The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 21 (2015) No. 1

Published 2017

Acteurs and Actrices as Muses: The Case for Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Repertory Troupe (1672–86)

Antonia L. Banducci*

Abstract

Jean-Baptiste Lully consulted the illustrious soprano Marie Le Rochois about his operas and often attributed their success to her, according to Évrard Titon du Tillet. But to what extent did Le Rochois and the other performers in Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique repertory troupe influence the fourteen operas that Lully and his librettists created? This article presents a correlative analysis of the operas, librettos, musical settings, and musico-dramatic skills of the original performers, proposing that under Lully’s strong direction, his librettists contrived their librettos to utilize the troupe’s performers to best advantage. Lully then made matching his music to his performers’ abilities an especially high priority. Four operas in particular, Proserpine (1680), Persée (1682), Acis et Galatée (1686), and Amadis (1684), an opera with a strongly criticized libretto but with great success on stage, serve to make this point. In the case of Amadis, I propose that at Lully’s request and with his help, Quinault designed the Amadis libretto as a vehicle for the Académie Royale de Musique’s star performers, thereby contributing to the opera’s success. One can fruitfully apply the same consideration to all Lully’s operas. A performer-based view reveals the intrinsically theatrical nature of these works and thereby provides a new tool to understanding his operas and their librettos within and beyond their literary frame.

1. Setting the Stage

2. Lully’s Two Overlapping Troupes

3. Typecasting

4. Proserpine’s Opéra Premiere (1680) and the Persée Connection (1682)

5. Mlle Saint Christophle, Soprano

6. Marie Aubry, Soprano

7. Louis Golard Dumesnil, haute-contre

8. François Beaumavielle, Baritone

9. Marie Le Rochois, Soprano

10. Galatée (Acis et Galatée, 1686)

11. Jean-Baptiste Lully, Librettist-in-Chief

12. The Amadis Conundrum

13. Solving the Conundrum Pair by Pair: Amadis/Dumesnil and Oriane/Aubry, the Physically and Musically Estranged Lovers

14. Florestan/Dun and Corisande/Desmatins, the Devoted, Extraneous Lovers

15. Arcalaüs/Beaumavielle and Arcabonne/Le Rochois, the Sibling Enchanters Who Steal the Show

16.  Resetting the Stage

Acknowledgements

Examples

Audio Examples

Tables

References

1. Setting the Stage

Il fallait ces deux hommes [Lully et Quinault], et des acteurs, pour faire de quelques scènes d’Atys, d’Armide et de Roland, un spectacle tel que ni l’antiquité ni aucun peuple contemporain n’en connut.

—Voltaire, Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751)^[1]

1.1 According to Évrard Titon du Tillet, Jean-Baptiste Lully consulted the illustrious soprano Marie Le Rochois about his operas and often attributed their success to her.^[2] But as far as I can determine, no one has raised, let alone attempted to answer, the question that Titon du Tillet’s observation provokes: to what extent did Le Rochois and the other performers in Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique troupe influence the fourteen operas that Lully and his librettists created? A correlative analysis of these operas, their librettos and the sources that inspired them, their musical settings, and the musico-dramatic skills of the operas’ original performers proposes an answer: under Lully’s strong direction, his librettists—most frequently Philippe Quinault—contrived their librettos to utilize the troupe’s performers to best advantage. Lully then made matching his music to his performers’ abilities an especially high priority.

1.2 The makeup of Lully’s two simultaneous troupes—one at court and the other in Paris—illustrates that he worked with the same set of performers over long periods of time. He therefore knew very well their particular singing and acting skills. The repertory nature of the Académie troupe in particular enabled Lully and his librettists to create opera after opera with the same group of performers in mind. For example, three of the five cast choices for the Paris Opéra premieres of Proserpine (1680) and Persée (1682) had already performed leading roles in Lully’s operas over the previous five to seven years. Their new roles closely match each performer’s demonstrated abilities and past character type, including musico-dramatic setting. Contemporary anecdotal evidence that Lully worked closely with his librettists further corroborates this argument.

1.3 This performer-based perspective then offers a solution to the conundrum that Lully and Quinault’s Amadis (1684) presents. Despite the opera’s successful premiere and eight Opéra revivals through 1771, Quinault’s libretto continuously drew sharp criticism for its plot deficiencies, criticism that modern scholars have echoed or have tried to explain away. But an analysis of Quinault’s alterations to the original source in light of the ways in which each role capitalizes on the skills and the established character type of its initial performer easily explains the logic behind these plot anomalies. This explanation suggests that Quinault, at Lully’s request and with his help, designed the Amadis libretto as a vehicle for the Académie Royale de Musique’s star performers without concern for contemporary literary norms.^[3]

2. Lully’s Two Overlapping Troupes

2.1 Two nominally different troupes introduced all but two of Lully’s first eight operas, through Proserpine in 1680. With the exception of Cadmus et Hermione (1673) and Psyché (1678), each new opera received a court production and a Paris production. With some overlap, performers in the king’s employ, known as the Musique du Roy, performed at court venues (primarily Saint Germain en Laye), and members of Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique (the Opéra), performed in Paris.^[4]  The initial performance venue—at a court location or in Paris—determined which troupe would premiere the work. Lully was in charge of both. In 1661, Louis XIV had made Lully surintendant et compositeur de la Musique de la Chambre du Roy. Roughly a decade later (1672), the king gave Lully permission “to establish a Royal Academy of Music in our fair city of Paris” in a document that makes a clear distinction between the two sets of performers and their respective performance domains:

This [Academy] shall comprise whatever number and quality of people he sees fit—whom we shall choose and appoint on the basis of the report with which he provides us—to give performances in our presence when it pleases us of musical works that will be settings of either French or foreign works.… We permit him to give public performances of all the works he composes, even those staged in our presence, though he may not use in the [public] performance of the said works any musicians who are in our employ.^[5]

2.2 Thus, Académie members could perform at court, but court musicians could not perform in Paris. For example, in five of the operas premiered between 1675 and 1680, three members of the Académie Royale de Musique troupe—Mlle Saint Christophle and Marie Aubry, both dessus (sopranos) and the haute-contre (high tenor) Bernard Cledière—performed the same major roles in both venues. By contrast, basse-taille (low tenor or baritone) Jean Gaye, employed by the Musique du Roy, performed the principal baritone roles at court, while the basse-taille Académie member François Beaumavielle performed these same roles in Paris. The preface to Christophe Ballard’s 1703 collection of opera librettos articulates this practice: “In 1675 Thésée was performed [premiered] at S. Germain for the king, by His Majesty’s Musicians joined together with those from the Académie, and was then performed in Paris by only the Opéra’s acteurs.”^[6]

2.3 My choice to retain the original French term acteur in the preceding translated passage warrants some explanation, given that elsewhere I refer to the troupes’ members as performers and purposefully avoid the terms “actor,” “actress,” and “singer.” In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French sources, acteur and actrice refer to opera performers and thereby underscore the notion that such performers both act and sing. The terms’ English translations do not adequately convey their original meaning. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1768) makes this distinction in the acteur entry, which begins “Singer who performs a role in an opera performance.” Rousseau’s expanded definition makes the connection between acting and singing explicit:

It is not enough for an acteur at the Opéra to be an excellent singer if he is not already a master of the art of mime, for he must convey not only what he himself is singing but also what he leaves to be said by the instrumental music.… His steps, his expressions, his gestures, must all accord constantly with the music, without his appearing to think about it. He must always hold our interest, even when he is silent; if while he is preoccupied with singing, he lets himself forget for a moment the character he is portraying, he is merely a singer on the stage and no longer an acteur.^[7]

By contrast, Rousseau’s definition of a chanteur (singer) is only one sentence long: “Musician who sings in a concert.”^[8] Following Rousseau, and in light of what will appear to be the very real focus on a performer’s acting abilities, I will retain the terms acteur and actrice in my translations of the original French sources.

2.4 The existence of the two troupes makes clear that Lully had to rehearse two different productions of the same opera. Jean-Laurent Le Cerf de la Viéville’s well-known comments on Lully’s exacting rehearsal practices testify to the seriousness with which he undertook his duties as head of the Académie troupe.^[9] The 1677 Nouveau Mercure galant provides similar evidence for Lully’s dedication to rehearsals at court:

[Alceste, Thésée and Atys] were sung by the Musique du Roy alone, augmented by several people, including Mademoiselle de la Garde and by Mademoiselle Ferdinand.… The remainder of the Musique du Roy performed as usual. [This ensemble] is composed of France’s best voices. It is impossible for them to do badly, and in a short time under a master such as Lully, the least able become able.^[10]

2.5 Table 1 charts the two troupes’ initial performances in Lully’s operas.^[11] Via the indicated performance venues provided in chronological order in Column 2, one can identify the troupe that premiered the opera and its subsequent performance by the other troupe. The two-troupe practice ended in 1682, when king and court took up residence at Versailles, where no theater equipped to support elaborate decors and machines had been built. Henceforth, only the Académie troupe premiered or performed Lully’s operas at Versailles and in Paris.^[12] The heavy black line between Proserpine (1680) and Persée (1682) in Table 1 delineates this change in practice. The heavy black line between Acis et Galatée (1686) and Amadis (1687) separates the operas that Lully composed before his death in March 1687 from their later revivals. Subsequent columns in Table 1 identify or propose many of the major casting assignments for Lully’s operas through 1697, the year in which the Opéra’s most prominent troupe member, Le Rochois, retired.^[13]

2.6 This cast listing reveals the two somewhat overlapping sets of Académie performers, almost all of whom would perform together in the 1680 Paris production of Proserpine.By 1675, the principals included Saint Christophle, Aubry, Cledière, and Beaumavielle, the only Académie member employed throughout Lully’s tenure. The Opéra’s production of Proserpine marked the debut of the new principals: Le Rochois, haute-contre Louis Dumesnil, and baritone Jean Dun. After having performed in the court production of Proserpine, Cledière left the Académie troupe to join the Musique du Roy.

3. Typecasting

3.1 A correlative analysis of the troupe’s performers and the roles they premiered reveals a clear pattern of typecasting by voice and character type. Le Cerf aptly summarized the typecasting associated with the different voice types:

Our women (i.e., female characters) are always women; our basses ordinarily sing the roles of kings, secondary and scorned lovers, magicians, serious and aging heroes, etc., and our tenors and our hautes-contre, whose voices are as high and as flexible as nature permits and intends them to be, are the young, gallant heroes who must be loved and the amorous and lighthearted gods, etc.^[14]

With the exception of the baritone Beaumavielle cast as the romantic hero in Lully’s first opera, Cadmus et Hermione, and as the eponymous and unusual rejected lover/gallant hero in Roland, Le Cerf’s observation applies to Lully’s subsequent male role assignments.

3.2 Le Cerf does not distinguish French opera’s female characters by means of similar classifications according to age or class. Yet casting decisions do appear to reveal considerations of these and other attributes, while simultaneously confirming a tendency to cast individual women according to type. For example, Lully often cast Saint Christophle as an older woman or goddess, who suffers and contends with some sort of cruel fate; Aubry appears as the sometimes vulnerable, sometimes forceful hero’s beloved; and Le Rochois reigns as an independent and powerful character who experiences strong internal conflict and/or alternating passions.^[15] This typecasting continued in subsequent Lully opera revivals. Between 1698 and 1701, for example, Fanchon Moreau and Marie-Louise Desmatins assumed the previous principals’ roles—those of Aubry and Saint-Christophle/Le Rochois, respectively—in revivals of Lully’s Thésée (1698), Proserpine (1699), Atys (1699), and Amadis (1701).

3.3 Given the system’s consistency, one might usefully hypothesize who might have premiered various roles when no sources identify the cast assignments. For example, one can imagine Saint Christophle as the angry, overprotective mother, Venus, in Psyché; Aubry as Libye, the eponymous hero’s new romantic interest in Phaëton; and Beaumavielle as the serious and faithful lover, Epaphus, in Phaëton. When cast information has not surfaced, based on the typecasting that occurs throughout this period and the roles’ musical settings, I have suggested in Table 1 probable cast assignments followed by a question mark and bracketed.

4. Proserpine’s Opéra Premiere (1680) and the Persée Connection (1682)

4.1 Proserpine’s Opéra premiere—featuring the veterans Saint Christophle, Aubry, and Beaumavielle alongside newcomers Le Rochois, Dun, and Dumesnil—exhibits clearly this pattern of role distribution and typecasting. Perhaps with the newcomers in mind, with the sole exception of Saint Christophle, Lully assigned a Musique du Roy cast to premiere Proserpine’s leading roles at court. For the Paris premiere, he subsequently and notably recast the remaining principal roles for the Académie’s most recent hires.^[16] Saint Christophle, having already premiered at least four strongly dramatic, angry, vengeful and/or tormented roles after her first premiere performance as the romantic lead in Lully’s Alceste (1674), reprised her court performance as Cérès, Proserpine’s anguished mother.^[17] Lully cast Aubry, who had premiered the romantic female lead in at least four of Lully’s previous operas both at court and in Paris (Thésée, Atys, Isis, and Bellérophon),as Proserpine. Having previously played a hero, a god, a rejected lover, and three kings—two jealous and one solicitous—Beaumavielle performed Pluton, the opera’s antihero, who forces Proserpine to become his wife. And perhaps well aware of Le Rochois’s potential, Lully chose to debut her as the love-averse, conflicted water nymph Aréthuse.^[18] Paired with Le Rochois, Dumesnil took on a secondary romantic lead, Alphée, who pursues Aréthuse. Dun debuted in the smaller baritone role of Ascalaphe, Alphée’s rival from the Underworld.

4.2 The correlation between the performers and their roles in Proserpine and the same performers and their roles in Lully and Quinault’s Persée—which the troupe premiered in Paris sixteen months later—advances my hypothesis that this set of performers inspired the construction of the Persée libretto and its musical setting. Lully’s dedication to Louis XIV in the published score credits the king with the choice of subject, but I wonder if Lully and/or Quinault, with their troupe in mind, influenced this choice.^[19] Similarly, Buford Norman suggests: “Perhaps [Quinault] even led Louis to choose the subject of Amadis, as he did in 1685 when he presented the king with a choice of Armide and two other subjects he would almost certainly not choose.”^[20] In Persée, the character type, voice type, and musico-dramatic skills that each major role required matches that of the troupe member who premiered the role, each of whom I will consider in turn.

5. Mlle Saint Christophle, Soprano

5.1 According to the Parfaicts’ “Histoire,” Saint Christophle was tall, attractive, beautiful, and virtuous. And as she joined an extremely beautiful voice with noble and tasteful acting, Lully did not hesitate to cast her in leading roles.^[21] The October 1677 Mercure galant, referring to court performances of Alceste, Thésée, and Atys, singled out Saint Christophle for praise when she reprised the roles that she had premiered (Alceste, Médée, and Cybèle): “We have nothing to add to the applause that Saint Christophle garnered both for her fine singing and for her ability to convey passion, at times with great force, at times with great delicacy, according to the demands of the role.”^[22]

5.2 As Cérès, Prosperpine’s mother, Saint Christophle had four scenes in which she sang alone, three of which offer significant occasions for mute acting, i.e., internal instrumental passages, not associated with an entrance or exit.^[23] Norman’s characterization of Cérès similarly conveys the multifaceted interpretive skills her role required:

This is precisely the kind of role that can create the most powerful effects in an opera, and not just because the spectator is fascinated and moved by the variety of situations in which Cérès finds herself; the spectator also begins to think about what he or she would do in a situation similar to that of Cérès, who is so desperate to recover a lost child that she goes from “déesse bienfaisante” [beneficent goddess] to ravager of the earth.^[24]

5.3 As Cassiope in Persée, Saint Christophle again portrays a mother in distress, a vain and tormented queen whom Vénus punishes for her vanity by inflicting terrible punishments on Cassiope’s people and on her daughter Andromède. Cassiope bewails their fate, seeks forgiveness, and fears for her daughter’s life. She conveys these feelings in strong affective recitative and in duets and trios with other characters, most notably in Act I, scene 1 and Act IV, scene 4.

5.4 Cassiope is Saint Christophle’s last documented role; the Parfaicts’ “Histoire” indicates that she retired thereafter.^[25] No sources provide a cast list for Lully’s next opera, Phaëton, but the soprano’s skills and character type match Clymène, Phaëton’s anguished mother. Even if Saint Christophle did not perform the role, Lully and Quinault likely fashioned it with her in mind. For example, Clymène’s impassioned recitative and air, in which she tries to convince Phaëton to give up his attempts to win Egypt’s throne (II, 2), is marked by leaps in contrary motion and short rests that set off changes in affect, similarly exhibiting the musico-dramatic elements found in her two previous roles described above.

6. Marie Aubry, Soprano

6.1 Having cast Marie Aubry as the eponymous romantic lead pursued by Pluton in the Opéra’s Proserpine, Lully assigned the soprano to a similar role in Persée: Andromède, Cassiope’s daughter as well as Persée’s beloved. Writing in the 1690s, Jean Nicolas du Tralage described Aubry, apparently from personal experience: “She still has a beautiful, clear, silvery, and clean voice. She was a good actress and always had the premier roles.… She alone had mastered gesture and stage movement; the others, for the most part, were like singing marble busts.”^[26]

6.2 Although Andromède has a large musical presence in only four scenes in Persée, each scene requires a markedly different affective interpretation, which displays the extent of Aubrey’s musico-dramatic skills. Secretly in love with Persée, Andromède determinedly tries to convince her betrothed, Phinée, that she loves him (I, 4). In her Act II, scene 5 monologue, believing herself to be alone, she passionately expresses her love for Persée and fears for his safety. Mérope, also in love with Persée, then reveals herself, and in dialogue and in two complicit duets, each acknowledges the other’s pain and hopes that Persée will slay Venus’s monster, even if that means he will love the other upon his return (II, 5). Pretending to Persée that she is still faithful to her betrothed, Andromède finally declares her true feelings for him as he leaves to slay the monster; they affirm their love in a concluding duet (II, 6). Finally, chained to a rock and menaced by a sea monster, Andromède fearlessly accepts that only her death will appease the angry gods, even as she mourns the loss of future love (IV, 5).

7. Louis Golard Dumesnil, haute-contre^[27]

7.1 Having cast Dumesnil as Alphée, a secondary romantic role, in the Opéra’s Proserpine, Lully advanced Dumesnil to the title role in Persée, the hero in love with Andromède. The Parfaicts’ “Histoire” provides the most detailed account of the performer and his abilities: Dumesnil was the most fashionable acteur of his time.^[28] The haute-contre was working as a cook when Lully discovered and subsequently engaged him in the Académie Royale de Musique troupe because of his beautiful voice. Lully then paid a dancing master and a music master to train Dumesnil for the stage. The dancing master had every reason to be happy with his task: his student was tall, dark, and handsome, with beautiful teeth and extremely noble features. He only lacked an attractive manner, or rather, he only needed to employ those attributes that came naturally to him.

7.2 In strong contrast to the dancing master’s success, the music master’s efforts were in vain. Dumesnil made so little musical progress that, during his entire performing career, he needed a man to teach him his roles note by note. The Parfaicts acknowledge, however, “It is true that his memory partially compensated for this fault. And it happened much less frequently that he made mistakes when he was singing.” He was always magnificent onstage, even as offstage he was boorish and unsophisticated. He never understood music and he often sang out of tune. And frequently extremely drunk, he often appeared disorderly on stage. But even with these faults, he was the public’s delight.

7.3 Dumesnil’s performance abilities also elicited comment from the haute-contre’s immediate contemporaries. François Raguenet, in his 1702 Parallèle des Italiens et des Français, identified Dumesnil as the only person capable of playing the role of a passionate lover in French operas, “but besides that, he sings very out of tune and is not very musical, and his voice is a long ways from being as agreeable and as beautiful as that of the Italian castrati.”^[29] Having seen Dumesnil perform, André Cardinal Destouches and Prince Antoine 1er of Monaco agreed that Dumesnil cut a fine figure on stage and had a strong voice made for the theatre.^[30] Presumably referring to the 1697 performances of Armide, Le Cerf noted a somewhat changed Dumesnil, nonetheless acknowledging his vocal limitations:

Dumesnil, who happily was not drunk, [performed] Renaud. Truthfully, he appeared rather amiable in order not to bring shame to the Hero that he represented. He sang better and more in tune than he had done since Lully’s death. I listened easily and with pleasure to the four or five beautiful notes that he had in the middle of his range, because Dumesnil had only those.^[31]

7.4 The role of Persée matches Dumesnil’s skills and weaknesses: it demands heroic physical capabilities even as its musical setting is much more restricted and less challenging than that for the other leading roles. Even though Persée takes part in eleven scenes, he sings only 190 measures in the entire opera. In only two scenes does he sing more than ten measures and in three scenes he does not sing at all. Rather, he is an action hero: he slays Méduse; he flies through the air to slay a sea monster and thereby free Andromède, whom Neptune has chained to rocks in the middle of the sea; and he defeats his arch-rival Phinée and his troops—all in full view of the audience. The March 1737 Mercure de France underscores the significant physicality of Persée’s role as he flies to rescue Andromède: “Persée’s flight, moreover, is very daring; the winged hero travels very rapidly and in opposite and diverse directions—in straight lines, spirals, diagonals, and perpendiculars.”^[32] I imagine that Dumesnil’s dancing master must have coached the flight and that the cook-turned-acteur thereby set the standard for every Persée to follow.

8. François Beaumavielle, Baritone

8.1 Cast as Pluton (Pluto) in the Opéra’s Proserpine, Beaumavielle likewise assumed the antiheroic role in Persée as Phinée, Persée’s rival in love and battle and sometime cohort of Mérope, Persée’s rejected lover. According to the Parfaicts’ “Histoire” Beaumavielle, a native of Languedoc, was “tall, ugly but had a noble air on stage … and [he] performed all his assigned roles to much applause. They say that Beaumavielle, having been sick awhile, reappeared, and the public received him with joy.”^[33] Titon du Tillet described him in slightly more generous terms: “Lully saved Beaumavielle for the Paris Opéra. He was the great acteur of his time. He had a rather ordinary face, but a handsome mien [bien facé]; he was one of the most perfect baritones and played all the leading roles for this voice-type.”^[34]

8.2 The role of Phinée illustrates Beaumavielle’s singing and acting skills particularly as demonstrated in conjunction with those of Le Rochois, who premiered Mérope. Phinée and Mérope have three substantial dialogue scenes together (IV, 1–2 and V, 2). Notably, their storm scene (IV, 2) includes four internal ritournelles—two long and two short—that require mute acting. Le Cerf’s enthusiasm presumably led him to exaggerate the effect of Phinée and Mérope’s duet in this scene: “Several times in Paris I observed that when the very skillful and very difficult ‘Les vents impetueux’ from Persée was well executed, everyone with equal attentiveness held their breath for seven and a half minutes, their eyes fixed on Phinée and Mérope.”^[35] The pair shares a long, dramatic scene with Andromède (I, 4), which also drew praise from Le Cerf. He singled out Phinée’s “Non, je ne puis souffrir qu’il partage une chaîne” (I, 4) as an example of how particularly expressive an air within recitative can be; and he referred to Phinée, Mérope, and Andromède’s trio, “Ah, que l’amour cause d’alarmes,” as “very touching and very pleasing.”^[36] The duo also has a short scene with Cassiope (II, 1) and a relatively long interaction with a sailor in the king’s navy (Idas) and a troupe of Ethiopians bemoaning Andromède’s capture by a sea monster (IV, 3). In this scene Phinée famously and controversially asserts, “I would rather witness a terrible Monster devour thankless Andromède than see her in the arms of my gleeful rival.” Indeed, the predominance of Persée’s enemy along with that of the hero’s rejected lover deliberately foregrounds the opera’s construction. As Norman observes: “The status of both Phinée and Mérope as major actors in the drama makes Persée stand out among Quinault’s librettos as the only one in which four mortal characters are involved in a love relationship and play truly important roles.”^[37]

9. Marie Le Rochois, Soprano

9.1 The Phinée-Mérope pairing takes on additional significance because Le Rochois’s role is an entirely invented one. Mérope, the queen’s sister, and, unlike Proserpine’s Aréthuse, the opera’s only truly conflicted character, does not appear in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the plot’s source. Mérope loves Persée and fears for his safety. Yet, because he loves Andromède instead, Mérope momentarily sides with his rival, Phinée, until at the last moment, she warns Persée of Phinée’s approaching army. She dies when hit by a stray arrow meant for Persée.

9.2 Le Rochois’s skills as described in contemporary accounts, in conjunction with the role’s musico-dramatic prominence, provide strong evidence that Lully and Quinault created this role specifically for her. For example, in his Le Parnasse françois, Titon du Tillet, who likely saw Le Rochois in a 1697 production of Armide, testified to the great acclaim she inspired:

She began to distinguish herself in the role of Aréthuse in the opera Proserpine in 1680 and soon became the greatest actrice and the most perfect model for declamation that had appeared on stage. I know this from my own experience and from what I have often heard said to Baron le père, the Théâtre Français’s most celebrated actor [Comédien] and similarly to Mlles du Clos and Desmares [Champmeslé], so known for the excellence with which they perform spoken drama [Comédie].^[38]

He then famously described Le Rochois’s persona and the skills that all her premiere roles required, namely, an ability to sing, to declaim, and to act:

Over and above … the talents for singing and for declamation that [Le Rochois] possessed to the highest degree, she had a great mind, knowledge and insight of the highest order, and unerring good taste. Where she surpassed herself was, in my opinion, in her acting and in the expressive and striking tableaux in the roles she was portraying, which carried away the whole audience. She was only of moderate height, very dark, and with a face that looked perfectly ordinary outside the theatre, with the exception of her eyes, which were large and fiery and able to express every emotion; yet when she was on stage, she surpassed all the other actrices with the most beautiful faces and figures. She had the bearing of a queen or a goddess, her head positioned nobly, a fine gesture, every movement attractive, appropriate and natural; she listened very closely to what we call the ritournelle, played while the actrice makes her entry on stage, as in dumb show, during which all feelings must be conveyed silently in one’s face and appear in one’s action. This is something that great acteurs and great actrices have frequently not understood. What struck me was that when she began to move and to sing, no one had eyes for anything else on the stage, especially in Armide, in which she played the biggest and most demanding role in French opera.^[39]

Titon du Tillet’s particular praise for Le Rochois’s mute acting abilities as conveyed in her “expressive and striking tableaux” during the purely instrumental passages will take on greater significance during the course of this argument.

9.3 Le Cerf de la Viéville, who most likely saw the same 1697 Armide production, recorded the palpable effect of Le Rochois’s performance. His comments likewise underscore her acting as well as her singing ability:

When I bring to mind Le Rochois, this petite woman who was no longer young, coiffed with black hair and armed with a black cane adorned with a ribbon the color of fire, moving animatedly about the great theater, which she filled almost entirely alone, and from time to time drawing from herself bursts of her marvelous voice, I assure you that I still tremble.^[40]

9.4 The role of Mérope stands out not only because she is the only conflicted character, but also because of her dramatic and musical prominence in Persée. She appears in sixteen scenes, more than any other character. No other character has strictly solo monologues; she has three musically and dramatically compelling ones that express her tormented state: “Ah! je garderay bien mon cœur” [“Ah, I will take good care of my heart”] (I, 3); “Helas! Il va perir” [“Alas! He (Persée) will perish”] (II, 3); and “O Mort! venez finir mon destin deplorable” [“Oh Death! Come end my deplorable destiny”] (V, 1). Large leaps (several of a sixth), much rhythmic variety, and chromatic inflection characterize her first monologue, in D minor, which begins with a continuo air and ends in recitative. Similar elements mark her second monologue, in A minor, set entirely in recitative. To bring the rejected lover on stage in the third monologue, a full orchestral prelude announces the music of the twice-repeated incipit, “O death! come finish my wretched destiny,” which returns three more times in Mérope’s long and chromatically inflected rondo air (ABACA) in F major. The first of two of these solo appearances also include substantial internal ritournelles, which provide occasion for the mute acting skills that Titon du Tillet so admired. La Gorce refers to the latter as one of the most moving monologues that Lully ever composed.^[41]

9.5 Indeed, Mérope’s role drew the particular attention of eighteenth-century commentators as well as that of modern scholars. For example, Le Cerf singled out for praise five settings involving multiple main characters; four of the five include Mérope.^[42] And a review of Persée’s 1737 revival underscores the importance of the role’s interpreter: “Although the role of Mérope is purely episodic and has almost nothing to do with the principal action, it becomes captivating when an actrice sings it.”^[43] Norman also singles out Mérope for comment: “It is remarkable that Quinault would not only invent a character but give her such large role.” With Cassiope’s persona in mind, he then speculates in a note: “One possible reason is that Lully needed a better role for Marie (“Marthe”) Le Rochois rather than that of a vain and aging queen.”^[44]

9.6 That all Le Rochois’s premiere roles in Lully’s operas exhibit similar connections between her skills and each role’s musico-dramatic characteristics provides strong evidence that Lully and his librettists contrived these roles with Le Rochois in mind. In each case, strong internal conflict distinguishes Le Rochois’s role when compared with other female characters, who—and I generalize a bit here—either love and are loved in return or who are motivated by a singular passion. In addition to that of Mérope, these roles include Théone in Phaëton (1683), Arcabonne in Amadis (1684), Angelique in Roland (1685), the title role in Armide (1686), and Galatée in Acis et Galatée (1686), a three-act pastorale heroïque. Lully’s musical settings for these roles are likewise marked by a multifaceted complexity that demands a strong ability to sing, to declaim, and to act.

10. Galatée (Acis et Galatée, 1686)

10.1 Seven months after Le Rochois premiered Armide, in what would be Lully’s final opera, Acis et Galatée, the composer provided Le Rochois with a particularly challenging and multidimensional monologue unmatched in any of his previous works. Indeed, noting similarities between the roles of Armide and Galatée, La Gorce states categorically that Lully wrote this monologue—a remarkable 156 measures long—so that Le Rochois could show off her gifts as a tragedian.^[45] The opera, commissioned by the Duke of Vendôme to honor the Dauphin and with a plot from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, premiered at the Château in Anet on September 6, 1686, and at the Opéra eleven days later. In this monologue, “Enfin, j’ai dissipé la crainte” (III, 7), the sea nymph Galatée searches for her beloved shepherd Acis, only to discover that the giant Polyphème has murdered him. Over a third longer than either of Armide’s longest and most celebrated monologues, “Enfin, il est en ma puissance” (II, 5) and “Le perfide Renaud me fuit” (V, 5), Galatée’s monologue, with five-part accompaniment, strikingly includes seven distinct orchestral sections, six of which mark a shift in the sea-nymph’s emotions and thus provide multiple opportunities for interpretive mute acting. In an impassioned tour de force, she expresses in turn happiness, fear, terror, suicidal impulses, guilt, vengefulness, and, finally, a humble realization that only an entreaty to the gods will restore Acis to life (outlined in Table 2).

10.2 In the previous scene Polyphème, unbeknownst to Galatée, has murdered Acis by crushing him with a rock. Galatée enters at some point during the prelude. Alone on the stage, she eventually discovers her murdered beloved. She emerges from the sea seeking Acis:

Enfin j’ay dissipé la crainte	At last I have dispelled the fear
Qui m’arrêtoit au fond des flots;	that halted me at the edge of the waves;
Je voy regner icy le calme & le repos,	here I see calm and quiet reign,
Ma flamme desormais ne sera plus contrainte.	my ardor henceforth will no longer be constrained.
Cherchons seulement	Let us search only
Le Berger charmant	for the charming shepherd
Que mon cœur adore.[46]	whom my heart adores.
	(Example 1a; Audio Example 1a)

Not able to find Acis, Galatée becomes fearful, then terrified as she discovers his body:

Mais, quelle terreur secrete	But what secret terror
M’allarme & m’inquiete?	alarms and disquiets me?
Quelle image, grands Dieux! vient fraper mon esprit?	Great Gods, what image comes to strike my mind?
Je tremble, quel objet à mes yeux se presente?	I tremble. What object presents itself to my eyes?
Les Rochers renversez & la Terre sanglante	The overturned Rocks and bloody earth
M’assurent le Malheur que mon cœur m’a prédit.[47]	assure me of the calamity my heart predicted.
Prelude	Prelude
	(Example 1b; Audio Example 1b)

Galatée plots revenge:

Songeons du moins à le venger.	Let us at least think about avenging him.
[Prelude]	[Prelude]
Poursuivons le Geant,[48]	Let us pursue the giant,[49]
	(Example 1c; Audio Example 1c)

10.3 Le Rochois’s performance, when she reprised the role of Galatée for the second time in June 1695, must have brought down the house, as Louis Ladvocat’s somewhat tongue-tied account reveals: “but I’m telling you [l’abbé Dubos] that Le Rochois sang [in this production] and she received such applause that one would have great difficulty expressing it to you.”^[50]

11. Jean-Baptiste Lully, Librettist-in-Chief

11.1 Contemporary anecdotal evidence—underestimated by modern scholars—supports my assertion that Lully greatly influenced the content of his operas’ librettos in order to adapt the main characters and their musical settings to his troupe’s individual performers. But curiously enough, in spite of the demonstrable connections described above between a performer and the role she/he premiered, I have found only three statements—all in Le Cerf’s Comparaison—that indicate that Lully composed a role for a particular singer, specifically, that 1) Lully set the role of Cadmus for Gaye; 2) he wrote the part of Oriane in Amadis for Marie Aubry; and 3) he composed the minor role of Zilante in Roland for the little-known baritone La Forêt.^[51] Nonetheless, Le Cerf found Lully’s command over his librettists to be the exception to the rule and cited Charles de Saint-Évremond to this effect:

Mr de Saint-Évremond declares himself for the Poets: It is for the musician, he says, to follow the Poet’s orders. He excludes only Lully from this rule, whose genius he knows … In effect, if all composers were Lullis, I believe that all poets would have to bow and take second place to the [composers].^[52]

More graciously, the Parfaict brothers reported:

Beyond a doubt, Quinault was very useful to Lully, but Lully, in turn, contributed to the glory that Quinault acquired, either by correcting his verses with more taste and spirit than the best connoisseurs of the time could have done, or by furnishing him with very sound ideas concerning the direction of his poems and the nature of his characters.^[53]

Taking a more critical view of the pair’s relationship, Rémond de Saint-Mard blamed the lack of sentiment in the Pan and Syrinx episode in Isis and the overly languorous relationship between Alphée and Aréthuse in Proserpine on “Quinault’s complacency and the extraordinary authority that Lully held over his librettist.”^[54]

11.2 Given Le Cerf’s well-known account of how Lully meticulously reigned over his acteurs, choristers, instrumentalists, and dancers,^[55] such engagement with his librettists should not be surprising. According to Le Cerf, Lully would examine scrupulously and alter Quinault’s already reviewed and corrected texts, only relenting when he was satisfied with the result:

In Phaëton, for example, [Lully] sent back whole scenes twenty times to be revised even when they had already been approved by the Académie Française. Quinault was making Phaëton’s character excessively harsh and one who said truly insulting things to Théone. Lully scratched out much of this. He wanted Quinault to make Phaëton ambitious, but not brutal; we owe to Lully the small amount of gallantry that Phaëton retains; without [Lully], Phaëton would have set a very bad example.… Finally, when Quinault had bitten his fingernails to the quick, Lully approved a scene.^[56]

Le Cerf also noted that Thomas Corneille, Bellérophon’s librettist, similarly suffered: “Lully constantly drove [Corneille] to despair. He was made to write two thousand verses to achieve the five or six hundred contained in this piece.”^[57]

11.3 The Parfaicts’ “Histoire” provides further anecdotal evidence of the extraordinary control that Lully exercised over Quinault’s work—this time in connection with Armide’s fifth act:

Lully, always with acute taste, had foreseen the public’s feelings concerning the fourth act. That’s why he asked Quinault for a fifth act that would not only make the spectators forget this feeble section but even surpass all that he had already done. Quinault set to work and eventually satisfied Lully by bringing him the act he demanded as we know it today, but only after three different attempts. Happy the poet who could to do so well in twelve attempts.^[58]

As Gros aptly summarized: “[Lully] didn’t want a collaborator who would have been his equal; what he was looking for was a poet who was in his employ.”^[59]

11.4 Notably, when Quinault became Lully’s librettist, the playwright already had had experience writing for specific troupes. Quinault wrote all but one of his plays (comedies, tragicomedies, and tragedies) for the Comédiens du Roy, the troupe that also produced tragedies by Corneille and by Racine in its Hôtel de Bourgogne theater.^[60] Indeed, Gros imagined that Quinault’s success with the Comédiens du Roy had inspired the young Théâtre du Marais actors to ask him to write a play for them, which resulted in his La Comédie sans comédie (1655).^[61] With the perspective that “Quinault, as a writer of spoken plays, did know his actors and did write for them, i.e., with their individual talents in mind,” William Brooks has suggested which actors performed unattributed roles in Quinault’s plays.^[62] And Quinault specialists Buford Norman and Etienne Gros have entertained briefly in footnotes the possible adaptation of librettos for the Académie troupe. Norman refers the reader to Gros “where he correctly points out that the need to create roles for the principal singers in the troupe often left Quinault little choice as to the number of characters in his libretto.”^[63] Given Quinault’s previous experience, one can imagine that he understood the need to adapt his opera librettos according to Lully’s requirements for his troupe. Whether the librettist did so as a happy, collaborative partner must remain an unanswered question.

12. The Amadis Conundrum

12.1 We turn now to the conundrum posed by Lully’s eleventh opera, Amadis, with a libretto by Quinault. Premiered successfully in 1684, the opera enjoyed no fewer than eight revivals at the Paris Opéra through 1771. Only Thésée (with thirteen revivals) and Armide (with ten revivals) saw more productions than Amadis.^[64] But despite the opera’s success, Quinault’s libretto drew sharp criticism over the ensuing century. As the Mercure’s critic reported when Amadis was revived in 1731, connoisseurs complained that the libretto’s episodic execution “lacked Quinault’s usual ingenious artfulness.”^[65] Such criticism reflects a focus on the dramatic coherence of the libretto and the significance attached to a libretto’s perceived literary characteristics.^[66] A comment by the same critic in 1731 encapsulates the period’s perceived disconnect between Quinault’s libretto and Lully’s music: “As for the music, one always recognizes the great Lully therein, and if the genre is a bit sad, it is the poet’s fault rather than the musician’s.” Citing this sentence, the Parfaicts then noted that Amadis was one of Lully’s best operas.^[67]

12.2 With a similar focus on the libretto’s literary quality, most famously promulgated in Cuthbert Girdlestone’s La Tragédie en musique 1673–1750) considérée comme un genre littéraire, modern scholars have voiced similar complaints. Indeed, Girdlestone himself concluded that: “Amadis is the least well-constructed of [Quinault’s] tragedies.… In effect, this work disregards with perfect candor the most elementary dramatic rules. It unfolds without the remotest continuity.” He ultimately admits that it is “useless to analyze such a muddle from a dramatic point of view.”^[68] Philippe Beaussant more recently summed up the criticism:

Poor Quinault somewhat lost his way, and commentators have not have had much trouble showing that [the Amadis libretto] is the worst constructed, the most incoherent, and the least dramatic of all that he wrote.… Amadis is nothing but loving, Oriane nothing but sad, Arcalaüs nothing but malicious, only Arcabonne has some complexity.^[69]

12.3 Within this critical context, modern scholars have proposed remarkably diverse explanations for the libretto’s perceived faults. Norman, for example, seeks internal dramatic justification for Amadis’s plot anomalies rather than simply charging Quinault with incompetence. He posits that Quinault introduced Arcabonne into the plot because he needed “a character with a true interior conflict that linked her to the main as well as to the secondary action.”^[70] Bertrand Porot’s dramaturgical analysis of the “still enigmatic” Amadis suggests hatred as a unifying factor. The “unusual source” of this hatred, according to Porot, is a clan’s vengeance [“la vengeance clanique”], as brother and sister (Arcalaüs and Arcabonne) seek to avenge their brother’s death at Amadis’s hand.^[71] And in spite of comedy’s early banishment from the tragédie en musique libretto, most recently Sylvain Cornic advances a comedic explanation: “The irregularity of this opera, a loose improvisation on Amadis de Gaule, does not seem the result of clumsiness but of a completely deliberate choice based on aesthetics and dramatics. One is not surprised to find therein elements of tragicomic dramaturgy.”^[72]

12.4 But why would Lully’s longtime, trusted librettist have created such a problematic libretto after having written nine coherent ones? An answer surfaces when one matches the performers and their skills with the roles that each premiered. One can thereby explain all the plot’s anomalies, including the remarkable prominence of two characters: Corisande, who barely appears in Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s original Amadís de Gaula, and Arcabonne, an essentially invented character derived from two very minor characters in the same tale of knight-errantry.^[73] Notably, unlike either of these two minor characters, Quinault’s Arcabonne falls in love with Amadis. Table 3 identifies the performers who premiered Amadis’s primary characters and provides a brief summary of the relationship between the libretto’s characters and their counterparts in the original.

12.5 Eighteenth-century critics articulated the opera’s multiple plot anomalies: 1) a sustained focus on the unfounded jealousy of Oriane and the misery of the spurned Amadis; 2) the surprising prominence of the lovers Florestan and Corisande; 3) the equally if not more surprising musico-dramatic dominance of the brother and sister enchanters, Arcalaüs and Arcabonne; and 4) the questionable dramatic relevance of Act V. This criticism repeatedly and accurately focuses on the weakness of the plot’s crux. In Amadís de Gaula, the knight Amadis demonstrates his valor and high principles through many battles and through his continuous fidelity to the princess Oriane. At one point in the tale Oriane falsely believes that her beloved Amadis has betrayed her, and her jealousy instigates a rift between the lovers healed only when she learns the truth. Quinault’s version focuses entirely on this one aspect of their love story. Spurned by her, Amadis wallows in misery. Not only jealousy but also the libretto conspires to keep the two lovers apart as they carry on separately in this fashion throughout most of the opera. Indeed, Amadis and Oriane encounter each other in person only in Act V, scene 2. Within minutes they resolve their past differences and proclaim their eternal love.

12.6 As the Mercure’s critic recorded on the occasion of Amadis’s revival in 1731, connoisseurs had pointed out that an unfounded presumption serves as the crux of the libretto: “Quinault was careful not to include a scene between Amadis and Oriane in the four first acts; Oriane’s suspicions would have been dispelled by a single word from Amadis and the story would have finished almost as soon as it had begun.”^[74] Jean-Antoine Romagnesi and Antoine-François Riccoboni’s parody, Amadis, performed at the Comédie Italienne during the opera’s revival in 1740, mocks the same dramatic illogic. Amadis sings: “Is there a lover more tender and more maligned than I? Only in the last act do I see [the woman] who causes me unhappiness. It has to be a pact between those crafty enchanters.”^[75] And while praising Lully’s genius, Gabriel de Mably, in his Lettres à Madame la marquise de P. sur l’opéra (1741), asserts that Oriane’s unfounded jealously causes one to take her for a fool, nor does he understand at all “why Amadis is unaware of [Oriane’s] suspicions and does not try to dispel them. He resigns himself with such kindness of heart to being unhappy that one is almost tempted to leave him to it, without pitying him.”^[76]

13. Solving the Conundrum Pair by Pair: Amadis/Dumesnil and Oriane/Aubry, the Physically and Musically Estranged Lovers

13.1 Once again, Dumesnil premiered the role of the hero. We may assume that his musical skills had continued to progress, as the role of Amadis requires much more rote memorization than that of Persée and considerably more than the role of Phaëton, which the haute-contre had premiered the year before.^[77] Amadis shares the stage with a panoply of characters as shown in Table 4, which provides a summary of the characters’ relative dramatic importance and their interactions on stage. Indeed, Amadis performs in the greatest number of scenes (ten), but he sings fewer than fifteen measures in three of them.

13.2 One of Lully’s most famous airs, then and now, Amadis’s “Bois épais” (II, 4) encapsulates the hero’s emotional state throughout the opera. At the same time, the air’s straightforward rhythms, considerable use of stepwise motion, and harmonic simplicity cater to Dumesnil’s limited skills:

Amadis seul.	Amadis, alone.
Bois épais, redouble ton ombre:	Dense wood, double your shadow;
Tu ne sçaurois estre assez sombre,	You could not be dark enough;
Tu ne peux trop cacher mon malheureux amour.	You cannot hide my wretched love too much.
Je sens un desespoir dont l’horreur est extréme,	I feel despair marked by extreme horror,
Je ne doy plus voir ce que j’aime,	I must no longer see the one I love,
Je ne veux plus souffrir le jour.[78]	I no longer wish to suffer this existence.[79]
	(Example 2; Audio Example 2)

The air remains one of Lully’s rare monologues in binary form with a repetition in each section. More typically, he used an extended binary (ABB’), rondeau or ternary form, and often his monologues are through composed, sometimes with short internal reprises, as in Oriane’s long monologue in Act IV.^[80] For “Bois épais,” the first stand-alone monologue air that Lully had Dumesnil premiere, the haute-contre only had to memorize twenty measures of relatively simple music, and he got to sing it twice.

13.3 Contemporary sources disagree about who premiered Amadis’s jealous lover Oriane: the established star, Marie Aubry, who had performed the romantic female lead in six if not eight of Lully’s previous operas, or the sixteen-year-old Fanchon Moreau in what would have been her first major role. The Parfaicts’ Dictionnaire states that Moreau premiered Oriane, and modern scholarship has followed the Dictionnaire’s lead.^[81] But Le Cerf reported that “Aubry … retired only after having performed in Amadis the admirable role of Oriane (although a bit too weepy) that had been written for her.”^[82]

13.4 The musico-dramatic significance of Oriane’s role, coupled with compelling contemporary evidence that testifies to its difficulty, leads me to believe that Lully wrote the part for Aubry, his established romantic lead, even if the newcomer Moreau may have premiered it. For example, although Oriane appears in only seven scenes, she has two monologues, both in Act IV (scenes 2 and 4), one more than accorded any other character. The second of these, in which Oriane comes upon a prone Amadis and believes him to be dead, combines a long, highly impassioned simple recitative—set with leaps, dramatic rests and rapidly changing harmonies—with an equally expressive accompanied air:

Oriane, Amadis qui paroît mort.	Oriane, Amadis who appears dead.
Que voy-je! ô Spectacle effroyable!	What do I see? O hideous spectacle!
O trop funeste sort!	O fate too ghastly!
Ciel! ô Ciel! Amadis est mort!	Heavens! O heavens! Amadis is dead!
Ma colère luy fut fatale;	My wrath was fatal to him;
J’eûs tort de l’accuser de suivre un autre amour.	I was wrong to have accused him of following another love.
Que ne puis-je, en mourant, le rappeler au jour,	Might I not, in dying, call him back to life,
D’eust-il vivre pour ma Rivale.[83]	even were he to live for my rival.
	(Example 3; Audio Example 3)

13.5 In addition to her monologues, Oriane has three particularly compelling scenes with Florestan (I, 3), Arcalaüs (IV, 3) and Amadis (V, 2). Indeed, all of Oriane’s settings rival those of Le Rochois’s Arcabonne both musically and dramatically. Not surprisingly, given Dumesnil’s somewhat limited abilities, Oriane’s setting in her scene with Amadis (V, 2) is more than twice as long as the knight’s.

13.6 The trouble that the Académie had finding a soprano capable of successfully assuming Oriane’s role in its 1759–60 production also testifies to its many difficulties and thereby to the need for an experienced actrice, such as Aubry, to premiere Oriane. No fewer than three sopranos tried and failed to replace satisfactorily the nineteen-year-old Sophie Arnould, already a leading soprano in the troupe, for whom the assigned role nonetheless presented some problems.^[84] Thus, based on the role’s character type, its musico-dramatic significance, and its demonstrable challenges, I am convinced that Quinault and Lully wrote the romantic lead for Aubry. Given the opera’s initial success, I also trust Le Cerf’s statement that she premiered it. And I can imagine that Lully and Quinault kept the two lovers separate for most of the opera to draw attention away from the striking differences in skills that Amadis’s and Oriane’s roles require.

14. Florestan/Dun and Corisande/Desmatins, the Devoted, Extraneous Lovers

14.1 We can similarly understand the surprising and greatly criticized prominence of the openly amorous couple Florestan (Amadis’s half brother) and Corisande (the ruler of Gravesande Island) in light of the two troupe members who premiered the roles, Dun and Desmatins. In the opera, the two repeatedly proclaim their undying love for each other in six different scenes over three acts, conveyed through multiple duets and airs, along with a shared trio and a quartet. Of Amadis’s three couples, Florestan and Corisande most often share the stage (see Table 4). But according to the connoisseurs given voice in the 1731 Mercure de France,“the Florestan and Corisande episode has so little to do with the plot that one would wish that it weren’t there at all.”^[85]

14.2 Indeed, the couple’s strong presence in the opera belies their presence in the original source. In Amadís de Gaula, Corisanda is only one of Florestan’s many lovers, and their relationship is brief, although she wishes it otherwise.^[86] Quinault invents the scenes in which Corisande asks Amadis to help rescue Florestan, whom the evil sorcerer Arcalaüs—Amadis’s nemesis throughout the original—has captured. Quinault then has Arcalaüs capture Amadis and Corisande, as well. Notably, Florestan’s role is almost as big as Amadis’s. Florestan performs in seven scenes, five of which involve extensive singing.

14.3 One can only conclude from the musical—if not the dramatic—importance granted to this couple, that Lully wanted to premiere the talented fourteen-year old soprano Marie-Louise Desmatins in a substantial role that included six duets with Florestan but did not place strong demands on her acting ability. In addition, to provide Desmatins with a reliable musical partner for her debut, the composer coupled her with the somewhat more experienced baritone, Dun, who had joined the troupe several years earlier. The predominant homophony and the series of sweet thirds and sixths in their first duet, “Oh bien heureux moment” (I, 2)—a reunion—typifies their duets:

Corisande: Florestan!	Corisande: Florestan!
Florestan: Corisande!	Florestan: Corisande!
Corisande et Florestan:	Corisande and Florestan:
O bienheureux moment	O joyous moment
Qui finis mon cruel tourment!	that puts an end to my cruel torment!
Aprés la rigueur extréme	After the extreme harshness
D’un fatal esloignement;	of a fatal separation,
Que c’est un plaisir charmant	what a charming pleasure it is
De revoir ce que l’on aime![87]	to see again the one you love!
	(Example 4; Audio Example 4)

14.4 Perhaps not coincidentally, given Desmatins’s ingenue status, Corisande’s settings include only one substantial recitative, its twelve measures dramatically inflected with numerous leaps and some chromaticism as Corisande pleads for Amadis to rescue her beloved Florestan (II, 5). One imagines that the fourteen-year-old was initially more comfortable with the metric security and built-in expressiveness of Corisande’s airs. Lully must have nonetheless trusted Desmatins’s abilities, as he set the opera’s last solo air for her, “Au milieu d’un tourment sans égal, L’Amour sçait plaire” [“In the midst of an unequaled torment, love knows how to please”] (V, 5).

15. Arcalaüs/Beaumavielle and Arcabonne/Le Rochois, the Sibling Enchanters Who Steal the Show

15.1 Reprising Beaumavielle’s and Le Rochois’s successful and similar character assignments from Persée, Lully cast the baritone as Arcalaüs, an evil sorcerer, and the soprano as Arcabonne, his conflicted enchantress sister, in love with Amadis. With the addition of Lully’s music—including emotionally charged recitative and long, purely instrumental passages for mute acting—their roles again capitalize on these performers’ skills. As Table 4 indicates, Arcalaüs and/or Arcabonne appear solely in Acts II–IV, the most highly praised acts of the opera.

15.2 In the libretto, the siblings seek revenge against Amadis, who has slain their brother, Ardan Canile. As Arcabonne is about to kill the captive Amadis, she discovers that he is the unknown knight with whom she had fallen madly in love when he saved her life. She frees him and his fellow captives. When Arcabonne reveals her love for Amadis to her brother, who believed that she had killed the hero, the shocked Arcalaüs proposes that seeing Amadis and his beloved Oriane together will turn the enchantress’s love to jealousy. Instead, in the presence of the two lovers (Oriane in a faint and Amadis comatose), Urgande, a good sorceress, arrives and thwarts the siblings’ revenge. They ultimately renounce life.

15.3 Having complained that one word from Amadis to Oriane would have finished the opera immediately after it had started, the same 1731 Mercure critic observed that the Arcalaüs and Arcabonne episode compensated for this fault. The critic continued:

Truly, only hatred motivates Arcalaüs’s actions in the episode, but Arcabonne finds herself taken up simultaneously by gratitude, love, and hatred, and that is what makes the third and fourth acts the most interesting.… the work seems absolutely finished at the end of the fourth act; with the death of Arcalaüs and Arcabonne, there is no reason to fear for the four lovers, whose fates should have continued to interest the spectators [through Act V].^[88]

15.4 Arcalaüs’s role as Amadis’s nemesis, which generally resembles that in the original Amadís de Gaula, requires particularly strong acting as well as singing and declamation skills.^[89] His only monologue (II, 3), in which he alerts his offstage demons to ready themselves as he seeks revenge against Amadis, requires as much acting as it does expressive singing:

Arcalaüs, seul:	Arcalaüs, alone:
[unlabeled prelude]
Dans un piège fatal son mauvais sort l’ameine.	Into a fatal trap his sorry fate leads him.
[interlude]
Esprits malheureux & jaloux,	Unhappy and jealous spirits,
[interlude]
Qui ne pouvez souffrir la Vertu qu’avec peine;	who tolerate Virtue only with difficulty;
Vous, dont la fureur inhumaine,	you, whose inhuman fury,
Dans les maux qu’elle fait trouve un plaisir si doux;	Finds sweet pleasure in the evils that this fury evokes,
Demons, preparez-vous	demons, prepare yourselves
A seconder ma haine;[90]	to assist my hatred;

Alone on stage after the previous scene, Arcalaüs begins his mute conjuring immediately in the eighteen-measure prelude. The prelude’s homophonic dotted rhythms, which recall both the entrée grave, always for men, and the French overture, suggest elaborate, powerful posturing.^[91] With a five-part instrumental accompaniment, which continues throughout the scene, Arcalaüs comments on Amadis’s pending arrival: “His sorry fate leads him into a fatal trap” (Dans un piège fatal son mauvais sort l’amène). He mutely continues his appeal through another twenty-two measures, which begin polyphonically in a manner similar to the second section of a French overture. He then directly calls upon his demons in a thirty-six-measure air, “Esprits malheureux & jaloux” (Example 5; Audio Example 5). This monologue’s elaborate multifaceted construction contrasts strongly with Amadis/Dumesnil’s much simpler “Bois épais.” Indeed, Lully must have had great confidence in the seasoned baritone’s acting as well as singing. The following year, Beaumavielle would premiere the title role in Lully’s Roland, which famously required the baritone to go entirely—and often mutely—mad on stage (IV, 5–6).

15.5 Unlike his approach to the opera’s other characters, Quinault, presumably under Lully’s direction, almost entirely invented the character of Arcabonne, as the librettist had done when he wrote the roles that Le Rochois had premiered in Persée (Mérope) and Phaëton (Théone). To create Arcabonne, the most dramatically and musically captivating character in the opera, Quinault conflated elements from two very minor characters in the original source—Dinarda and Arcabonne—and added a love interest (Amadis) complicated by hatred and jealousy. Dinarda, “the most lovely and fair” and “the most malicious and subtle woman that those times afforded,” is Arcalaüs’s niece and Ardan Canile’s daughter. Seeking to avenge her father’s death at Amadis’s hand, she helps her uncle capture the knight, for whom she shows no love, instead turning her attention to entrapping other knights.^[92] The original Arcabonne is an elderly magician and Arcalaüs’s sister. Amadis has killed one of her grown sons, and Amadis’s brother has killed her husband. Foiled in her vengeful attempt to kill King Lisuart, Amadis’s king, she throws herself into the sea. She never encounters Amadis in person.^[93]

15.6 As constructed by Lully and Quinault, however, the opera’s Arcabonne, unlike her original one-dimensional antecedents, takes center stage as she struggles with her conflicted feelings. Two contrasting examples of Lully’s settings for the enchantress illustrate ways in which the composer capitalized on Le Rochois’s skills. Just prior to the opera’s crucial moment (III, 3–4) when Arcabonne recognizes Amadis and sets him free, the ghost of her brother (Ardan Canile, whom Amadis has killed) accuses Arcabonne of betraying him because she has not yet slain Amadis.  As he reenters his tomb, a five-part prelude marked “fast” [viste], with many running sixteenths, provides for a mute expression of her furious reaction, which she confirms in highly animated recitative until the moment she comes upon the knight:

Arcabonne	Arcabonne
Non, rien n’arrestera la fureur qui m’anime.	No, nothing will stop the fury that drives me.
On vient me livrer ma Victime.	My victim is about to be delivered to me.
AMADIS enchaîné. Troupe de Soldats qui gardent Amadis, & les mesmes Acteurs de la Scene precedente. Arcabonne s’aproche d’Amadis avec un poignard à la main.	Scene 4. Amadis in chains. Troop of soldiers guarding Amadis and the same acteurs from the preceding scene. With a dagger in hand, Arcabonne approaches Amadis.
Meurs .… que mes sens sont interdits!	Die! … How my senses are bewildered!
O Ciel! que vois-je! est-ce Amadis![94]	O Heaven! What do I see? Is it Amadis?
	(Example 6; Audio Example 6)

15.7 A five-part prelude and air express Arcabonne’s internal conflict very differently in her initial and solo appearance at the beginning of Act II. Set for voice and continuo in a modified rondeau form, the air is self-reflective rather than overtly dramatic, but nonetheless affectively powerful:

Arcabonne seule:	Arcabonne alone:
Prelude	Prelude
Amour, que veux-tu de moy?	Love, what do you want of me?
Mon cœur n’est pas fait pour toy.	My heart is not made for you.
[Mon cœur n’est pas fait pour toy.]	[My heart is not made for you.]
Non, ne t’oppose point au penchant qui m’entraîne,	No, do not oppose the penchant that leads me.
Je suis accoustumée à ressentir la haine,	I am accustomed to feeling hatred,
Je ne veux inspirer que l’horreur & l’effroy.	I want to inspire only horror and terror.
Amour, que veux-tu …[95]

The twenty-two-measure prelude in F major, with its regular phrasing, steady rhythm and a largely conjunct melodic line, presents—almost exactly—the entire treble and bass line of the air. This music thereby provides the occasion for a physical depiction of Arcabonne’s emotional state as she silently struggles with her question before she articulates it vocally. To convey Lully’s subtle dramatic inflection of the text requires the interpretive skills for which Le Rochois was so well-known, this time employed in a more nuanced way as a close reading of the first three lines illustrates. An eighth-note rest between “Amour” and “que veux” creates an initial hesitation. That these first three words are all set to a c″ evokes reticence, as if she fears asking the question. The upward leap of a fourth to f″ on “tu” strongly emphasizes the “you,” as if love is external to herself. An eighth-note rest follows her question. Given the rest’s setting over a half-note b-flat in the bass line, one imagines that the rest would be slightly lengthened to keep the question in the air. An upward leap of a fourth from d″ to g″ (the highest note in the air) on “My heart” underscores Arcabonne’s forceful response to her question as simultaneously the b-flat in the bass moves to a b-natural, the V6 of V thereby intensifying her tortured heart’s emotion. The upward and downward leaps on “made for you” resemble one shaking one’s head “no, no, no” as Arcabonne tries to banish her feelings. She appears to accept this fate when, firmly in tonic, the repeated assertion that she has found within herself, “My heart is not made for you,” descends from f″ to f′ (Example 7; Audio Example 7).

15.8 Notably, Le Cerf singled out “Amour, que veux-tu de moi” as a barometer of excellent music because it touched everyone from the cook to the princess, from the knowledgeable to the ignorant. He concluded, “The air must be very beautiful, fittingly natural, and very full of true expression because it moved such diverse hearts and delighted so many different sets of ears.”^[96] One imagines that Le Rochois’s interpretive talents contributed to the air’s remarkable popularity.

15.9 In response to Amadis’s 1759 revival, the Mercure’s critic deemed two scenes that pair Arcalaüs and Arcabonne as “masterpieces, especially the one in Act IV.”^[97] Although Arcalaüs and Arcabonne actually share four scenes (including IV, 5–6), this accolade refers presumably to two scenes that constitute the most emotionally charged interchanges in the opera: Arcalaüs’s reactions to the revelation that Arcabonne is in love with an unknown knight (II, 2), and her admission that instead of killing Amadis, she has set him free (IV, 1). On both occasions, Arcalaüs ultimately convinces his sister to seek revenge against her beloved.

15.10 The Mercure critic preceded his praise of the two “masterpiece” scenes with a comment that applies particularly to the first scene of Act IV: “The dialogue in the scenes is as accurate as it is rapid; each person says only what they must say; and the gestures—favorable to the sung expression—arise from the heart of the subject, without ever diverting or slowing the dialogue’s course.”^[98] To propel this scene, Lully composed the long series of exchanges almost entirely in simple recitative, but he animated them emotionally with leaps, rests, rhythmic variety, and a chromatically altered bass line. The section that includes, in short succession, Arcabonne’s sigh in response to Arcalaüs’s presumption that she has slain Amadis, her revelation of love, and Arcalaüs’s incredulous reaction to the news, illustrates the swiftness of the dialogue between the two, a rapidity and complexity not found elsewhere in the opera:

Arcalaüs:	Arcalaüs:
Un soûpir vous échape! & vous n’osez parler!	A sigh escapes you, and you dare not speak!
Est-ce par des soûpirs que la haine s’exprime?	Is it by sighs that hatred expresses itself?
Arcabonne:	Arcabonne:
Que vous estes heureux de n’avoir à songer	How fortunate you are to have only to think
Qu’à haïr, & qu’à vous vanger!	of hating and avenging yourself.
Hélas! dans nostre Ennemy mesme	Alas! In our very Enemy
J’ay trouvé l’Inconnu que j’aime.	I have found the stranger that I love.
Arcalaüs:	Arcalaüs:
Vous aimez Amadis! Il voit encore le jour!	You love Amadis! He’s still alive?
Quoi, sur vostre vengeance un lâche amour l’emporte?	What! A cowardly love wins out over your revenge?
Arcabonne:	Arcabonne:
La vengeance la plus forte	The strongest revenge
Est foible contre l’Amour.	Is weak against Love.
Arcalaüs:	Arcalaüs
Quelle foiblesse est plus étrange!	What weakness is stranger!
Nostre Ennemy mortel devient vostre vainqueur?[99]	Our mortal enemy becomes your conqueror?
	(Example 8; Audio Example 8)

15.11 That Lully chose to set this scene in E minor—Amadis’s only scene in that key and a key rarely used in his operas—also contributes to the scene’s dramatic impact. A gentle, unassuming ritournelle (with dotted quarter notes and stepwise eighths) brings Arcalaüs and Arcabonne onto the stage, set as a “Pleasant Island.” The E-minor tonality ironically undercuts the pleasant surroundings and forewarns that conflict is ahead. One imagines that the two performers used their full complement of mute expressive skills to convey this striking contradiction. Notably, Lully’s choice of E minor to convey Arcabonne’s conflicted feelings provides a doubly strong thematic connection between Le Rochois’s roles in Amadis and Armide. He also chose E minor for the scene in which Armide, determined to kill Renaud, unexpectedly falls in love with him.^[100]

15.12 The same Mercure critic went on to praise Amadis’s fourth act “from one end to the other [as] one of the most moving and among the best written to appear on stage.”^[101] That the roles associated with the Académie Royale de Musique troupe’s three most consummate performers—Le Rochois, Beaumavielle and Aubry (Arcabonne, Arcalaüs, and Oriane, respectively)—dominate Act IV dramatically and musically provides the context for this praise. Each scene involves internal and/or external conflict between characters, which is most frequently expressed by means of dramatic recitative (both simple and accompanied). Oriane’s two demanding monologues appear in Act IV (scenes 2 and 4). Four of the six scenes (1, 2, 4, and 6) include substantial entrance music and/or musical interludes that call for mute, expressive acting. Even Arcalaüs’s “one-dimensional” role exhibits flexible psychological cunning when, in scene 1, he helps to turn Arcabonne’s love for Amadis into hatred and when, by the end of scene 3, he finds a way to turn Oriane’s hatred for Amadis into love (See Table 5).

15.13 Lully’s settings of the roles written for Le Rochois, Beaumavielle, and Aubry in this act exhibit most predominantly the characteristics of his mature style. In contrast, the relative simplicity of Amadis’s role matches Dumesnil’s less praiseworthy singing and acting skills, just as the unaffected nature of Corisande’s part corresponds to Desmatins’s neophyte status. Such distinctions underscore the remarkably careful and individual musical attention Lully paid to the skill sets of his troupe members as he composed their parts.

16.  Resetting the Stage

16.1 This performer-based perspective provides the key to understanding Amadis’s success in spite of the criticism leveled at its “bad” libretto. The close connections among Lully, Quinault, and the Académie Royale de Musique troupe lead me to conclude that, with his audience and his troupe members in mind, Lully strongly influenced, if not conceived, the libretto’s episodic plot outline, which he then obligated Quinault to put into verse. The Lully/Quinault libretto enabled Lully to compose music that showed off the troupe’s talents to greatest advantage, music that, as Mozart would say, “fit a singer as perfectly as a well-made suit of clothes.”^[102] Thus, to consider the Amadis libretto as a theatrical vehicle enables us to understand how the libretto—and not just Lully’s music—contributed to the opera’s success. One can fruitfully apply the same consideration to all Lully’s operas. A performer-based view reveals the intrinsically theatrical nature of these works and thereby provides a new tool to understanding his operas and their librettos within and beyond their literary frame.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Craig Monson, Graham Sadler, Diane Waldman, and Michael Klaper for their thoughtful and generous comments on earlier versions of this article. My thanks go out as well to the external readers for their detailed and perceptive comments. I also greatly appreciate Lois Rosow’s scholarly expertise and significant contributions to the editing process. In the article’s final stages, JSCM editor Kelley Harness’s eagle eye, her dedication to excellence, and her many felicitous suggestions could not have been more welcome. She has my deepest gratitude.

Examples

Example 1a. Lully, Acis et Galatée, Act III, Scene 7 (mm. 1–29)

Example 1b. Lully, Acis et Galatée, Act III, Scene 7 (mm. 65–81)

Example 1c. Lully, Acis et Galatée, Act III, Scene 7 (mm. 114–23)

Example 2. Lully, Amadis, Act II, scene 4 (mm. 25–45)

Example 3. Lully, Amadis, Act IV, scene 4 (mm. 1–17)

Example 4. Lully, Amadis, Act 1, scene 2 (mm. 1–28)

Example 5. Lully, Amadis, Act II, scene 3 (mm. 14–66)

Example 6. Lully, Amadis, Act III, scenes 3 (mm. 50–63) and 4 (mm. 1–4)

Example 7. Lully, Amadis, Act II, scene 1 (mm. 13–36)

Example 8. Lully, Amadis, Act IV, scene 1 (mm. 49–71)

Audio Examples

Audio Example 1a. Lully, Acis et Galatée, Act III, Scene 7 (mm. 1–29)

Audio Example 1b. Lully, Acis et Galatée, Act III, Scene 7 (mm. 65–81)

Audio Example 1c. Lully, Acis et Galatée, Act III, Scene 7 (mm. 114–23)

Audio Example 2. Lully, Amadis, Act II, scene 4 (mm. 25–45)

Audio Example 3. Lully, Amadis, Act IV, scene 4 (mm. 1–17)

Audio Example 4. Lully, Amadis, Act 1, scene 2 (mm. 1–28)

Audio Example 5. Lully, Amadis, Act II, scene 3 (mm. 14–66)

Audio Example 6. Lully, Amadis, Act III, scenes 3 (mm. 50–63) and 4 (mm. 1–4)

Audio Example 7. Lully, Amadis, Act II, scene 1 (mm. 13–36)

Audio Example 8. Lully, Amadis, Act IV, scene 1 (mm. 49–71)

Tables

Table 1. Lully’s Star Performers

Table 2. Schema of Galatée’s monologue, “Enfin j’ai dissipé la crainte”

Table 3. Amadis’s Characters: Performers and Sources

Table 4. Participation (by Scene) of the Main Characters in Amadis

Table 5. Amadis, Act IV: A Dramatic and Musical Schema