Jean-Baptiste Lully

Giovanni Battista Lulli was born in Florence on 28 November 1632, the son of a miller. A lively, gifted child, he learned guitar and violin from a Franciscan friar. In 1646, aged thirteen, he was spotted by the Chevalier de Guise, who took him to Paris to serve his niece Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, known as La Grande Mademoiselle, cousin of the young Louis XIV. Officially employed to converse with her in Italian, he worked in the kitchens but perfected his violin and dancing.

After the Fronde La Grande Mademoiselle was exiled, and Lully, unwilling to leave Paris, obtained his release. In 1653 he danced alongside the fourteen-year-old king in the Ballet royal de la Nuit, in which Louis XIV appeared as the Rising Sun. The king noticed him and appointed him composer of the court’s instrumental music. Lully took charge of the king’s “Petits Violons”, an ensemble he drilled with unprecedented rigour: playing together, precise attacks, uniform ornaments. This orchestral style became a model throughout Europe.

In 1661, the year Louis XIV began his personal rule, Lully was appointed superintendent of the music of the King’s Chamber and became a French citizen. In 1662 he married Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the famous singer and composer Michel Lambert, with whom he had six children. A skilful courtier, ambitious and sometimes ruthless with rivals, he became one of the most powerful and wealthy men at court.

From 1664 to 1671 he worked with Molière to create a new genre, the comédie-ballet, combining theatre, music and dance: Le Mariage forcé, George Dandin, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac and above all Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), with its famous Turkish ceremony. Lully sometimes played comic roles himself. But the two fell out in 1672, when Lully obtained for himself alone the privilege of the Académie royale de musique — the Opéra — giving him a monopoly on sung entertainments in France.

With the poet Philippe Quinault, Lully then invented the tragédie en musique, French-style opera. Cadmus et Hermione (1673) opened a series of a dozen works, almost one a year: Alceste, Thésée, Atys (1676), nicknamed “the king’s opera” because Louis XIV loved it so, Persée, Phaéton, Amadis, Roland and Armide (1686), his masterpiece. These operas begin with a “French overture” — a slow, majestic section followed by a fast one — and give a central place to recitative modelled on the declamation of tragic actors, to choruses and to ballets.

Lully also composed grands motets for the royal chapel, such as the Miserere and the Te Deum (1677). On 8 January 1687 he conducted this Te Deum to celebrate the king’s recovery. At the time, the beat was kept by striking the floor with a long staff. Carried away, Lully struck his own foot violently. The wound became infected and gangrene set in, but he refused amputation, perhaps so that he could still dance. He died in Paris on 22 March 1687.

Lully left a vast fortune and a style that dominated French music for almost a century. His model of opera was taken up by Rameau, and the French overture was imitated by Purcell, Handel and Bach. He turned the orchestra into a precise, disciplined machine and gave the court of Versailles music to match its splendour.