention in the 1650s of the French overture, a form used extensively in the Baroque and Classical eras, especially by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel.
Lully's works
Sacred music
Lully's grand motets were written for the royal chapel, usually for vespers or for the King's daily Low Mass. Lully did not invent the genre, he built upon it. Grand motets often were psalm settings, but for a time during the 1660s Lully used texts written by Pierre Perrin, a neo-Latin poet. Lully's petit motets were probably composed for the nuns at the convent of the Assumption, rue Saint-Honoré.- Motets à deux chœurs pour la Chapelle du roi, published 1684
- Miserere, at court, winter 1664
- Plaude laetare, text by Perrin, April 7, 1668
- Te Deum, at Fontainebleau, September 9, 1677
- De profundis, May 1683
- Dies irae, 1683
- Benedictus
- Domine salvum fac regem, grand motet
- Exaudiat te Dominus, grand motet, 1687
- Jubilate Deo, grand motet, 1660?
- Notus in Judea Deux, grand motet
- O lacrymae, grand motet, text by Perrin, at Versailles, 1664
- Quare fremuerunt, grand motet, at Versailles, April 19, 1685
- Petits motets: Anima Christi; Ave coeli manus, text by Perrin; Dixit Dominus; Domine salvum; Laudate pueri; O dulcissime Domine; Omnes gentes; O sapientia; Regina coeli; ''Salve regina''