Ballet rested on twin pillars. La belle danse was one: it prescribed how noblemen danced. The second was spectacle. Ballets were not yet evening-length performances of dance performed in a theater for an audience, as they are today. They were still very much ballet de cour, grand displays of power performed by and for those in power. In many ways, la belle danse and the ballet de cour were of a piece: together they represented and affirmed the hierarchies governing life at court and the magnificence of the king. But they also existed in tension. If la belle danse pointed to a strict classical discipline, the ballet de cour turned sharply to a more lavishly extravagant baroque aesthetic. It is thus worth dwelling for a moment on the sources and sheer magnitude of theatrical spectacle during Louis’s reign, for this too was a defining feature of ballet.
The Catholic Church might seem an odd place to begin, since—though it is known for its dramatic liturgy, it was not traditionally sympathetic to dance. “Where there is dance, there is the devil,” thundered Alexandre Varet in 1666, drawing authority from the fourth-century writings of St. John Chrysostom. Dancing “does nothing but excite passions, making modesty lose its call amidst the noise of jumping and abandoning oneself to dissolution,” railed another, citing the fourth-century authority St. Ambrose. Indeed, actors and dancers who performed publicly were automatically excommunicated and denied final rites and a Christian burial.*36
The ironies of this harsh injunction became acute in the context of Louis XIV’s well-known passion for the art, a point that did not escape La Bruyère. “What more bizarre idea,” he wrote, “than to have a crowd of Christians of both sexes assemble in a room on certain days to applaud a troupe of excommunicated individuals, who are only there by virtue of the pleasure they give and who have been paid in advance.” Voltaire shot back from the next century: “When Louis XIV and his entire court danced onstage, do you think they were excommunicated?…But if one did not excommunicate Louis XIV for dancing for his own pleasure, it hardly seems just to excommunicate those who give this same pleasure for a bit of money, with the full permission of the king of France.”37
Among Catholics, however, there was one group that did believe in dancers and dancing: the Jesuits. Known for their Counter-Reformation zeal and desire to employ the arts to save souls, the Jesuits saw ballets and spectacle as a way to attract and inspire believers, and it is no accident that many of the most impassioned treatises on ballet were written by Jesuit fathers. Indeed, a steady stream of traffic flowed between the court and prominent Jesuit schools, and Beauchamps, Pécour, and other highly regarded dancers taught and performed regularly at the Collège de Clermont (renamed Louis-le-Grand in 1682), which educated a French and foreign elite.
At Jesuit schools, students (many of them future courtiers) were taught oration and the “mute rhetoric” of dance, gesture, and declamation. They learned to carry themselves with a firm, upright posture with the head just so, not thrust back or hanging dog-like to the front, not too high (proud) or too low (disrespectful). The hands were to be held by the side, slightly in front of the body, and the arms poised, never swinging to the gait of a step or lifted above the shoulders. Good orators, they were told, should have well-proportioned bodies (no short necks—too comic) and strive to hone their gestures to match those of kings and princes of the Church, whose numinous bodies shone with divine light.38
Every year students performed in tragedies played in Latin with full-scale balletic interludes for an audience of prominent courtiers, which at the Collège de Clermont often included the king. The ballets were written and designed by professors of rhetoric and were meant to persuade. Working in conjunction with ballet masters, these professors created elaborate and richly decorated productions with up-to-date stage effects. Their ballets were never, however, mere entertainments or divertissements, which the Jesuit fathers scorned as cold and decorative. To the contrary, Jesuit ballets echoed the themes of the Latin drama they accompanied. They were expected, moreover, to exert a powerful emotional grip on the spectator and to pull him into the world of the “supernatural and extraordinary.” Bearing titles such as Le Triomphe de la réligion, they were conceived in the spirit of baroque church architecture, with its great twisting columns of (usually fake) marble and gold, designed to deliver men to God.39
As magnificent as these Jesuit productions were, they were no rival for the ballets performed at court itself, and in this, as in so much else, the Church paled before the French state. Consider Les Plaisirs de L’Île enchantée, a three-day-long event at Versailles in May 1664 in honor of the queen—except that it was also (scandalously and to the grave consternation of the queen mother, Anne of Austria) understood to be in honor of the king’s mistress, the attractive Mademoiselle de La Vallière. Versailles was not yet the extravagant palace that it would become: it was still a hunting residence, and the grand château and gardens would not be completed for some years, making the logistics of hauling sets, costumes, food, water, and building materials all the more taxing and impressive to those in attendance.
The festivities dramatized a story drawn from a well-known poem by Ludovico Ariosto about Roger, a knight errant held captive by the beautiful enchantress Alcine. Each day, the king and his company of some six hundred courtiers proceeded to different outdoor locations, finally ending at a lake where the grand palace of Alcine itself had been specially constructed for their pleasure. At night the way was fantastically lit with hundreds of wax candles and flaming torches, and the king, who played Roger, appeared in a diamond-studded costume and mounted on a magnificent stallion. There was a sumptuous banquet (with diners seated in strict rank order) on a theme of the four seasons, in which dancers performed the signs of the zodiac and “the seasons” each appeared mounted on a horse, camel, elephant, and bear. Performers bearing huge platters of gorgeously decorated foods followed, and there were plays (by Molière) and other entertainments, prepared, as plans for the event noted, by a “little army” of artists and artisans. On the last day, a full-scale ballet enacted the storming of Alcine’s magical palace: protected by dancing giants, dwarves, demons, and monsters, Roger (this time danced by a professional, allowing the king to watch and preside) finally wielded his magical wand and, amid thunder and lightning, caused the palace to crumble as fireworks exploded.40
Ballets were thus one element in a grand and ritualized spectacle, a world of sensual pleasure and opulent entertainment. In these and similar performances rank mattered less than merit and the king’s prerogative: Beauchamps and other professional (non-noble) ballet masters often performed alongside royalty, with heroic and comic parts assigned to each. Like his father, Louis XIV made a fetching village girl, and Beauchamps was known for his elegant appearance and grand movements. There was, however, one critical moment when blood trumped skill: at the end of a ballet de cour there was almost always another, distinct, and shorter kind of ballet, the grand ballet, which acted as a ceremonial resolution, a return to the tonic and natural order. In a practice stretching back at least to the days of the Ballet comique de la Reine, this grand ballet was traditionally danced by noblemen and the king, often clad in black masks and arrayed according to rank. And in sharp contrast to the freer, more improvisational, and burlesque dances of the preceding spectacle, the steps and figures of the grand ballet were, in the strictest sense, both noble and choreographed.
Courtiers would have recognized it perfectly, for at the king’s balls, as in the grand ballet, dancers were selected in advance and performed in order according to rank. Those who did not dance (and exception was made for age) watched and judged. The grand ballet thus acted as a bridge between theater and life, between the fantastical and allegorical world of the spectacle and the hierarchically regimented world of the court, between the ballet de cour and la belle danse. It was a boiling down and summing up: the moral of the spectacle could be abstracted in the steps and figures of this dance, like a final chord at the end of a dramatic musical exposition. It reestablished the formal hierar
chies, returned the players to their stations, and formally confirmed the order and discipline governing social relations.
The ballet de cour was so closely fused with the French monarchy that it seemed—like the king himself—immortal. But it was not: in the course of Louis’s reign (1643–1715) it faltered and fell into a slow but irreversible decline. One ostensible cause was the development of a competing, if related, art form imported directly from Italy: opera. But another and more immediate cause was Jean-Baptiste Molière (1622–1673) and the comédie-ballet. In the 1660s Molière worked closely with court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) and the ballet master Beauchamps and was also frequently joined by the Italian machinist Carlo Vigarani, known for his clever technical innovations and spectacles on a grand scale. It was a formidable team, and together these artists created iconoclastic and wickedly witty entertainments, often performed in the midst of the feasting and festivities of the king’s spectacles. In time these entertainments undercut the ballet de cour (of which they were part)—not by attacking it from without, but by whittling away from within. It is not that the ballet de cour suddenly disappeared or was transformed into something new; it was more a matter of flux and dissolution, as the sprawling ballet de cour gradually lost coherence and gave way to other theatrical forms.
The comédie-ballet was everything the ballet de cour was not: a succinct and tightly crafted satirical genre that mixed drama and music with ballets “sewn” (as Molière put it) into the plot. The dances were thus never gratuitous divertissements but grew instead out of the plot—they were part of the action. The first comédie-ballet ever produced was Les fâcheux, performed in 1661 at a fête given by Louis XIV’s ill-fated minister of finance, Nicolas Foucquet.* Molière and Beauchamps (Lully was not yet involved) had originally envisioned separate theatrical and dance entertainments, but they were short of good dancers and needed time for the dancers they did have to change costumes for their various entrées. It was thus decided to “sew” the dances into the drama, in order to allow the dancers time to change while the actors performed their parts. The king was pleased, and other comédie-ballets followed.
The comédie-ballet, however, was not only a product of theatrical improvisation. It also drew deeply on the conventions of the time. Molière was well versed, for example, in the verbal wit of the Parisian literary circles known as the précieuses. These circles were led by independent-minded women whose intimate society and sharp-witted and erudite discussions of etiquette and courtly love were a refuge of sorts from the suffocating culture of Louis’s court, which the précieuses (like Molière) at times subtly opposed. In 1659 Molière had matched his wit to theirs in a piercing satire: Les précieuses ridicules. We should not be surprised that Molière also attended the Collège de Clermont and was thoroughly schooled in the Jesuit arts, not least in the art of rhetoric and moral suasion, as well as in the practice of tying ballets substantively to tragedy; nor that he was influenced by the commedia dell’arte and shared a theater with one of its most accomplished troupes in Paris.
The commedia dell’arte was important because it was at once a serious and a comic art. Today we rightly associate it with improvised antics and horseplay, and with the farcical characters of Pierrot, Harlequin, and the rest. But this is only half the story. At its inception and into the seventeenth century, commedia dell’arte players were mountebanks and actors employed by noble families and thoroughly versed in written comedies and dramas reaching back to Ovid and Virgil. (Some were even admitted to academies, where they studied literature and art.) To please their noble patrons, these players laced their performances with literary allusions and bent genres back on themselves, mocking, mimicking, and pouring scorn on stiff and pompous academic fashions and the pretenses of the men and women who embraced them. The sharp tension between formal drama and zany improvisation, between high and popular idioms, lay at the heart of its appeal.
Lully was no stranger to this tradition. A native Florentine, he first served Louis XIV as a violinist and baladin before becoming a prominent court composer (whose astronomical rise and libertine habits were a subject of endless gossip and speculation). In the comédie-ballet, he left the formal dances to Beauchamps but personally supervised and danced the more comic roles, which were often freely improvised. Indeed, he was known for his airs de vitesse and impatience with the “stupidity of most of the grands Seigneurs,” who could not keep up with his quick-minded steps and sequences.41
In 1670 Molière and Lully turned their satirical wit on the conventions of ballet and court spectacle with Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. First performed for the king at his castle at Chambord, the play was a biting portrait of bourgeois ambition and the arbitrary rules of court etiquette. M. Jourdain, the parvenu who aspires to rank through wealth, is comically clumsy and poorly schooled in the manners and etiquette required of high society. He hires tailors, musicians, philosophers, and ballet masters to teach him how to behave like an accomplished courtier and aristocrat, but this is not enough. To become a true man of rank he must pass the iron test of wooing a marquise, which means—he is told by his foppish and self-serving advisors—that he must present her with a grand ballet.42
The dancing master (himself a parodied court sycophant) teaches M. Jourdain to bow—a step backward and bow, then three steps forward, bowing each time, “the last as low as her knees”—and to perform a minuet. But privately he takes offense: dance, he proclaims, echoing the elders of Louis XIV’s Royal Academy of Dance, is an art and should not be sullied by this money-grubbing bourgeois. Indignantly he strikes out at the fencing master, “a funny little animal in a breast-plate … a master metal-basher,” and proclaims with a vain flourish that dance is a vastly superior art: “Man can do nothing at all without dancing.…All the misfortunes of mankind, all the disasters of which history is full, the bungling of politicians and the mistakes of great generals, all come through not learning to dance.”43
By the time we get to the final grand ballet, the Ballet des Nations, we have been treated to an anti–grand ballet performed by a lumbering bouffon Turk—a pointed reference to the inept manners of an Ottoman emissary who had recently paid a visit to the French court and was understandably befuddled by its capricious requirements. Originally performed (and no doubt impishly improvised) by Lully, the mufti’s antics were surpassed only by those of M. Jourdain, played by Molière himself. This grand ballet was no resolution, of course, but a devastating attack. Performed in this case by professional dancers rather than ranking nobility, it lampooned the traditional ceremonial resolution.
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme marked an important moment in the history of ballet, not for what it did but for the way it summed up a tradition and turned it on its head. It is difficult to imagine that the ceremonial pomp of the ballet de cour could ever be seen in quite the same way, even by the most avid courtiers. Moreover, here was a new genre, a kind of miniature ballet de cour conspicuously lacking in the rambling and dramatically extraneous divertissements that typically larded the king’s spectacles. The comédie-ballet stripped away the fat of the ballet de cour in favor of dramatic coherence, and Le Bourgeois gentilhomme finished the job by mocking it. Yet the very fact that the comédie-ballet had grown up within the ballet de cour—that it was in effect a play within a play—was also a sign of the strength and durability of Louis’s court and its ceremonial forms. The two could and did coexist. But the satirical tone had flung open the doors, and the way was clear for change.
Nor did Molière and Lully—or the king—stop with comédie-ballet. In 1671 Louis asked them to collaborate with Pierre Corneille and the librettist Philippe Quinault on a new work to be performed at the Tuileries in Paris. Rarely had such an eclectic group of collaborators been assembled: Corneille, the conscience of French tragedy, had little in common with the lightweight Quinault, or even with the vigorous but Italianate style of Molière or Lully. The Tuileries, a vast théâtre à machines, had been constructed by Vigarani in 1662. With a c
apacity of at least six thousand, it had a massive feel, with marble, gold, and imposing columns decorating the interior and a stage half again as deep as any other at the time, fully rigged with every conceivable machine. The idea was pure baroque: to envelop the spectator in the illusion of vistas and heavens stretching to infinity. In order to enhance the illusion, Vigarani even painted in extra people, thus populating the stage with cardboard crowds that extended back along a series of wings and grooves, diminishing toward a distant horizon. The result may have been visually spectacular, but the theater’s imposing size also made it an acoustic disaster, and it had fallen into disuse. The new production, Psyché, would reclaim it briefly from decay.
Psyché promised to be something new: a tragédie-ballet. It was an ambitious attempt to join a serious subject with ballets and elaborate stage effects, and the production included dances for zephyrs and furies, dryads and naiads, buffoons, shepherds, acrobats, and warriors. According to one observer, there was even a spectacular dance featuring seventy professional ballet masters and a final tableau with no fewer than three hundred musicians suspended in the clouds.44 The overblown character of the production did not go unnoticed at the time: Psyché inspired a string of parodies. If the comédie-ballet was a honed satirical genre that used dance and theater to turn a mirror on the court and its follies, then the tragédie-ballet was its reverse, a bloated spectacle in the tradition of the ballet de cour set on a grandiose stage and dressed up as tragedy. As such, it was more of a dénouement than a beginning: Psyché was the only tragédie-ballet ever created, and we would not be wrong to see in it the death throes of the ballet de cour.
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