A Musical Monopolizer

It has come to my attention in the last few days that my blog from last week may have portrayed Lully as the bullied child of baroque composers, who got his lunch money stolen and was generally picked on for being ‘different.’

I assure you, he was not.

As I previously mentioned, Jean-Baptiste Lully is among the enviable musicians that had a high and reliable income, not to mention was an esteemed favorite of the king. But that’s not all. Hopefully by the end of this post I will have convinced you that Lully was the play-ground bully of the school of French music, and that there was little anyone could do about it.

From the very beginning of Louis XIV’s reign, Lully was given the title of surintendant de la musique de la chamber du roi in 1661, the highest position a musician could hope for in the French court. Considering his very humble beginnings in Florence as a peasant and how he tried to portray himself as of higher birth than he actually was, we can perhaps see his own character parodied in his opera Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Middle-Class Gentleman, 1670) where a middle-class gentleman tries to pass himself off as of higher class, trying and yet failing at singing serious songs or dancing minuets. (Click here to listen to it, or there is an example clip at the end of this)

Operas such as this one are what Lully is well-remembered for, despite him saying in the 1660s that opera would not work in France due to the nature of the language. In 1672 Lully took over the privilege of being the director of the Académie Royale de Musique, thus beginning what I like to call his musical monopoly. James P. Fairleigh describes that from this point on, “Lully had established almost absolute control over secular musical performances, not only in Versailles and Paris but in all the provincial communities as well.”  He achieved this by prohibiting shows to have dancers, or having music groups perform with more than two voices and six violins without his permission, for which he charged. As an example, a series of operas to be performed in Marseilles cost 2000 livres a year just for his consent.

He charged steep prices for his shows, and chose where the best (most expensive) tiers in the amphitheater would be, the “best” possible seats being on the stage itself.

A poster advertising for Lully's first production after he took control of Opera.

Lully controlled just about every aspect of his productions. His cohort Philippe Quinault would select the subjects for the king to choose from, following which he would write up a rough overview to be given to Lully who would arrange the order and acts as well as scenes. He then gave it back to Quinault who wrote the libretto (words), who would then have it revised by his peers before giving it back to Lully, who had the choice to take or leave the criticisms. The composer worked on the score until he knew it, then dictated it to his secretaries, beyond that not letting others besides the king see what he was working on.

The dictatorship which he created can be seen most of all in the rehearsals. Missed rehearsals or performances were met with fines per hour missed. Not content with just composing the music, he was often found listening at the back of the theater for wrong notes or extra flourishes, to which he felt at liberty to go up and smash the instrument over the player’s backs. It had even been said he kicked a pregnant actress in order to make her pregnancy fail.

Lully the Bully

Following this, it doesn't even surprise me that his death came from conducting. The cane he used to beat time in ballet class was used so vigorously it smashed his foot, which became infected by gangrene. He only lived for another eight weeks.

Jean-Baptiste Lully was the composer of the French court during Louis XIV’s reign, composing very beautiful and entertaining operas that not surprisingly were still played in France 100 years after his death, though it is probably fair to say his musical monopoly was not the result of super-human talent, but rather a result of being the playground bully.

Further reading:
Jérôme de la Gorce, ‘Lully,’ Grove Music Online. Accessed March 7, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42477pg1.

James P. Fairleigh, ‘Lully as “Secrétaire Du Roi,” Bach, Vol 15, No.4 (1984), 16-22.

Wendy Heller, Music in the Baroque (New York: Norton, 2014), 121-129.

Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 204-214.

Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader (Brookfield: Ashgate, 2000), 22-26.

Further listening:

I found a particularly useful YouTube clip to understand how dancing was an integral part of Lully's productions, as shown in Le bourgeois gentilhomme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBFigs-fjLs

Feel free to add any comments or queries below.