1632–1687 · France · Baroque
Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) was a French composer of Italian birth, a violinist and conductor at the court of Louis XIV. He created French national opera and became one of the leading figures of French Baroque music. The site currently holds his piece "Salve Regina" — a good place to start getting to know his music.
Lully's father, Lorenzo Lulli, worked as a miller in Florence; his mother was Caterina Del Sera. Lully later said his earliest music instruction came from a Franciscan monk, who also taught him guitar, and that he picked up the violin as well. As a child he staged comic skits and was already a capable dancer.
Lully came to France in March 1646 in the retinue of the Guise family, as a servant to the king's niece, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who used him to practise her Italian. He quickly won the trust of his employers.
In 1653 the Fronde, in which Mademoiselle de Montpensier had taken an active part, was defeated in its struggle against Louis XIV, and exile to the château of Saint-Fargeau awaited her. To stay in Paris, Lully asked to be released from his post, and three months later appeared as a dancer at court in Isaac de Benserade's "Ballet de la Nuit". At the same time he studied with Nicolas Métru, Nicolas Gigault and François Roberday.
Louis XIV was very fond of Lully and furthered his career at court. In 1653, after the death of Lazzaro Lazzarini, the king appointed him "composer of instrumental music". In May 1661, by royal decree, Lully took the post of chief superintendent of the king's music, and in December of that year he took French citizenship and changed the spelling of his surname from Lulli to Lully.
In 1662 Lully married Madeleine Lambert, the daughter of the court composer Michel Lambert.
In 1655 Lully took charge of the "Petits Violons du Roi" orchestra. As a composer he was at first responsible only for instrumental music, but gradually took on vocal writing as well. Among his works of the 1650s–1660s are the ballets of Time, Flora, Night, the Seasons and Alcidiane: sequences of songs, vocal dialogues and dance numbers joined by a common plot or allegory.
In 1658, in the ballet "Alcidiane", the so-called "French overture" was heard for the first time, becoming Lully's hallmark, and in 1663, in the "Ballet de Flore", he introduced trumpets into the orchestra for the first time, instruments that had previously served only as fanfares.
In 1658 Molière made his debut in Paris. In 1663 Louis XIV granted him a pension and commissioned a play in which he himself wished to dance: Molière wrote the comedy-ballet "Le Mariage forcé", on which Lully worked together with the choreographer Beauchamp. This began their long collaboration: Molière's librettos produced "La Princesse d'Élide" (1664), "L'Amour médecin" (1665), "George Dandin" (1668), "Monsieur de Pourceaugnac" (1669) and "Les Amants magnifiques" (1670).
On 14 October 1670, at the château of Chambord, the most famous joint work of Lully and Molière was first performed — "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme" (on 28 November the play was shown at the Palais-Royal theatre, with Molière as Jourdain and Lully as the Mufti). The amount of material belonging to Lully himself in this comedy is comparable in size to Molière's: an overture, dances, several interludes, and the large closing "Ballet des Nations".
Lully's first opera, "Cadmus et Hermione", was written to a libretto by Philippe Quinault on a subject chosen by the king from several options; it premiered on 27 April 1673. According to contemporaries, Lully often went to listen to great tragic actors and noted down in his notebook the nuances of their delivery — pauses, the raising and lowering of the voice. He chose the musicians and singers himself, trained them, ran the rehearsals and conducted with a violin in his hand.
In all, Lully composed and staged thirteen operas: "Cadmus et Hermione" (1673), "Alceste" (1674), "Thésée" (1675), "Atys" (1676), "Isis" (1677), "Psyché" (1678), "Bellérophon" (1679), "Proserpine" (1680), "Persée" (1682), "Phaëton" (1683), "Amadis" (1684), "Roland" (1685) and "Armide" (1686). The opera "Achille et Polyxène" (1687) was completed after Lully's death by his student Pascal Collasse, and the "pastorale héroïque" "Acis et Galatée", staged in 1686, was revived several times.
On 15 February 1686, Lully's last opera, "Armide", was performed for the first time in Paris; Quinault took its libretto from Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered". After the king's marriage to Françoise de Maintenon, who kept away from the theatre, opera and worldly entertainment, Louis XIV grew distant from the composer.
On 8 January 1687, while conducting his own Te Deum for the king's recovery, Lully injured his foot with the tip of the conducting staff then used to beat time. The wound developed into an abscess and turned into gangrene. The composer died on 22 March 1687. Both of his sons, Louis (1664–1734) and Jean-Louis (1667–1688), also became composers.
Lully called his operas "a tragedy set to music", a form later known as "tragédie lyrique". In them he sought to heighten dramatic effect through music, to achieve precise declamation, and to give the chorus a genuine dramatic role. These operas were highly acclaimed in France and across Europe and stayed on stage for about a hundred years, influencing the development of the French opera school.
Under Lully, singers in operas began performing without masks for the first time, and women started dancing ballet on the public stage; oboes were introduced into the orchestra for the first time. Unlike the Italian model, the overture in his operas took the form Grave-Allegro-Grave. Besides operas, Lully wrote a large number of ballets, symphonies, trios and divertissements.
For Lully the starting point was always a verse text — most often written by his regular librettist, Philippe Quinault. Finding the Italian operatic model unsuited to the French language, he used the same verse metres as writers of spoken tragedy for the recitative, and shorter lines for the airs, especially when they were built on dance rhythms. Unlike Italian opera, where numbers were clearly divided into recitatives and arias, Lully combined and interwove them for dramatic effect.
Lully's music combines forceful, lively fast sections with slow movements full of feeling; the passacailles and chaconnes that recur throughout his output — Armide and Phaëton among them — are some of its most popular pieces. He also transformed the court dances themselves: stately, unhurried steps gave way to quick dances — gavottes, menuets, rigaudons, sarabandes.
Besides operas and ballets, Lully wrote sacred music — grand motets for the royal chapel, usually performed at vespers or the king's daily mass; he did not invent the genre but built on an existing one. His smaller motets were probably written for the nuns of the convent of the Assumption on rue Saint-Honoré.
The site currently holds one piece by Lully — "Salve Regina" (LWV 77), at an intermediate level of difficulty. It is a suitable piece for starting to get to know the composer's music.