Apollo’s Angels
Page 7
The Royal Academy of Music—later known as the Paris Opera—was founded in 1669, and it was there, under the direction of Lully, that the subsequent development of French ballet and opera unfolded. The idea for its establishment originated with the ambitious but administratively inept poet Pierre Perrin. Perrin proposed that the king establish an academy of poets and musicians lest France be “vanquished” by foreigners in the vital new art of opera, which was making such headway in Italian cities at the time. He envisaged a French national art, distinct from—and superior to—its Italian counterpart. The king agreed but did not provide funds: the Academy was to survive on box office alone, and Perrin soon found himself in debtor’s prison.
Lully, ever opportunistic, did not fail to see the possible profits and prestige of the Paris Opera, and through a series of machinations he wrested control of the enterprise in 1672. Dissatisfied with the original terms set forth by the king, however, he maneuvered to win a crucial concession in the following year: no other Parisian theater would be allowed to mount productions on an equally grand scale. In particular, the number of musicians and dancers that other theaters would be allowed to employ was strictly limited. Lully thus stifled the competition* and gave himself carte blanche for the development of a new operatic and balletic art.45
What followed was a period of enormous artistic dynamism centered at the Paris Opera—a dynamism founded, however, on very different principles from those which had been (and still were) operative at court. In the patent letters of the Opera, the king stipulated that noblemen who danced or sang on its stage would not lose their noble status, as they most certainly did if they acted on any other Parisian stage. The Opera, it seems, was to be a court away from court, a privileged outpost for royal spectacles and ballets. And indeed, many of the early productions staged at the Paris Opera were copies of those first staged for the king at Versailles. What Louis could not have anticipated, however, was that the amateur aristocrats he was trying to protect would soon fall away: their participation alongside professionals almost immediately became the exception rather than the rule. Prominent noblemen had danced side by side with professionals in one of the Academy’s first productions, Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, but this was to be a farewell performance of sorts, and from that point forth only the occasional nobleman graced the Academy stage.
Moreover—and this was a change—women took to the stage. When Le Triomphe de l’Amour (first performed at court in 1681) was staged at the Paris Opera, the parts originally danced by the dauphine and other royal ladies were not taken by men en travesti, as had been customary. Instead, they were performed by the first professional women dancers, including one Mademoiselle de La Fontaine, who was known in addition to compose her own steps.* Curiously, the fact that women were now dancing on the Opera stage passed almost unnoticed at the time: “a singular novelty,” the Mercure galante blandly noted. The reason for this indifference may have been that La Fontaine only illustrated what people already knew: that in the years following the establishment of the Paris Opera, social and professional dancing were parting ways. There were now two distinct tracks, the court and the stage, and they did not mix as freely as they had in the past. For women, it was a case of promotion by demotion: as real nobles made their exit and their roles were taken up by skilled (but socially low) professionals, women dancers found a place.46
In addition, and contrary to popular images of the lavishness of life at Versailles, both Paris and the Paris Opera were gaining on the court. From the 1680s to the end of Louis’s reign in 1715, ballets were still performed at court, though with less regularity and in general with more restraint. When Louis’s grand château at Versailles was finally completed in the early 1680s, it did not even house a theater. Moreover, life at Versailles grew notoriously less festive as Louis’s military defeats mounted and as he came under the more severe influence of the pious Madame de Maintenon. It was she who in 1697 demanded the expulsion of the Italian commedia dell’arte players. In these years, the tension that had always existed between the court and Paris—Louis would forever associate the city with the Fronde—grew increasingly acute. The Paris Opera served as a bridge of sorts, but it was also a very Parisian institution, both in its audiences and in its growing sense of its own independence.
Soon after the Paris Opera was founded, Beauchamps was appointed principal ballet master. We know very little about his choreography, which has been lost to time, but we can follow some of what happened to dance in this period through the work of Lully, who did so much to develop early French opera. Lully and his contemporaries were acutely aware that opera drew on the sonorities and rhythms of the Italian language, and they were also sharply attuned to tragedy and the powerful French classical tradition developed by Corneille and Jean Racine. As such, Lully, working closely with Quinault in particular, turned away from the ballet de cour and the comédie-ballet and labored to forge a new and self-consciously serious French operatic form. What he came up with was yet another new genre: the tragédie en musique.47
The tragédie en musique did not neglect dance. It couldn’t: French taste demanded ballets. But Lully and Quinault’s real interest lay in the ways that music might be pressed into the mold of the French language. Fascinated by theatrical declamation, Lully studied the techniques of the legendary tragic actress La Champmeslé (Racine’s mistress), and when composing he took his cue from the libretto, which he learned by heart, declaiming its verses and then shaping the rhythmic and melodic lines around the rise and fall of the poetic meter. In contrast to Italian opera, he tended to compose serious roles in recitative and he strived for a simple style close to speech, chastising singers who dared ornament or distort his prized linguistic clarity.
Dances and divertissements were sprinkled like leavening or bits of sweet candy through the production. Ballet, it seemed, was losing its claim to gravitas. We can see the change in a small but revealing detail: Louis XIV’s favorite dance had always been the stately courante or entrée grave, but Lully preferred the then sprightly and skipping minuet, “always gay and quick” in triple meter, which appeared repeatedly in his operas (and was also the dance that M. Jourdain had so desperately hoped to master). Similarly, according to the Marquis de Sourches, some years later Louis asked his ballet masters to stage a courante; shockingly, none could remember the details of this once favorite dance, and the king had to settle, again, for a minuet instead. The most elevated forms of the noble style, it seemed, were giving way to a more brilliant and ornamented dance that emphasized quick footwork and buoyant jumps.48
A tension thus emerged between opera, which labored to be serious, and ballets, which manifestly and increasingly were not. French opera was still (like the ballet de cour) an umbrella form, which encompassed both, but exactly what direction it should take was as yet uncertain, and the ensuing years spun forth a dizzying array of loosely related genres that mixed opera and ballet in varying quotients. People were very much aware of this shifting situation, and ballet and opera became the subject of contentious debate.
The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes is usually thought of as a literary affair. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, however, it also evolved into a bitter culture war over the nature and merits of Louis’s reign, which in turn spilled into a heated argument about the purpose and future of opera and ballet. The “Ancients” claimed that the seventeenth century—and Louis XIV’s reign—represented the flowering of a great tradition that reached back through the Renaissance to antiquity. The “Moderns,” by contrast, saw no reason to root the present in a fusty and old-fashioned past. Louis’s reign, they insisted, was not an end point but a glorious new beginning without precedent in history. Weren’t Cartesian logic and the scientific method evidence that France had fathered a new and superior modern epoch? Wasn’t Lebrun a step up from Raphael, and the French language an advance on Latin? Didn’t French opera and the music of Lully outdo anything that came before?49
To t
he Ancients, whose ranks included distinguished men such as Racine and Nicolas Boileau, the Moderns were little more than tendentious courtiers whose flowery writing and facile rhetoric could never capture the gravitas of Louis’s France. The Ancients’ views echoed those of the Jansenists, a Catholic branch with whom Racine in particular was closely allied and whose severe religious doctrines and emphasis on purity and restraint were a matter of taste as well as theology. Thus Racine and the Ancients advocated a clear and unadorned style sharpened with irony and wit, and they disdained the ornate, baroque style typical of the Jesuits, their political archrivals. Not surprisingly, then, the Ancients had little respect for the bombast and spectacle of opera, which they took to be a superficial form of flattery that could never hope to rival tragedy or satire. And they found Quinault’s texts for the tragédies en musique particularly offensive, since—in works such as Alceste, after Euripides—the librettist willfully distorted ancient texts in the spurious name of contemporary taste and fashions. Boileau, who (at the king’s request) once tried his hand at writing an opera, found the work so “miserable” that it filled him with “disgust.”50
The Ancients were not wrong—about opera, ballet, or the men who defended it. The Moderns were indeed consummate courtiers: Quinault and Lully moved in the king’s inner circle (the king signed both their marriage certificates), and Quinault was known for his gallant verse and too-clever rhymes. There was also the panegyrist Jean Desmarets, who worked with Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, and Louis XIV on court spectacle, and Charles Perrault, who owed much of his success to Louis XIV’s influential minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and was a prominent member of the Académie Française, stronghold of the Moderns. Indeed, Perrault became an outspoken leader for the Moderns, and his views were also echoed and elaborated by lesser lights such as Michel de Pure, an avid courtier and author of a closely argued treatise on dance, and the Jesuit father Claude-François Ménestrier, who wrote extensively about spectacles.
What did these men have to say in defense of their beloved opera and ballet? First, they readily admitted that ballets in particular had neither the rigor nor the seriousness of tragedy—or even, for that matter, of comedy. Ballets failed miserably to adhere to the classical unities of time, place, and action; they could not fully represent heroic figures or high human emotions such as compassion and terror, or even hope to instruct or shape the moral life of men. And yet! Ballet, de Pure declared in 1668, was a “new” theatrical genre justified precisely by its deviations from tragedy. Opera, echoed the poet and librettist Antoine-Louis Le Brun in 1712, must be thought of as an “irregular tragedy…a newly invented spectacle with its own laws and beauty.”51
We should remember what the supporters of ballet in particular were up against. In spite of its prominence at court, dance had never ranked among the highly regarded liberal arts—traditionally arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, grammar, logic, rhetoric, and music—thought to be worthy of study by free men, except perhaps (as we have seen) as a branch of rhetoric or music. Nor was it considered on a par with poetry, so vaunted by the Ancients. Rather, it had generally been considered a more artisanal occupation (it was, after all, a physical labor), and its masters, as we have seen, were typically drawn from the lower orders of society, even if they did on occasion rise to visible positions at court. The issue had always been confused, however, precisely because dancing was so intimately tied to courtly etiquette and royal spectacles, and as far back as the Renaissance, ballet masters had looked to their high-ranking patrons, and to antiquity, to justify and elevate themselves and their art.52
They were not alone. Painting had also long been relegated to the status of a vulgar employment: painters worked with their hands. But during the Renaissance and into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, artists and writers managed to raise painting to the level of a liberal art (or “fine” art, as it was increasingly called), often following the Ancients by likening it to poetry: ut pictura poesis, loosely rendered “as is poetry, so is painting.” And so Ménestrier and other dancing masters adapted this argument, insisting that ballets too were like paintings, except that they were also animated—paintings that lived and moved surely imitated life more closely. If painting had been elevated by virtue of its portrayal of exemplary and heroic acts, then ballet must by extension merit a similar rise in stature.
It was a valiant theoretical stride, but not altogether convincing. For the real truth was that ballets did not belong to the rigorous and rational world of classical theater, and would always exist at the edges of the liberal and fine arts. Rather, the province of ballets was the more inchoate world of le merveilleux. This expansive arena, with its pagan and Christian resonances and fascination with miracles, magical, and supernatural events defying material logic and human reason, seemed purpose-made for opera and ballet, and had long been associated with court spectacle. All the more so since for many at the time, le merveilleux was not an unreal or imaginary world outside of daily experience: belief in enchantment was commonplace, and spirits, fairies, ghosts, and vaguely religious ideas of devilry, witches, and black magic inhabited the minds of even the most educated people.
In theatrical terms, le merveilleux meant machines and ballets: deus ex machina, spectacular effects in which men and gods were transformed and seemed to fly up into the clouds or disappear suddenly through trapdoors, and scenery that suddenly revolved, transporting the spectator to exotic lands in the blink of an eye. Charles Perrault explained that effects and fantastical creatures, so frowned upon in tragedy or comedy, were perfectly dignified in opera, which took le merveilleux as its subject tout court. Similarly, La Bruyère reflected that opera could “hold the mind, the eyes and the ears under the same spell.”53
It was in this spirit that in 1697 Perrault published what would later become an iconic text for ballet: The Sleeping Beauty. Written toward the end of his life as a fairy tale to amuse his own children, Beauty was steeped in the ideas championed by the Moderns. It was not based on Greek or Roman mythology, nor did it tell of angels and saints. Instead, Perrault sought to give children their own distinctly French merveilleux, rooted in Louis’s epoch. Beauty is the story of a good prince and princess (with elegant manners and finery) who vanquish evil fairies, ogres, and a one-hundred-year night. In the end the prince, now a king, saves his beloved queen and their children from a gruesome death and restores order to his realm. Perrault wrote in self-consciously clear and simple French and tinged his tale with Christian morality, reminding readers that the childish innocence of the infant princess (like that of the baby Jesus) reflected a state of pure faith. Today, we often forget that The Sleeping Beauty was not merely a children’s story: it was a tribute to Louis XIV, le merveilleux, and the modern French state.
Perhaps not surprisingly, le merveilleux left the Ancients cold. Jean de La Fontaine ridiculed the cumbersome theatrical machines coveted by opera and ballet, complaining that recurrent mechanical failures left gods dangling helplessly from ropes and had been known to accidentally plunge the heavens at an angle into hell. Even when successful, he said, machine effects were ridiculous deceptions perpetrated on the knowing. Similarly, the outspoken critic Charles de Saint-Évremond, writing from exile in England, threw up his hands at the potpourri characteristic of ballet and opera: “In effect, we cover the earth with Divinities and let them dance.…We exaggerate with an assemblage of gods, shepherds, heroes, magicians, ghosts, furies and demons.” But even he finally admitted that Lully and Quinault had worked wonders with this very peculiar art.54
And so they had. For if the Ancients held the high ground—and their arguments would ring in the ears of ballet masters for centuries to come—it was the Moderns who presided over the birth of French opera and ballet as it emerged from the ballet de cour. By 1687, when Lully died (of gangrene) and Beauchamps left the Academy of Music to be replaced by Pécour, ballet and opera were on firm footing and ballet was even ascendant. The number of ballets in tragédies en musique m
ore than doubled in the 1690s. And when the composer André Campra, working with Pécour, created L’Europe Galante (1697), he dispensed with tragedy altogether and simply strung together a series of dance numbers loosely based on the theme of Europe. With Les festes vénitiennes (1710) this trend became an established fact, and ballets held an increasingly prominent place in operas for decades to come. In 1713, the Paris Opera employed twenty-four dancers; by 1778, the number would rise to ninety, with approximately one tragic opera to every three lighter and more dance-oriented productions.
This surge in ballets, however, did not signal a new golden age. In fact, the period of great innovation—which had seen the immensely important codification of positions by Beauchamps and the evolution of the ballet de cour, the comédie-ballet, and the tragédie en musique—was coming to an end. Ballet was changing, becoming more lighthearted and losing the spontaneity, grandeur, and satirical edge evident in performances of earlier years. In part, this was because ballet was being slowly cut off from its source. By the early eighteenth century Louis’s court, which had nourished ballet for so long, was beginning to lose its vitality. In 1700 the Duchesse d’Orléans complained bitterly that she had seen courtiers seated indiscriminately at court with no attention to rank, and five years later she wrote that the rules of etiquette had become so lax that “one doesn’t have any idea who one is … I cannot get used to this confusion.…this no longer resembles a court.”55