• Period: Baroque (1600-1749)
• Country: France
• Genres: Orchestral, Ballet, Opera, Choral

Biography

Clearly the most successful musician of his time, in terms of power and financial wealth, Jean-Baptiste Lully was almost singularly responsible for the shape of French opera during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Born Italian, he died a wealthy Frenchman at the early age of 54. Although most remembered for his opera compositions, he was also a talented violinist and dancer. His business sense and, some say, unscrupulous manner, made him one of the most powerful musicians in all of France, if not Europe. His patron and friend King Louis XIV further cemented Lully's position at the top of Europe's musical elite. Lully's operas remain his legacy, but he also composed over 30 ballets, motets, incidental music, dances, and marches.

Lully was born the son of a miller who lost custody of him after his mother died. While in his early teenage years, Lully was taken to France by the Chevalier de Guise in March 1646. He served as a musician and page in Mlle de Montpensier's court until she was exiled, in 1652, to her estate at St. Targeau for her role in the Fronde. During his service with the Montepensier court, Lully was schooled in guitar, violin, and dance. His talents brought him to the attention of the young King Louis XIV. After his release from the Montepensier court, Lully joined the King's court, as a composer and dancer. He became the leader of a small string ensemble formed by the King. Lully's prestige at the court, as well as throughout France, grew even more when he was appointed the Superintendent of Music and subsequently, the Master of Music for the Royal Family.

When Lully began composing opera in the 1670s, Italy was the center of great opera. Opera in France was in its infancy. Lully's operas, which were based on Italian models but with French libretto, helped popularize the art form. He composed one a year between 1673 and 1680, and then again between 1682 and 1686. Besides being the premier opera composer in Paris at the time, Lully ensured his exalted position by securing patent rights which would ultimately allow him to determine what opera could be performed and severely limiting performances of operas he himself had not approved of. These patent rights, obtained from librettist Pierre Perrin who had been jailed for debt problems, were for the sole right to form the Royal Academy of Music. Lully bargained with Perrin for those rights, paying off his debts and providing him with a lifetime stipend. Lully formed the Royal Academie in March 1672. A year later, in April 1673, restrictions were passed that limited productions performed outside of the academie's auspices to no more than two singers and six players.

Lully was naturalized a French citizen in December 1661. On July 24, 1662, he married the daughter of his mentor and royal chief musician, Michel Lambert. King Louis XIV attended Lully's wedding to Madeleine Lambert and became the godfather of their eldest son. In 1681, Lully was granted Lettres de Noblesse and named one of the Secretaires du Roi. During a performance celebrating the recovery of the King from an illness, Lully accidentally hit his foot with his conducting staff. An infection resulted, and it ultimately killed him. When Lully died in 1687, he left his wife, six children, and an estate with an estimated value of 800,000 livres, a value more than 500 times the annual salary of an average court musician. ~ Bruce Lundgren, All Music Guide

( b Florence, 28 Nov 1632; d Paris, 22 March 1687). French composer of Italian birth. He was taken from Florence to Paris in 1646 by Roger de Lorraine, Chevalier de Guise, who placed him in the service of his niece, Mlle de Montpensier. At her court in the Tuileries Lully got to know the best in French music and, despite his patroness's dislike of Mazarin and her involvement in the Fronde, he was no stranger to Italian music either. After the defeat of the Frondists, Mlle de Montpensier was exiled to St Fargeau. Lully obtained release from her service and on the death of his friend Lazzarini, in 1653, was appointed Louis XIV's compositeur de la musique instrumentale. From 1655 his fame as dancer, comedian and composer grew rapidly, and his disciplined training of the king's ‘petite bande’ earned him further recognition. In 1661 he was made surintendant de la musique et compositeur de la musique de la chambre and in 1662 maître de la musique de la famille royale. By then he was a naturalized Frenchman, and in July 1662 he married Madeleine, daughter of the composer Michel Lambert.

Lully then collaborated with Molière on a series of comédies-ballets which culminated in Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670). After that he turned to opera, securing the privilege previously granted to Perrin and forestalling potential rivals with oppressive patents granted by the king. He chose as librettist Philippe Quinault, with whom he succeeded in establishing a new and essentially French type of opera known as tragédie lyrique. Between 1673 and 1686 Lully composed 13 such works, 11 of them with Quinault.

During this time Lully continued to enjoy the king's support, despite Louis displeasure at his overt homosexual behaviour and the resentment his high-handedness provoked in other musicians. His greatest personal triumph came in 1681 when in an impressive ceremony he was received as secrétaire du Roi. After the king's marriage to Mme de Maintenon in 1683 life at court took on a new sobriety; it was perhaps in response to this that Lully composed much of his religious music. During a performance of his Te Deum in January1687he injured his foot with the point of a cane he was using to beat time. Gangrene set in, and within three months he died, leaving a tragédie lyrique, Achille et Polyxène, unfinished.

At his death Lully was widely regarded as the most representative of French composers. Practically all his music was designed to satisfy the tastes and interests of Louis XIV. The ballets de cour (1653-63) and the comédies-ballets (1663-72) were performed as royal entertainments, the king himself often taking part in the dancing. The tragédies lyriques (1673-86) were kingly operas par excellence, expressing a classical conflict between la gloire and l′amour ; Louis himself supplied the subject matter for at least four of them and certainly approved the political sentiments of the prologues. Lully's music was correspondingly elevated, in the stately overtures, the carefully moulded ‘récitatif simple’ and the statuesque choruses; many of the airs, too, draw as much attention to the galant mores of the court as to the stage action. Finally, the Versailles grand motet, of which the Miserere is an outstanding example, was designed to glorify the King of France as much as the King of Heaven.

Lully's three sons, Louis (1664-1734), Jean-Baptiste (1665-1743) and Jean-Louis (1667-88), were all musicians in the king's service.

works:
Dramatic music

• Cadmus et Hermione (1673)
• Thésée (1675)
• Alceste (1674)
• Isis (1677)
• Persée (1682)
• Amadis (1684)
• Roland (1685)
• Armide (1686)
• 5 other tragédies lyriques
• 36 ballets (some with other composers)
• 14 comédies-ballets, incl. L′amour médecin (1665), Les amants magnifiques (1670), Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670)

Sacred music

• 13 grands motets, incl. Miserere (1664), Te Deum (1677), De profundis (1683)
• 14 petits motets

Instrumental music

• dances, symphonies, airs

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Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), Italian-born French composer, established the basic form of French opera, which remained virtually unchanged for a century.

Jean Baptiste Lully was born in or near Florence on Nov. 28, 1632. At the age of 12 he went to Paris, where he received his musical training. He performed successfully as violinist, dancer, and conductor. He started his own orchestra of stringed instruments and trained it to play with exceptional precision; it was famous throughout Europe for the quality of its performance.

At the same time, Lully was writing music and achieving a reputation as a composer. He was very much favored at the French court, particularly by King Louis XIV. In 1661 Lully was appointed Superintendent of Music; the following year he was named Master of Music of the Royal Family. These prestigious appointments carried high salaries, and Lully built up a large fortune. He was ambitious to the point of ruthlessness and seems to have had no scruples when it came to advancing his own interests. He gained a monopoly over French opera and virtually eliminated any possible rivals in this field. Lully had many enemies, along with many admirers, when he died in Paris on March 22, 1687.

Apart from a small body of sacred music, Lully's work belongs to the realm of theater music. He composed the music for over 40 ballets and other entertainments in the theater. Among his collaborators was the great dramatist Molière. Molière's comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme was performed in 1670 with incidental music by Lully. This music, which is still used occasionally in performances of the Molière play, is a brilliant complement to the spoken drama.

Italian Traditions

Lully's main achievement, however, was his composition of 14 operas between 1673 and 1687. He was provided with excellent French librettos, mainly by Philippi Quinault, on a variety of subjects: classical, pastoral, and heroic. Musically, Lully modeled his operas to a large extent upon Italian operas of a slightly earlier period. Italian operas had been performed in Paris in the 1640s to the 1660s, and he had taken part in some of the performances.

When Lully came to write his own operas, he took over the essential features of these Italian operas: a flexible, expressive kind of recitative and a contrasting musical style in the arias. His recitative is somewhat different, being set to French words; but it is expressive in its own way and notable for its correct declamation of the words. Lully was particularly careful in setting words to music. He listened to the best actors at the Comédie Française and aimed to reproduce in music the inflections of spoken French drama. His arias are usually quite short and quite simple structurally, but in performance the singers decorated them with graceful ornaments. The art of ornamentation was part of the training of 17th-century singers; it was expected that they would embellish their solo arias in a skillful, tasteful manner.

French Traditions

Other elements in Lully's operas are derived from French traditions. The ballet had been a favorite entertainment in itself, and it now became an important element in French opera. The chorus was equally important to Lully. In many of his scenes the chorus is treated in rondo fashion: it performs a refrain and thus serves to unify the opera.

To accompany the choral passages and ballets in Lully's operas, there was an orchestra of strings and woodwinds, supplemented by brass and percussion instruments when the situation called for them. Sometimes the orchestra played alone, in separate instrumental pieces. Many long scenes are devoted to dancing and to other kinds of stage spectacles; in them the orchestra has a most important function.

Lully cannot strictly be called the creator of French opera, since other French composers had already written a few operas. He was, however, the first composer of genius to write French operas, and he proved that opera in French could be a viable art form. His operas were immensely popular and continued to be performed long after his death. Today they are almost never presented in their complete form because of their great length. They contain much beautiful music, for Lully was a master of the operatic form and, at his best, a composer of rare inspiration.

Further Reading

Lully's operas are discussed by Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era: From Monteverdi to Bach (1947); Donald J. Grout, A Short History of Opera (1947; 2d ed. 1965); and Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music (1968). Bukofzer also describes the background to French opera and mentions Lully's contribution to sacred music.

Additional Sources

La Laurencie, Lionel de, Lully, New York: AMS Press, 1978.

For more information on Jean-Baptiste Lully, visit Britannica.com.

Lully, Jean Baptiste (orig. Giovanni Battista Lulli;b Florence, 29 Nov. 1632, d Paris, 22 Mar. 1687). Italian-French composer and dancer. He studied music as a child in Italy and came to France c.1644. In 1652 he was engaged at the court of Louis XIV as a violinist and dancer and danced alongside the King in several ballets, including Ballet de la nuit (1653), for which he also composed music. Becoming the King's favourite, he was appointed supervisor of the royal music in 1662 and director of the Académie Royale de Musique (1672-87). He was effectively in supreme control of the Opera and was unpopular with many of his contemporaries. He composed music for many ballets and divertissements including the first important comédie-ballet Le Mariage forcé (libr. Molière, chor. Beauchamps, 1664), also Le Bourgois gentilhomme (libr. Molière, chor. Beauchamps, 1670), Psyché (libr. Molière, Corneille, and Quinault, chor. Beauchamps, 1671), and Le Triomphe de l'amour (chor. Beauchamps and Pécourt, 1681). He was responsible for enlivening the rather slow stately dances of the ballet de cour and for introducing female dancers to the stage. He died from a gangrenous abscess on the foot, which developed after he struck himself with the long staff he used for conducting.

Lully, Jean-Baptiste (Lulli, Giovanni Battista) (1632-87). Composer, performer, and dancer of Italian birth, Lully was initially known for his ballets de cour and comédies-ballets. From 1664 to 1670 he collaborated with Molière on comédies-ballets—a genre in which dramatist and composer worked as equals. Lully is regarded as the founder of French opera. Under the patronage of Louis XIV he had autocratic control over all operatic performance in France. He called his operas tragédies en musique (renamed tragédies lyriques in the 18th c.), with the tragedy or libretto being of primary, not secondary, importance. Most were written by Quinault, with others by Corneille and Fontenelle, on subjects drawn from mythology or legends of chivalry. Lully modelled his operas on the famous tragedies of the day and based his recitatives on the declamatory style used by the actors at the Comédie-Française. He made little distinction between airs and recitatives; the time of the action more or less coincides with the music, whereas in contemporary Italian opera time was effectively suspended during the arias. Every tragédie consisted of a prologue glorifying the king, followed by five acts. Ballet was an essential ingredient, most notably in the divertissements. Lully's tragédies established a genre which remained active for over 100 years in France.

[Kerry Murphy]

(zhäN bätēst' lülē') , 1632–87, French operatic composer, b. Florence, Italy. His name originally was Giovanni Battista Lulli. A self-taught violinist, he went to France in 1646 and in 1652 entered the service of Louis XIV. He became chamber composer and conductor of one of the king's orchestras. Lully composed numerous ballets, many for plays by Molière, until 1672, when he obtained a patent for the production of opera. He established the Académie royale de Musique, where he held a virtual monopoly on the French operatic stage, amassing a fortune producing his own works. Among his many operas are Cadmus et Hermione (1673), Alceste (1674), Amadis (1684), and Armide (1686). His librettist, Philippe Quinault, was a dramatist in his own right, and Lully called their works tragédies lyriques. He established the form of the French overture, wrote recitatives well suited to the French language, and set the style for French opera until the advent of Gluck.

Lully, Jean-Baptiste (1632–1687), French composer and founder of the French operatic tradition. Lully was born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence, the son of a miller. Despite his humble origins, he was selected at the age of thirteen to teach Italian in Paris to Louis XIV's cousin Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, known as the "Grande Mademoiselle," and he completed his education while serving in her household, mastering harpsichord, violin, and dancing. Lully became familiar with the ballet style of the royal court and by 1652 had so risen in musical status that he composed some of the music for a ballet that was given in the Grande Mademoiselle's palace. She became a partisan of the Fronde (a rebellion against the authority of the monarchy) later in the same year and was banished from Paris, freeing Lully to accept a post in 1653 as composer of instrumental music at the court of Louis XIV, functioning at first as both dancer and composer. The king, six years younger than Lully, befriended the composer, and the stage was set for Lully's extraordinary rise to musical power in France. By 1656 he had his own royal orchestra (the "petits violons") and began to compose all of the music for ballets, rather than collaborating with other composers. In the early 1660s he was understood to be the principal composer of ballets at court.

At this time, opera was understood to be exclusively an Italian phenomenon, and the considerable Italian presence at the court of Louis XIV (his first minister, Cardinal Jules Mazarin, was Italian) resulted in the importation of much opera. In 1664, Lully began to move in the direction of dramatic music in French, first by collaborating with Molière (1622–1673) in comédies-ballets (plays with much dance music). Louis XIV was in the process of extending his power in all aspects of French life, and in 1669 he added an Académie Royale de Musique to the "academies" he had established to control the artistic and intellectual life of the country; the new academy's stated purpose was to promote operas in French. Lully soon saw his opportunity and became its director in 1672, a position he held and aggrandized until his death, at the age of fifty-four. According to one contemporary source (Jean-Laurant Le Cerf de La Viéville), he died of gangrene after banging his foot while conducting with a cane.

Lully and librettist Philippe Quinault (1635–1688) created a noble new genre that signaled the beginning of a French style of opera. It was first termed simply tragédie, then tragédie en musique; later, the genre was labeled tragédie lyrique. Lully completed thirteen of these, approximately one a year, eleven to librettos by Quinault and two to librettos by Pierre Corneille (1606–1684): Cadmus et Hermione (1673), Alceste (1674), Thésée (1675), Atys (1676), Isis (1677), Psyché (1678, libretto by Corneille), Bellérophon (1679, Corneille), Prosperpine (1680), Persée (1682), Phaëton (1683), Amadis (1684), Roland (1685), and Armide (1686). Because Lully held royal privileges that gave him a complete monopoly on musical stage works, his operas dominated the musical life of the court and of Paris, and they held the stage well into the eighteenth century. Stylistically, they eschewed the rapid speechlike declamation typical of Italian recitatives. Rather, Lully created a fluid and expressive style of melodic line based on the declamation used in spoken French drama. Airs are usually dance-songs, and there are many dances interspersed with the vocal music, including full-fledged divertissements (entertainments that interrupt the plot). The five-act structure of the tragédie en musique was adopted from the spoken dramas of Corneille, and the prologue that either directly or allegorically praises Louis XIV came from the ballet tradition. Lully established a form for his overtures that was widely imitated elsewhere in Europe, and came to be known as the "French overture," consisting of a stately chordal section characterized by dotted-note rhythms, followed by a lively contrapuntal section.

Lully also composed a small but influential body of church music, particularly grands motets and petits motets. While he did not compose much independent instrumental music, the large amount of dance music in his stage works circulated separately, was gathered into suites, and was transcribed for other instruments. There is, for example, more harpsichord music derived from Lully's operatic dances than original music by any seventeenth-century French harpsichordist. Outside France, his influence was particularly strong in the Netherlands and Germany, and also in England. After the middle of the eighteenth century, his music was regarded for the most part as historical artifact until a revival of Atys in 1987 generated a new wave of appreciation for his operas.

Bibliography

Heyer, John Hajdu, ed. Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.

Isherwood, Robert. Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1973.

La Gorce, Jérôme de, and Herbert Schneider, eds. Jean-Baptiste Lully: Actes du colloque = Kongressbericht: Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg, 1987. Laaber, 1990.

—BRUCE GUSTAFSON

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