The 28th of last month marked the 390th birthday of a composer who became associated with the longest recorded reign in History: Jean-Baptiste Lully, a figure which is now seldom mentioned in the pantheon of great composers separately from the world he came to represent. Lully was born at just the right time to make his social climbing within the greatest court in all of Europe in the 1600s; his employer was none other than Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, ruler of France from 1643 to his death in 1715. At a time when France was the cultural center of the globe, at the time when the whole of Europe was dazzled by Versailles and the splendour of the universe the French king had created around himself, the son of a Tuscan miller, who started his career as chamber boy to the niece of a nobleman, went on to become the director of the Académie Royale de Musique, the sole master of the artistic world of Louis XIV's court. And it is not only in his music, but also in his life, that the Sun King's favourite court composer mirrored the greatness, splendour, and ruthlessness of that court; indeed among all great composers none save Richard Wagner, is remembered as more ambitious & ruthless a social climber as Lully. There is also something nearly magical in the way Lully's career echoed the prosperity of his king's own. The beginning of Lully's rise to power in 1653, when he was noticed by Louis XIV, then only 14 years old to Lully's 20, as they both danced in the Ballet de la Nuit, marked the start of a prosperous reign for Louis; while the composer's death in 1687, coincided with a turn in the sovereign's fortune, with the Nine Years' war fought from 1688 to 1697 considerably weakening his reign, both politically & diplomatically. If that strange correspondence between Lully's and Louis' careers seem to indicate that the splendour of Lully's music and that of the Sun King's reign were somehow inextricably linked, it is also a reminder of the very effective importance of art for a monarch such as Louis XIV; an importance which is key to the creation of the Ballet de la Nuit.
In February 23rd, 1653, the Ballet de la Nuit premiered at the Salle du Petit-Bourbon in Paris. A collaborative work put together in music by several composers among whom Jean de Cambefort, Jean-Baptiste Boesset, and Michel Cambert, with a libretto by Isaac de Benserade, the piece featured a prestigious performer: the fourteen-years-old Louis XIV, who debuted as Apollo, the rising Sun, in the great work. That was a prophetic debut: eight years later, in March 1661, the cardinal Mazarin, who had been the young king's chief minister ever since the beginning of his reign, died, leaving Louis in sole control of the reins of the government. He convocated all the important members of his court, and called a meeting of his ministers & secretaries, to make an announcement that would astonish all including the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria. From then onwards, he would rule without a chief minister. The secretaries and ministers he had grown up surrounded with, were to give him advice when he asked for it. No orders, no papers were to be signed without his consent; all commands would have to be accounted for to him personally.
That bold move through which Louis XIV began the longest recorded reign in the history of royalty, or rather ratified it - for he had started ruling as early as 1643 - was to become the epitome of the style of monarchy and the personality of the Sun King. By the early 1680s, France had become a veritable luminary among European nations, the political, cultural, and artistic center of the world, and Louis was certainly the undisputed Sun of European monarchs. Let's now take a look at that famed Ballet de la Nuit, which was the common stepping stone to both the Sun King's and his favourite court composer Lully's illustrious careers.
Louis XIV as the Sun in the Ballet de la Nuit. All in the design of the costume was created to make him a solar symbol, down to the headpiece featuring the rays emanating from the face.
To understand more precisely what the Ballet Royal de la Nuit truly was, and how it very deeply represented the life at the court of the Sun King, even the relationship between the monarch and his subjects, one must first understand the very definite imagery the King created around himself. To all he was the Sun of Europe, the center of a Universe gravitating around him in adoration and obedience: that identification with the Sun was everywhere at Court, symbolized in the predominance of light & gold in the King's garments, his surroundings, and even the decorations inside palaces. The fabled Galerie des Glaces is one of the most remarkable representations of that quest of greatness, vastity, light, splendour, which characterized Louis XIV's reign. But nowhere was that imagery more intensely displayed, than in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit, where the sovereign, himself a very skilled dancer, got to very concretely represent the rising Sun among the planets of the solar system.
The Ballet de la Nuit is an image of just how important the imagery of the solar system was at the time of Louis XIV, and perhaps also how important it was to him personally. It is to be noticed that Louis XIV was only one among several great sovereigns who seemed to identify with the Sun, one of which was Akhenaton, the Egyptian pharaoh, dubbed the first founder of a monotheistic religion when he came to power in 1353 BC. The role of the Sun King in the Ballet de la Nuit was an image of his role within his court, within France & Europe and also the world. It mirrored the way in which he wanted to be regarded by his subjects, who, if they remained, like the planets, within respectful distance of the Sun, surrounding him harmoniously and moving about him as he dictated them to, then the reign would be prosperous and fortune would be assured. But if a planet came within too short a distance from the Sun, or moved in a way the sovereign had not dictated, then it would get burned; rather an astute allegory, and one which very clearly indicated the rules of the reign of the greatest monarch in all of Europe. But the position of the Sun among the planets didn't only represent the position of the King within his court, it also represented the position France had assumed in Europe, among the other nations: a cultural, political, artistic centre, radiating its light & power for all to be warmed by it as the planets are warmed by the rays of the Sun.
And thus the allegory of the Sun among the planets was not only a personal allegory, but very much on a wider scale as well. The Ballet de la Nuit is a grandiose, large-scale piece that took 13 hours to perform, only two hours less than Richard Wagner's great Ring cycle. The plot was concentrated on the night half of the 24-hour day, starting at 6 o'clock in the evening and going through the four watches of the night to finally reach 6 o'clock in the morning: the first watch being the 6pm to 9pm period, the second 9pm to 12am, the third 12am to 3am, and the fourth 3am to 6am. The plot featured characters such as the mythological goddesses Venus & Diana, demonic creatures such as werewolves & witches who celebrated a black Sabbath in the horrors of the night, and more realistic, human characters like shepherds, thieves, gypsies and beggars. And of course Louis XIV appeared at the end of the four watches as the rising Sun, who brought a glorious conclusion to all the dreary activities of the night creatures.
The King dancing in the Ballet de la Nuit, in chromo-typography by Maurice Leloir, 1904.
A scene from Franco-Belgian movie producer Gérard Corbiau's 2000 Le Roi Danse, in which we see Louis preparing his entrance as the Sun, and Lully (in the foreground with his back turned to us), having made his king the gift of a pair of dancing shoes.
But the Ballet de la Nuit, which had so prophetically introduced Louis as Apollo, the solar ruler of the Universe, was a stepping stone for another career than that of the Sun King, certainly as prestigious in its own field, and which was to become strangely linked to the sovereign's own fate. It was in the great work that Louis' attention was caught by a 20-years-old composer who performed several roles in the piece: the Tuscan-born Jean-Baptiste Lully, who twenty years later became the director of the Académie Royale de Musique, a position which made him the most important artist in the Sun King's court.
In observing the illustrious reign of the Sun King, which began in 1643 and ended with his death in 1715, one can note a close correspondence in Louis XIV's and Lully's careers. While the start of Lully's rise as a composer within the court marks the beginning of the King's rise to glory, the musician's death in 1687 closely corresponds with the start of a progressive decline in Louis' fortune, coinciding with the start of the Nine Years War which considerably impoverished the nation, and brought about a steady dwindling of France's position in Europe. Nor is such a correspondence surprising. Born to a family of Tuscan millers, first instructed music by a Franciscan friar, Lully is a sort of 17th-century French image of the self-made man, ruthless, ambitious, egotistical, ready for anything on his path to glory. Starting his career as chamber boy to the niece of a nobleman, Lully went on to become the sole wielder of power within the Académie Royale de Musique, the most important artistic personality within the Sun King's court; as his star kept rising, and the Sun King's rose with it, he gradually eliminated all competition from composers & playwrights in the court. Having collaborated with Molière on comedies such as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Lully broke with the playwright in 1672, and it was through that means that he became director of the royal opera which performed in the Palais-Royal: an advantage which made him sole master of opera and ballet within the prestigious establishment.
Jean-Baptiste Lully by Paul Mignard. From his accession to the prestigious position of director of the Académie Royale de Musique onwards he fiercely maintained his exclusive monopoly on King Louis XIV's artistic world.
From 1673 until his death fourteen years later, Lully produced a new opera almost every year for the Académie, and jealously kept his exclusive monopoly over the genre for which he initiated some notable innovations such as the creation of the sung recitative, which installed even more fiercely than before the dominion of music over all the constitutive elements of the courtly stage work. Thus doing, he affirmed, just like Louis XIV over his court, his exclusive power over the artistic world the Sun King had created around himself, and gathered in his hands all the reins of his very own government, that of the royal theatre. The Ballet de la Nuit & the power acquired by Jean-Baptiste Lully are the joint proof of the importance given by Louis XIV to art in his reign, as a promoter of his greatness: that an artist should rise to such prominence, and that a ballet should be the means through which a king could display his glory to the world, are certainly a symbol of that importance. And if Lully's name is better remembered than that of his numerous contemporaries and peers, it is also largely due to the composer's efforts in keeping exclusive credit for the works that were produced at court. He was the ultimate opportunist, and understood his chance in the single-minded artistic taste of his king: at the side of a sovereign who maintained the obsession of being constantly surrounded with music, light, and greatness, at all times, the path was clearly cut for him. Louis XIV was a monarch with an extraordinary sense of drama, and music was the means he had of dramatizing every aspect of his life. He wanted music as a background for all his activities, his decisions, his deeds. The tale of Lully's life is that of a ruthless climb to prominence within a world which his origins rendered hostile to him. Likewise, that of his king, if more destined from the start to greatness, is that of an unstoppable ascension to power. And the Ballet de la Nuit is the story of their acquaintance, friendship, and joint rise to greatness.
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