French Baroque Opera

From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of interest in the Lully-Rameau period during the past two decades. This book presents a wide-ranging and informative picture of the organization and evolution of French Baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an often entertaining insight into Lully’s once-proud Royal Academy of Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to further scholarly and critical writings in English. Readers will find this new, updated edition easier to use with its revised and expanded translations, supplementary explanatory content and new illustrations.

Examines the evolving practices in music, librettos, choreographed dance, and staging throughout the history of French Baroque opera.

From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of interest in the Lully-Rameau period. This is a wide-ranging picture of the organization and evolution of French baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an insight into Lully's once-proud Royal Academy of Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to further scholarly and critical writings in English.

Since its inception, French opera has embraced dance, yet all too often operatic dancing is treated as mere decoration. This book exposes the multiple and meaningful roles that dance has played, starting from Jean-Baptiste Lully's first opera in 1672. It counters prevailing notions in operatic historiography that dance was parenthetical and presents compelling evidence that the divertissement is essential to understanding the work. The book considers the operas of Lully and the 46-year period between the death of Lully and the arrival of Rameau, when influences from the commedia dell'arte and other theatres began to inflect French operatic practices. It explores the intersections of musical, textual, choreographic and staging practices at a complex institution - the Academie Royale de Musique - which upheld as a fundamental aesthetic principle the integration of dance into opera.

A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.

From the outset, French opera generated an enormous diversity of literature, familiarity with which greatly enhances our understanding of this unique art form. Yet relatively little of that literature is available in English, despite an upsurge of interest in the Lully-Rameau period during the past two decades. This book presents a wide-ranging and informative picture of the organization and evolution of French Baroque opera, its aims and aspirations, its strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on official documents, theoretical writings, letters, diaries, dictionary entries, contemporary reviews and commentaries, it provides an often entertaining insight into Lully’s once-proud Royal Academy of Music and the colourful characters who surrounded it. The translated passages are set in context, and readers are directed to further scholarly and critical writings in English. Readers will find this new, updated edition easier to use with its revised and expanded translations, supplementary explanatory content and new illustrations.

Using composers' own notations, marks added by 18th-century performers, historical treatises, and pictorial evidence, this work investigates both vocal and instrumental genres, including opera, cantatas, instrumental chamber music, and solo music for the viol and violin. It also deals with the discovery of a cantata by Rameau.

This volume of essays on Jean-Baptiste Lully and his musical legacy honours the distinguished French baroque scholar James R. Anthony. Jean-Baptiste Lully, court composer to Louis XIV, served as the principal architect of what would become known as the French style of music in the baroque era. The style he created strongly influenced the great musical figures in England (Purcell and Handel) and Germany (Bach and Telemann), but Lully's music itself has received little attention. Recently, through the efforts of scholars and musicians concerned with the performance practices of Lully's time, Lully's own music has begun to come alive in performance and recording. These essays, all by important baroque specialists, cover significant aspects of Lully's life and works and the French tradition he influenced. They constitute the first post-war collection of studies centred on Lully and form a fitting tribute to Professor Anthony whose own French baroque music provided a stimulus for the work of an emerging generation of scholars.