More than Music
Lucy Walker
Column III: Décor-um
Time period: 17th - 18th Century
Culture in focus: Music and Aesthetic Style
Music in focus: Lully and Rameau
Playlist link: ‘Décor-um’
Orangery in Versailles Palace
Credit: Urban at French Wikipedia
Versailles, Paris, 1674: Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Alceste was premiered before King Louis XIV in celebration of a recent victory. This work, a tragédie lyrique, exemplifies a turning point in the genre that would later become the golden age of French opera. Commonly regarded as the first French baroque opera, Lully’s Fêtes de l’amour et de Bacchus was performed at Versailles just 4 years later. Lully cultivated the emerging genre of baroque opera, combining courtly dances, expressive arias and sumptuous scenery into masterpieces which invited huge public enthusiasm. He and his successor, Rameau, both royal court musicians, are celebrated as pioneers of this genre and for subsequently making opera accessible to the public, no longer reserved for the aristocracy and royal courts.
Opera was born from parent-genres: comédie-ballet and tragédie lyrique. Tragédie lyrique tended to have propagandistic motives, using classical allusions as a metaphor for disciplined society and adulation of a leader. This manifested more widely in culture as a desire for order, visible in music and other artistic styles.
French opera had to distinguish itself from the long established Italian tradition and achieved this through stylistic divergence; for example, Italian-style over-ornamentation was considered distasteful, but subtle un-notated ornaments (known as agréments) were encouraged as a way of adding sensibility to the music.
Three key identifying features of French opera are flow, distinctive recitative and dance. French composers (compared to their Italian counterparts) favoured musical continuity and faster-paced plot development. Italian-style recitativo secco, almost spoken rather than sung, was less compatible with French prosody. Composers adjusted recitative passages to suit the contours of spoken French, ensuring the comprehensibility of the text and to allow for expressive harmonic accompaniment. Lully was praised particularly for the natural effect his recitative passages could create. Borrowing from contemporary theatre, opera composers often chose poetic metres to add to the atmosphere of the scene, for example, 12-syllable "alexandrine" and 10-syllable "heroic" lines. The incorporation of courtly dances was mastered by Rameau and Lully, the latter of whom danced professionally in his youth. Many traditional French dances, such as gavottes, minuets, rigaudons, passepieds, and musettes originated from folk dances, and were therefore widely recognised on account of their distinctive rhythms and characters.
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Listen to an aria from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux !
The overtures to French operas also gained popularity as a stand-alone genre, characterised by double dotted rhythms and ornamentation, which influenced later generations of composers. Listen to Atys: Overture and Zaïs: Overture !
The setting of opera performances reflects a similar stylistic nuance, whether in the manicured gardens of Versailles, or the filigree-decorated Palais-Royal. Even the couture of the day, displayed with pride at the opera as a sign of social status within the rising bourgeois class, embodied this delicate opulence, featuring ornamental designs, pastel colours and rich embroidery. The delicate ornamentation of the music reflects the intricate aesthetic of design, creative and expressive but still respectably restrained. Through opera performances, a new world of experience, trend and aesthetic was opened up to the rising middle class - a glimpse of courtly life denied to them in the past.
GLOSSARY
Aria – a musical number in an opera, sung by a solo singer.
Comédie-ballet – a musical genre, typically a collaboration between a writer and a composer, featuring lavish special effects and comedic entertainment.
Double dotted – exaggerated dotted rhythms.
Ornamentation – embellishments or flourishes (typically a few quick added notes, or stylistically delayed notes), to provide interest and expression to a simpler melody line.
Recitative – a type of singing in an opera where text is prioritised over melody, often to accelerate plot developments. The singer often sings several words on one note.
Recitativo secco – a style of recitative with minimal accompaniment, sometimes closer to pitched speech than singing.
Tragédie lyrique - a musical genre borrowing elements from verse tragedies, typically with classical mythology-based plots, chorus and ballet numbers.