The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 23 (2017) No. 1

The Ends of Artifice
in the Tragédies en Musique of Lully and Quinault

Jonathan Gibson*

Abstract

Throughout their collaboration as creators of tragédies en musique, Lully and Quinault engineered stark expressive collisions at the conclusions of many divertissements via unexpected interruptions by non-divertissement characters. Initially, these dramatic nodes may have amounted in part to a kind of simplistic metacommentary on the relative merits of pastoral and tragic drama, demoting the former and elevating the latter. A careful accounting of these moments, however, suggests that this metacommentary evolved into a sophisticated celebration of the dramatic potential underlying these purposeful collisions of antithetical expressive modes. While these engineered collisions had much to do with the composer’s and librettist’s navigation of personal, artistic, and political allegiances, they also embodied a dialectic between artifice and natural expression that saturated discourse on eloquence and other arts in late seventeenth-century France.

1. Introduction

2. The prologue as aesthetic manifesto

3. Further thoughts on prologues: bucolic celebrations and heroic interruptions

4. Preliminary notes on “natural” expression

5. Eloquence, artifice, and the natural

6. From eloquence to music

7. Interrupting the divertissement: Cadmus et Hermione

8. Recitative and the natural

9. Interrupting the divertissement: from Alceste to Phaëton

10. Engineering interruptions

11. The Rhetoric of Roland

12. Roland returns

13. Roland and the eloquence of nature

14. Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Examples

Video Examples

Audio Examples

Figures

References

1. Introduction

1.1 In Act 4 of Roland (1685), the penultimate tragédie en musique of Lully and Quinault, the title character awaits his beloved Angélique in a woodland grotto. Thanks to an unfortunate bit of graffiti, he discovers that Angélique’s heart belongs not to him, but to the Saracen Médor. Amidst his extended and increasingly agitated monologue, the bereft Roland overhears the rustic sounds of a trio de hautbois in the distance, heralding the dances and songs of a divertissement.^[1] A village wedding party follows, complete with multiple dances for shepherds and shepherdesses, as well as what Rebecca Harris-Warrick has described as “earthier depictions of rustic characters as laughable country bumpkins.”^[2]

1.2 Rather than stepping aside during these festivities, or at least silencing himself as was typical of tragic characters, Roland wanders back on stage at the divertissement’s mid-point and inserts himself into the rustic dialogue. For the remainder of this complex divertissement, multiple expressive modes and the respective genres they imply share an uneasy onstage coexistence. The tension among these competing forces mounts steadily, reaching its most absurd level as a rollicking chorus sounds the adulatory refrain “Benissons l’amour d’Angélique, / Benissons l’amour de Médor” (“Let us bless the love of Angélique, let us bless the love of Médor”). The insult is too much for Roland to bear, and he explodes in a rage of recitative beginning with the words “Taisez-vous!” His anger, though, seems directed not only at what the pastoral characters are saying, but perhaps more so at the deliberately decorous manner in which they are saying it.

1.3 While this celebrated portion of Roland may at first seem exceptional, it in fact exemplifies a specific dramatic convention on which Lully and Quinault had already begun to rely more than a decade earlier, and which they had invoked at least once in nearly every one of their operatic collaborations prior to Roland. The essence of this convention, to be examined in greater detail below, involves in each case a purposefully jarring collision of polar expressive modes brought about by a tragic protagonist’s forcible silencing of a given divertissement. As I will argue, however, this convention’s persistent appeal to Quinault and Lully may be best regarded as a manifestation of seventeenth-century understandings of “artificial” and “natural” expression—constructs that, while hardly unique to this time or place, were central to what we might regard as a powerful aesthetic paradigm in Lully’s France. I will explore this dichotomy chiefly from the vantage point of French texts on eloquence and related fields.^[3] As we shall see, while the convention may initially have taken the form of simplistic affirmations of tragedy’s superiority relative to competing genres, it evolved into a fascinating and nuanced metacommentary upon the friction between natural and artificial expression that spanned the entirety of an operatic collaboration, beginning thirteen years prior to the premiere of Roland.

2. The prologue as aesthetic manifesto

2.1 On the converted tennis court of the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume de Béquet (or “le Bel-Air”), Lully and Quinault presented in November 1672 their pastorale Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, inaugurating the new Académie Royale de Musique as well as a promising operatic partnership. Not surprisingly, Lecerf would recount the event thirty-odd years later as having contributed to the formation of a new French operatic tradition:

Lully initially located his theater at the Jeu de Paume de Belair and soon staged Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus there.… Lully had already had the good fortune of finding and uniting with Quinault. And there, ladies, is the story of the founding of the French Opéra.^[4]

The status Lecerf accords to Les Fêtes stands in opposition to the libretto’s own more humble avant-propos, which concludes by assuring the reader that “this first spectacle [of the Académie Royale de Musique] will soon be followed by another more magnificent one, whose perfection still requires a bit more time. The Académie is working on it tirelessly, and is resolved to spare nothing to respond as worthily as possible to the glorious [royal] protection it enjoys.”^[5] This roundabout apology for the work it introduces, or more specifically, for the type of work it introduces, is understandable when one considers that the “more magnificent” work in question was to be the first of Lully and Quinault’s full-fledged tragédies en musique, Cadmus et Hermione (1673).

2.2 The calculated humility of the avant-propos to Les Fêtes is, however, only the first hint of an intriguing self-reflexivity that intensifies in the work’s prologue. The prologue begins in a comic vein, featuring several characters’ attempts to obtain librettos for the ensuing production and culminating in the first of two entrées, for the “Donneur de Livres” and “Quatre Importuns.” But the comic mood halts when a cloud machine descends and opens to reveal Polymnie (Polymnia), Muse of pantomime, but functioning in this case as a “patron Muse of the opera.”^[6] She scolds the cast, commanding them to “elevate your music above ordinary song; remember that you must please the greatest king in the universe” (“Elevez vos concerts / Au dessus du chant ordinaire: / Songez que vous avez à plaire / Au plus grand Roy de l’Univers”). (See the score that was eventually printed:^[7] Les Fêtes, p. 19.) The precise target of her censure grows clearer after two additional clouds descend, bearing Melpomène, Muse of tragedy, and the pastoral Muse, Euterpe. Their respective disciplines inspire in the ensuing symphonie (Les Fêtes, pp. 21–24) two alternating textures, one in five parts (described in the libretto as “very strong”) and the other in three parts (“extremely sweet”).^[8] Each of the two Muses extols the merits of her respective genre before Polymnie, who will stand as judge (see Example 1 and Les Fêtes, pp.  26–27):

Melpomène	Melpomene
C’est moy dont la voix éclatante	It is I whose dazzling voice
A droit de célébrer les exploits les plus grands,	has the right to celebrate the grandest exploits;
Les nobles récits que je chante	the noble récits I sing
Sont les plus dignes jeux des Fameux conquérants.	are the entertainments most worthy of famous conquerors.
Euterpe	Euterpe
C’est un doux amusement	It is a sweet amusement,
Que d’aimables chansonnettes;	these lovable chansonnettes;
Les douceurs n’en sont pas faites	sweet things are not made
Pour les bergers seulement:	for shepherds alone:
Les tendres chansonnettes	the tender chansonnettes
Que l’on chante à l’ombre des bois	that one sings in the shade of woods
Sur les Musettes,	with musettes
Ne sont pas quelques fois	are sometimes not
Des jeux indignes des grands Roys.	entertainments unworthy of great kings.

2.3 Melpomène forms her arguments via an air in a heroic, declamatory style, whereas much of Euterpe’s delivery takes the form of a more lilting air rife with internal repetition. Thus, Euterpe’s lines rarely exceed eight syllables, whereas Melpomène peppers her discourse with the twelve-syllable alexandrines more common to the vers libres of recitative.^[9] When at last Polymnie is ready to rule, she speaks to Melpomène, borrowing the latter’s heroic style and leaving no doubt about the contest’s outcome: “I reserve my greatest works for you” (“Je réserve pour vous mes travaux les plus grands”).^[10]

2.4 This pronouncement, when understood as deriving not only from Polymnie but also from the work’s creators, leaves little room for interpretation: the pastorale, already long past its prime as a literary genre, would remain a musical entity in some vestigial form, but would henceforth be subservient to tragedy.^[11] Commenting on this shift, Étienne Gros went so far as to remark that, after Les Fêtes, “the musical pastorale disappeared, after the Florentine’s arrival, from the stage of the Académie Royale, and pastoral elements were found no more except those scattered in the prologues and intermèdes” and that “Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus … marks the end of the pastorale en musique….”^[12] In fact, Lully and Quinault had gone even further, seizing the opportunity to downgrade not only the genre bucolique but also comedy, for, while Euterpe loses the contest, the comic Muse Thalie (Thalia) is not permitted to appear at all alongside her usual compatriots. The omission suggests, to quote John Powell, that “the age of the comédie-ballet had given way to the dawn of a new, more lofty and less humorous epoch—one marked by Louis XIV’s deepening attachment to projection of an image of gloire, to the exclusion of ribald gaiety and self-laughter.”^[13]

2.5 Lully and Quinault’s explicit commentary on the relative merits of the pastorale and tragedy (and by implication comedy as well) within the foreword and first moments of the Académie’s inaugural work was the product of more than the authors’ aesthetic preferences. Any indictment of pastoral entertainment was also likely to be understood as a condemnation of Pierre Perrin, who had publicly championed the pastorale by choosing to inaugurate the Académie d’Opéra in March of 1671, not with a tragedy, but rather with the pastorale Pomone, “even though,” he writes, “I had three heroic [plays] already written.”^[14] What followed is well known. While Pomone met with public success, those who held the purse-strings—namely Sourdéac and Champeron—contrived to pocket most of the earnings, leaving Perrin on his way to debtor’s prison in June of the same year. Lully’s ensuing machinations, purchasing the Académie privilege for himself and thus undoing Perrin and Cambert along with Sourdéac and Champeron, amounted to a coup worthy of the celebratory proclamations that Les Fêtes provided.

2.6 Perrin was not, of course, the only victim of Quinault and Lully’s musical barbs. The prologue to Les Fêtes borrows for its libretto from the “Ballet des nations” that had once concluded Molière and Lully’s comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).^[15] The recycling, while not unusual (and within Lully’s rights, since his privilege gave him ownership over all works, librettos included, that he had set to music) and in this case certainly born out of the need for expediency, also implies that the lighthearted material preceding Polymnie’s exasperated command to “elevez vos concerts” represented dramatic types no longer worthy of sustained attention. Lully and Quinault, then, seem to have used the material from the Ballet des nations as a foil, an emblem of dramatic superficiality, and it is no wonder that Molière decided to return the favor the following year, parodying Les Fêtes in his collaboration with Charpentier, Le Malade imaginaire.^[16]

2.7 In all of these examples, what seems most worthy of comment is neither the composers’ and librettists’ incessant jockeying for position nor the alliances made and then broken when they no longer served. Rather, this cycle of lampoon and counter-lampoon suggests that Lully, Quinault, Molière, and others deployed pastoral or comedic conventions when they suited, but felt no obligation to let much time pass before mocking the same conventions when they appeared in others’ works. Again, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme is rich with examples: in one oft-cited scene, Monsieur Jourdain, having been instructed to imagine characters in a musical entertainment dressed as shepherds, questions his maître de musique with his characteristic blend of ignorance and accidental wisdom: “Why always shepherds? You see nothing but that everywhere.” The music master explains: “When we have characters who would speak through music, it is best if, for the sake of verisimilitude, we present it as a pastorale. Singing has always been assigned to shepherds, and it is hardly natural in dialogue for princes or merchants to sing their passions.”^[17] Molière’s audiences would likely have enjoyed the double meaning here. On one hand, the pastoral play had indeed provided a setting in which a dramatic work, to quote Lois Rosow, “could be sung throughout without violating the expectations of verisimilitude,” since “the shepherds and deities of ancient Arcadia could reasonably be presumed to have communicated in poetry and music.”^[18] On the other hand, the music master’s suggestion, and Monsieur Jourdain’s reaction to it, are humorous because of the comical notion that dressing people as shepherds renders everything more believable, and because of the gulf that audiences had begun to identify by the 1670s between “natural,” vraisemblable expression and pastoral archetypes whose tiresome artifice the playwright sought to lay bare. More will be said about this below.

2.8 Indeed, while the roles of satirist and satirized were traded frequently among works such as Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Pomone, and Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, what remained constant was the means of satire, which most often involved disparaging—implicitly or explicitly—the dramatic artifice inherent in a song, work, or entire genre. In one sense, then, the avant-propos and prologue to Les Fêtes form a kind of self-reflexive aesthetic manifesto, an attempt to chart a new course for French musical drama by redefining its formal and generic hierarchies.^[19] But such a message could hardly be delivered once and forgotten. Indeed, these aesthetic tenets were to become a constant trope for Lully and Quinault, and after Les Fêtes they turned to the following year’s “more magnificent spectacle,” Cadmus et Hermione, to air them again.

3. Further thoughts on prologues: bucolic celebrations and heroic interruptions

3.1 The prologues of Cadmus et Hermione (1673) and Atys (1676) provide perhaps the richest examples of Sylvain Cornic’s assertion that some of Quinault’s prologues take “the form of a preface or avertissement to the reader.” “Beyond the obligatory glorification of the king or the justification of his chosen subject,” Cornic continues, “[Quinault] was able to include, for the sake of what we might call pedagogy, the vector of his reflections on poetics.”^[20] From the outset, the Ovidian prologue to Cadmus et Hermione is steeped in the pastoral mode. In the second scene Pan leads troupes of nymphs and shepherds in a celebration of the sun’s life-giving power—a metaphor in little need of explanation then or now (see the printed score,^[21] Cadmus, pp.14–25):

Pan	Pan
Que chacun se ressente	Let all experience
De la douceur charmante,	the charming sweetness
Que le Soleil répand sur ces heureux Climats.	that the sun spreads across these happy climes.
Il n’est rien qui n’enchante	There is nothing that does not enchant
Dans ces lieux pleins d’appas,	in these places full of charms,
Tout y rit, tout y chante	everything here laughs, everything here sings,
Hé pourquoi ne rirons-nous pas?	And why don’t we laugh?

3.2 At this moment, Lully and Quinault employ for their first time as a team a specific type of stark dramatic juxtaposition upon which they will draw repeatedly throughout their thirteen-year operatic partnership. The festivities of “les danseurs rustiques” are interrupted, according to the score, “by subterranean rumblings” as the chorus comments on the disruption of the celebratory atmosphere (see Video 1 and Cadmus, pp. 16–21):

Les Chœurs	Chorus
Quel désordre soudain! quel bruit affreux redouble!	What sudden disorder! What frightful uproar redoubles!
Quel épouvantable fracas!	What a horrible din!
Quels gouffres s’ouvrent sous nos pas!	What abysses open beneath our feet!
Le jour palît, le Ciel se trouble;	The daylight fades, the heavens are troubled;
La Terre va vomir tout l’Enfer en courroux:	The earth will spit up all of hell in its wrath:
Fuyons, fuyons, sauvons-nous….	let us flee! Save ourselves!

Amidst the tumult, l’Envie (Desire) emerges and, through a lengthy discourse in récitatif simple, summons the monster Python in an attempt to blot out the sun’s radiant power (Cadmus, pp. 22–25).^[22]

L’Envie	Desire
C’est trop voir le Soleil briller dans sa carrière,	It is too much to see the Sun shining on his course;
Les rayons qu’il lance en tous lieux,	the rays he hurls everywhere
Ont trop blessé mes yeux;	have wounded my eyes too much.
Venez, noirs ennemis de sa vive lumière,	Come, dark enemies of his living light,
Joignons nos transports furieux.	let us combine our furious transports.
Que chacun me seconde:	Let each help me.
Paroissez, Monstre affreux.	Appear, frightful Monster!
Sortez, Vents souterrains, des antres les plus creux,	Arise, subterranean Winds, from your deepest lairs.
Volez, tirans des airs, troublez la terre et l’onde,	Fly, tyrants of the air, disturb the earth and the ocean,
Répandons la terreur;	let us spread terror.
Qu’avec nous le ciel gronde:	Let the heavens roar along with us,
Que l’enfer nous réponde;	let hell respond.
Remplissons la terre d’horreur:	Let us fill the earth with horror
Que la nature se confonde:	so that nature is confounded.
Jetons dans tous les cœurs du monde	Let us cast into every heart in the world
La jalouse fureur	the jealous fury
Qui déchire mon cœur.	that tears apart my heart.

Entrée de l’Envie:
L’Envie distribuë des serpents aux Vents qui forment autour d’elle des manieres de tourbillons.
(Desire distributes serpents to the Winds that form around her in the shape of whirlwinds.)

L’Envie	Desire
Et vous Monstre, armez-vous pour nuire	And you, Monster, arm yourself to harm
A cet astre puissant qui vous a sçeu produire:	this powerful star that was able to create you.
Il répand tant de bien, il reçoit tant de vœux.	He dispenses so many blessings; he receives so many prayers.
Agitez vos marais bourbeux:	Stir your slimy swamp;
Excitez contre lui mille vapeurs mortelles:	excite against him a thousand deadly vapors.
Déployez, étendez vos ailes,	Unfold and spread your wings,
Que tous les vents impétueux	let all the impetuous winds
S’efforcent d’éteindre ses feux.	strive to extinguish his fires.

3.3 It is no accident that references in Quinault’s libretto to the topic of disorder are accompanied by a shift to récitatif simple. While this recitative is, of course, as meticulously constructed as the dances and chorus it supersedes, from the perspective of the pastoral characters at the height of their celebration, this new and unwelcome setting is one of musical and structural disorder. For these pastoral characters, however, the disruption lies not in the incursion of a “foreign” expressive mode (for pastoral characters are as likely as anyone else to sing in recitative when engaged in dialogue), but rather in bad timing. The unexpected appearance of a single tragic character, employing récitatif simple to interrupt gatherings of pastoral or comic characters just as they are at the height of revelry, will become one of Quinault and Lully’s more intriguing operatic conventions. Such juxtapositions operate on multiple levels, contrasting not only polar styles and sentiments, but also pastoral and tragic conventions, and the effect in this instance is that the chorus seems afraid not only of the natural phenomena accompanying l’Envie’s entrance, but also of the fact that they have found themselves unprepared for the stark shift and generically maladapted to the new setting. Their only recourse is to urge one another to run away, prefiguring the villagers’ actions twelve years later in the fourth act of Roland.

3.4 Ultimately, le Soleil (the Sun) conquers Python and allows the pastoral mode to reemerge, but the tone is cautious and muted (Cadmus, pp. 32–37):

Le Chœur	Chorus
Conservons la mémoire	Let us honor the memory
De sa victoire.	of his victory.
Par mille honneurs divers,	With a thousand varied honors
Répandons le bruit de sa gloire	let us spread the news of his glory
Jusques au bout de l’univers.	to the ends of the universe.
Palès (la déesse des pasteurs)	Pales (goddess of shepherds)
Mais le Soleil s’avance,	But the Sun approaches,
Il se découvre aux yeux de tous.	he reveals himself to the eyes of all.
Le Chœur	Chorus
Respectons sa présence	Let us respect his presence
Par un profond silence,	by a profound silence,
Ecoutons, taisons-nous.	let us listen, let us be silent.

Acknowledging that their pastoral celebrations are not worthy of the Sun, Palès and the choir urge a more restrained tone, which they seem able to accomplish only through momentary silence. Their attempt at self-restraint obeys Polymnie’s directive in Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus to “elevate your music above ordinary song” to “please the greatest king in the universe.”  But the restraint is short-lived. Le Soleil hints that the company should enjoy themselves, and this is all it takes for the “rustic assembly” to redouble their dancing, playing, and singing until the end of the prologue (Cadmus, pp. 47–48):

Un Dieu Champêtre et le Chœur	A Pastoral God and the Chorus
Dans les beaux jours de notre vie	In the beautiful days of our life,
Les plaisirs sont dans leur saison,	pleasures are in season,
Et quelque peu d’amoureuse folie	and some little amorous folly
Vaut souvent mieux que trop de raison.	is often worth more than too much reason.

Clearly there is no question of abandoning altogether the pleasures of rustic entertainment; as Buford Norman notes, the prologue represents “at the same time an acknowledgement of the debt the new tragédie lyrique owed to the pastoral and a breaking away.”^[23] This prologue’s conclusion suggests, then, that the delightful antagonism between competing expressive modes, delineated and ordered with care, will provide a continuing source of musical fodder for Lully and Quinault for years to come.

3.5 This same dynamic is foregrounded again in one other prologue—that of Atys (1676). As the prologue begins, le Temps (the god of Time) tells of a hero whose glory has eclipsed all “heroes of ages past.” During the ensuing chorus, Flore—Flora, goddess of springtime—and her band of nymphs make a mistimed entrance (a reference to the wintertime premiere of the opera), seeking to honor the hero with rustic entertainments.^[24] Flore and le Temps lament together the hero’s tendency to forsake everything in the quest for military glory, and a gavotte in G major for Flore’s followers ensues. But, in a striking juxtaposition, an imperious prelude in C major silences the gavotte and announces the arrival of the tragic Muse Melpomène. Her entrance establishes an adversarial dynamic identical to that in Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, except that Flore has replaced Euterpe as the advocate for pastoral entertainment. At the outset, Melpomène seeks, just as in the earlier pastorale, to expose the triviality of bucolic celebrations by asserting the primacy of tragedy through récitatif simple in vers libres, calculated to counteract the dances of Flore’s followers (see the score,^[25] Atys, p. 28):

Melpomène à Flore	Melpomene to Flora
Retirez-vous, cessez de prévenir le Temps,	Depart, and cease forestalling Time.
Ne me derobez point de précieux instants:	Do not steal any of my precious moments.
La puissante Cybelle	The powerful Cybèle,
Pour honorer Atys qu’elle a privé du jour,	to honor Atys, whose life she has taken,
Veut que je renouvelle,	wishes for me to revive,
Dans une illustre cour,	in an illustrious court,
Le souvenir de son amour.	the memory of her love.
Que l’agrément rustique	Let the rustic charm
De Flore et de ses jeux,	of Flora and her diversions
Cede à l’appareil magnifique	make way for the magnificent display
De la Muse tragique,	of the tragic Muse
Et de ses Spectacles pompeux.	and her magnificent spectacles.

3.6 Following a dance “for the followers of Melpomène,” which takes the form of an entrée grave^[26] littered with tirades and ascending contours (see Example 2 and Atys, pp. 29–30), Cybèle’s confidant, Iris, steps in to reconcile Melpomène and Flore (Atys, pp. 31–32):

Iris, parlant à Melpomène	Iris, speaking to Melpomene
Cybelle veut que Flore aujourd’huy vous seconde.	Cybèle wishes for Flora to second you today;
Il faut que les Plaisirs viennent de toutes parts,	Pleasures must come from all areas
Dans l’empire puissant, où regne un nouveau Mars,	in the mighty empire where the new Mars reigns.
Ils n’ont plus d’autre azile au monde.	They have no other refuge in the world.
Rendez-vous, s’il se peut, dignes de ses regards,	Make yourselves, if you can, worthy of his regard.
Joignez la beauté vive et pure	Join the ardent and pure beauty
Dont brille la Nature,	with which Nature shines
Aux ornements des plus beaux Arts.	together with the ornaments of the fairest Arts.

Downing Thomas writes of this moment that “the prologue’s resolution of differences sets the stage for the harmonious hybridity of tragédie en musique, blending the amorous focus of the pastoral and the high concerns of the tragic.”^[27] It is true that the goal was not, and could not be, the outright banishment of pastoral archetypes, which would have excluded from the new tragédie en musique genre a rich source of musical and poetic content, particularly when it came to the operatic divertissement. I would argue, though, that “harmonious hybridity” is less what the authors had in mind than a reaffirmation of the hierarchy they had already advocated in the prologues of both Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus and Cadmus et Hermione. To be sure, tragedy’s victory is subtler here than that announced by Polymnie’s unequivocal decision in Les Fêtes, but it is no less conclusive. Iris, after all, addresses her petition not to the pair of contestants, but to Melpomène alone—as if the latter is owed an explanation for why Flore must be allowed to tag along—and reassures her of Flore’s status as her seconde.^[28] To quote Georgia Cowart, “The voice of the artist in Quinault’s two dedications [to Cadmus and Alceste], pleading with Louis to turn his attention to the arts and leisure, merges with the voice of Flora, begging Melpomène to share the tragic stage with the divertissements of pleasure.”^[29]

3.7 The final lines of Iris’s pleas, seeking to join the beauty of nature with “the ornaments of the fairest arts,” betray an irony that infuses many contemporaneous critiques of the genre bucolique: whereas the pastoral mode was always equated with nature,^[30] this naturel is virtually antithetical to the “natural” expression (discussed below) that served for many in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France as an aesthetic touchstone.^[31] Thus, the term’s confounding multivalence requires one to accept that the most natural music in one sense is in another sense pointedly unnatural.

4.  Preliminary notes on “natural” expression

4.1 With such paradoxes afoot, it would be foolhardy to proceed further without first attempting a fuller assessment of contemporaneous understandings of “natural” and “artificial” expression. For example, the tragic Muse Melpomène’s “nobles récits” that she felt “most worthy of famous conquerors” appear to have drawn on an aesthetic that aligned nobility with natural expression, whereas in the past, accounts of a “noble” style in music were likelier to have simply described grandiloquence. Thus, when Quinault was accused by the “ancients” of not expressing his thoughts “nobly enough” (assez nobles), Perrault reminded readers that a captivating and intelligible text “cannot be [achieved] unless the words, the speech, and thoughts are very natural, very well-known and used well; so Monsieur, we blame Monsieur Quinault where he deserves most to be praised, which is his expertise in using a number of regular expressions, and very natural thoughts, so many beautiful and pleasant works, and all so different from one another.”^[32]

4.2 In Quinault’s prologues to Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus and Atys in particular, Melpomène counters Flore’s (or Euterpe’s) contributions by offering the king something more “elevated” than pastoral entertainment. But the distinction drawn is not only between competing genres, it is also between relative degrees of affective weight. I would argue that these prologues amount to nothing less than a calculated effort to highlight the contrast between “natural” artistic expression on the one hand and artifice on the other. The starker this musical contrast, as in Melpomène’s appearance in Atys, the more forcibly the point is made. By affirming that the king has no time for mere revelry or childish folly (a sentiment expressed vehemently in the Act 4 divertissement of Alceste, discussed below), Quinault and Lully affirm the gravity of his authority, and in turn, the artistic gravity of their new dramatic genre.

4.3 While only the most dignified genres are worthy of the king, however, he nonetheless magnanimously invites commoners to delight in whatever expressive modes please them, so long as they acknowledge that he has made their gambols possible, as suggested in the prologue of Cadmus et Hermione: “As reward for my labors, it is enough for me that all take joy in them” (“Pour prix de mes Travaux ce me doit être assez, / Que chacun en jouisse”). As Downing Thomas has noted, “If the operatic prologue referred to the pastoral in part to commemorate its origins as a genre, bucolic love and peace were also precisely those pastoral values created or restored by the king for the pleasure of his subjects. The pastoral setting and atmosphere are implicitly presented as the creation of Louis, and in turn reflect back upon him, shaping his image.”^[33] This socially keyed approach to genre infuses the memoirs of Louis XIV himself, who clearly understood the efficacy of attention to such matters:

This society of pleasures, which gives the courtiers an honest [courteous] familiarity with us, touches and charms them more than one could say. The people, on the other hand, enjoy spectacles, at which we, in any event, endeavor always to please, and all our subjects in general are delighted to see that we like what they like or that at which they succeed the best. By this we hold their minds and their hearts, sometimes more strongly than we do by rewards and kindnesses.^[34]

4.4 The prologues that contained some of these spectacles, then, raise several matters of some importance to the fledgling genre, and define the parameters by which we are to understand the antagonisms among contrasting expressive modes within the tragédie en musique. Sylvan Cornic has written that “the prologue of Atys summarizes the theory of a genre; it is the equivalent of a short, staged treatise on poetics, and educates us on the genealogy of French opera.”^[35] But the aesthetic manifestos-in-miniature that reside within the prologues to Atys, Cadmus et Hermione, and Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus were neither isolated nor were they endpoints; they were merely early manifestations of an ongoing agenda that sought to distinguish between—and in turn, to comment upon—competing expressive modes and genres.

4.5 When, in an effort to further examine these expressive categories, I borrow from late seventeenth- century sources the notions of “artificial” and “natural” expression, I do so with a full appreciation of how clumsy and multifarious both of these constructs have been in every age since that of Plato.^[36] In a particularly astute assessment of the concept of l’imitation de la nature, Charles Dill opined some time ago that this idea was “not a complex underlying aesthetic structure, but merely the kind of deliberately ambiguous catchword in which eighteenth-century Frenchmen delighted.”^[37] In the face of almost universally vague and often contradictory uses of the term in period sources, one is tempted to agree. Perhaps most frustrating is that authors often drift without warning or explanation from one usage to another. Consider, for example, Lecerf de la Viéville’s glowing description of the music Lully employed to accompany Pan’s lament in Act 3 of Isis:

[Lully copied] the sounds the wind actually makes as it blows through a dwelling and through the reeds…. Supposing there would be some merit to imitating nature well, then there is no way to doubt Lully’s merit here. He has a natural thing to copy, he copies it after nature, he makes nature the very foundation of his symphonie; he is content to adapt nature to music, gilded with a few ornaments of art. Admire, you other sublime minds, the figured counterpoint of the Italians; we natural folk, we admire the integrity of Lully’s style.^[38]

4.6 Within these few sentences, Lecerf has summoned the same word to invoke the natural phenomenon of wind, natural (organic) materials in the form of reeds through which the wind passes (for which Lully’s paired recorders are indeed fitting stand-ins), the natural (bucolic) setting, the natural (rustic) personae populating that setting, the natural (accurate) authenticity of Lully’s sonic approximation of wind, and finally, the social construct of the gens naturels who have both the good sense to appreciate all of the above and the good taste to prefer Lully’s style to Italianate counterpoint. In reality, this brief passage only hints at the scope of the terminological confusion, for one finds in Lecerf’s Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française at least twelve distinct uses of the word “natural” among his more than one hundred references to the concept(s)—and one could easily increase this number by taking into account more subtle shades of meaning.^[39]

4.7 Nonetheless, my use of the terms “natural” and “artificial” throughout the remainder of this essay is neither capricious nor arbitrary. Despite the challenges facing those interested in late seventeenth-century categories of expression, it is undeniable that, more than any other terms, le naturel and l’artifice were those invoked by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors to describe the expressive dialectic at the heart of this essay. While we must not fall prey to the enticing trap of treating these constructs as more fixed or precise than they actually were, neither should we characterize them as being altogether without meaning.

5. Eloquence, artifice, and the natural

5.1 Those who argue that the vagueness surrounding these constructs render them meaningless have sometimes reached their conclusions by way of a nearly exclusive focus on music-centered sources. The problem with this approach is that the most detailed explanations appear outside music; the most vociferous and specific of them were penned by authors of manuals on eloquence. The rhetorician Bernard Lamy offers an especially direct explanation in his L’Art de parler of 1675:

One must therefore distinguish between two types of discourse: natural discourse and artificial discourse. Natural discourse is that which should be used … to make known the movements of one’s will and the thoughts within one’s mind. Artificial discourse is that which one employs to please, and in which, moving away from ordinary and natural usage, one makes use of all possible artifice to charm listeners.^[40]

This distinction was hardly a new one, mirroring a passage (among others) from Quintilian,^[41] and contrasting discourse that appeared as an unmediated representation of “the thoughts within one’s mind” with discourse mediated by an intellectual exercise and altered in order to please auditors. It is important to note that, while the term “artifice” may today have pejorative connotations, in the seventeenth century it simply represented an alternative category of expression, with the specific goal rhetoricians since Cicero had characterized as delectare.^[42]

5.2 Lamy likened natural usage to ordinary usage in part because of his broader agenda in this portion of L’art de parler: to distinguish figured speech from “ordinary” or unfigured speech. In doing so, he echoed other roughly contemporaneous understandings of nature as “that which is ordinary.”^[43] It is important to note, however, that the description of natural speech as “ordinary” only differentiates this speech from decorative or florid styles that might strain the oration’s verisimilitude; it does not rule out even the most fervently impassioned speech, gestures, or behavior. In fact, rhetoricians were quite likely to describe as “natural” delivery born out of the most fiery passions. After describing an orator’s use of exclamations such as “Hélas!” and “mon Dieu!,” for example, Lamy insists that “there is nothing more natural. We observe that as soon as an animal is wounded and he suffers, he begins to scream, as if nature made him cry for help.”^[44]

5.3 Like many of his fellow rhetoricians, Lamy adhered to a largely Aristotelian mimetic model that had established observable human behavior as the primary object of an orator’s observation and imitation. “If one wishes to know the figures of anger,” he writes, “let him focus his observations on one speaking in the throes of that passion.”^[45] This notion became an oft-repeated maxim of Lamy’s contemporary, the theologian and rhetorician François Fénelon, for whom “painting the passions” in speech was primarily a matter of “study[ing] the movements that they inspire.” “For example,” he explains in his Dialogues sur l’éloquence (c. 1679), “observe what the eyes do, what the hands do, what the entire body does, and what its posture is; what the voice does when it is overcome by sorrow, or struck by the sight of a shocking thing. There nature reveals herself to you, you only have to follow her.”^[46]

5.4 Of course, nobody argued that striving for “natural” delivery required one to constantly imitate screaming animals and other “shocking things,” as character A in Fénelon’s Dialogues sur l’éloquence attempts to explain to his interlocutor:

A: Everything [the speaker does] must follow nature. Furthermore, there are some things on which one will better express his thoughts by the cessation of all movement. A man filled with powerful sentiments stands motionless for a moment. This sort of paralysis holds the minds of all listeners in suspense.

B: I understand that these pauses, when well executed, can be effective and touch listeners powerfully. But it seems to me that you reduce the public speaker to doing with his gestures only what a man does who is engaged in private conversation.

A: Pardon me. The sight of a large audience and the importance of the subject he treats must without doubt animate a man much more than if he were engaged in a simple conversation. But in public as in private he must always act naturally….  Nothing seems to me so shocking and absurd as to see a man inflame himself in order to tell me something dispassionate—while he sweats, he freezes my blood. Some time ago I fell asleep during a sermon…. I soon awakened, and I noticed that the preacher was thrashing about extraordinarily. I thought that he had reached the climax of his sermon.

B:  Well, what was it then?

A: He was only notifying the congregation that he would be preaching on penitence the following Sunday. This announcement, delivered with so much violence, surprised me and would have made me laugh if respect for the place and the service had not restrained me.^[47]

Character B wonders how, if natural delivery is defined as ordinary delivery, it is distinguishable from regular conversation—in other words, how this kind of delivery qualifies as oratory at all. Fénelon’s answer (via character A), was that natural delivery—conceived of as the faithful imitation of a natural model, carefully chosen to complement the moment’s desired affect—was oratory, and that all other rhetorical precepts, guidelines, and traditions were now secondary.^[48]

5.5 For Fénelon, as for Lamy, this prioritization of “natural” rhetorical delivery led to a heightened disciplinary focus on everything that distinguished it from artificial delivery. In his famous letter to the Académie Française of 1714, Fénelon admits that “the florid style has its charms,” but argues that it is “misplaced in discourses which do not call for refined witticisms and in which great passions must be expressed.”^[49] While the author only rarely referred to music, he did take time to relate the same idea to both music and to tragedy: “Music intended only to soothe the ear is merely an amusement for weak and lazy people and is unworthy of a well-regulated republic. Music is good only insofar as it agrees with the sense of the words….”;^[50] and “Tragedy must not corrupt the imitation of true nature. While it is possible to depict nature favorably and on a large scale, still every man must always speak in a very human way…. The nobility of the tragic genre should not prevent even its heroes from speaking with a simplicity appropriate to the nature of the matters they discuss.”^[51] This passage’s focus is on tragedy rather than musical tragedy, yet it is easy to see the parallels between the natural style its author envisions and Melpomène’s “nobles récits” in the prologue of Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus.

5.6 Even while eschewing folly and artifice in favor of natural expression of the passions, this elevated nobility could never be ugly. In an explication of Aristotle’s Poetics first printed in 1676, the rhetorician René Rapin was adamant that one must “distinguish that which is beautiful and agreeable in nature…. It is not enough to cling to nature that is sometimes rude and unpleasant; one must choose in her what is beautiful from what is not.”^[52] The resultant concept of la belle nature, “an ideal of classic simplicity, purged of all coarseness, ugliness, complexity, and artifice,”^[53] was achieved by choosing one’s subjects carefully, as Rapin notes, but also by altering one’s representations to conform to prevailing notions of beauty. In being imitated “naturally,” then, the object of imitation is changed by the artist, undergoing what Catherine Kintzler has called a “fictional transformation” far-removed from “the real world.”^[54] “The stage does not present things as they have been,” writes the Abbé d’Aubignac in his celebrated mid-seventeenth-century treatise on theatre, “but rather as they should be, and the poet must restore to the subject all that does not conform to the rules of his art, as a painter does when working with a defective model.”^[55]

5.7 Predating by many decades explanations of similar ideals in numerous eighteenth-century sources,^[56] Aubignac confirms the distance between “raw” nature—which could never serve as a viable object of imitation—and an essentialized nature of things “as they should be.” This essentialized nature leads one directly to the notion of vraisemblance, a subject to which Aubignac returns in his description of a hypothetical portrait of Mary Magdalene in her “penitent retirement”:

In considering the thing painted, [the artist] clings to the nature of what he represents, and does nothing that will not seem verisimilar in all circumstances, so that everything will appear to be believable…. The figure will have a pale and troubled complexion, because anything else would be unbelievable amidst such austerity…. He will not paint a palace near her, but rather a wilderness…. He will paint her grotto not gilded with gold, but entirely covered with moss…. Finally, he will adorn his work with all the things that may convincingly [vraisemblablement] fit a state of penitence, according to the person, the place, and the requirements of the story; because here he considers the truth of the thing that he is to paint. All the same, the poet considering in his tragedy the representation or spectacle of it, does all his art and his soul allow to make it agreeable to spectators, for he strives only to please them.^[57]

5.8 The amount of ink spilled in France on these matters speaks to the tension between the championing of believable, faithful representation on one hand and the requirement on the other of altering this reality to render it pleasing to spectators.^[58] The resulting vraisemblable “reality” was in fact an invented world—“a world parallel to the natural world”^[59]—governed by a predetermined code conforming to “what might be” in a given set of carefully controlled circumstances. As Fontenelle noted in his Réflexions sur la poétique (1685): “Le vrai and le vraisemblable are quite different. Le vrai is all that is; le vraisemblable is that which we judge could be.” He added, “In the theater, where everything is feigned, le vraisemblable takes the place of le vrai.”^[60]

5.9 When regarded through this lens, what rhetoricians and others called “natural” expression was in fact no freer from artistic mediation than were styles they deemed “artificial,” though the means of mediation were different. Most importantly, while in “artificial” discourse the formulae through which artistic mediations functioned could sometimes themselves serve as a source of delight, natural eloquence had as a key requirement that the art, though indispensable, remain submerged and undetected. This ancient premise, appropriated by the French as the principle of l’art caché,^[61] found one of its more intriguing endorsements in the abbé d’Aubignac’s aforementioned treatise:

One could argue that if passionate dialogue is well ordered and conducted according to the rules, it will appear too affected, will highlight art, and will not imitate nature, which stirs the human spirit unpredictably and confusedly, and which expresses without order or rules all the objects, themes, and circumstances of one’s passion according to the ideas presently moving him. To reply: one must acknowledge that the disorder in the words of a man who mourns is a defect that weakens the exterior signs of pain, and one must reform these in the theater, which suffers nothing imperfect…. Thus, by the order with which one says things, one mends that which was defective in nature’s movements; and by the sensible variety of figures, one preserves a likeness to the disorder of nature.^[62]

Natural disorder, then, is admirable and effective only when it is in fact ordered—when it is the product of transparent, but meticulous artistic construction.^[63]

5.10 The necessity of artistic mediation is accepted even by Fénelon, whose explanations of natural eloquence often seem otherwise naively simplistic. “I will permit a fine disorder,” he writes in his letter to the Académie Française, “that which comes from rapture and concealed art.”^[64] Yet, the crucial point for Aubignac, Fénelon, and many others seems to be that disorder (or apparent disorder) could serve as a marker of artistic transparency, and thus of natural expression—a point Fénelon had already made in his earlier Dialogues sur l’éloquence. In one passage, he quotes an ancient text (from Gracchus), then rewrites it in an intentionally unnatural, prosaic style. Following his experiment, he asks the reader:

What has become of [the passage’s] liveliness? Where are those broken words that so well mark nature in the transports of grief?… In passages such as these, not only are complete sentences unnecessary, but one must do away with all order and connection. Otherwise, the passion no longer seems to be real [vraisemblable]; and nothing is as offensive as a passion expressed with pomp and in measured periods.^[65]

The “measured periods” to which Fénelon objected bring to mind a kind of predictably structured, florid discourse that serves mainly to flatter the ear^[66]—an idea clearly relevant to musical structures. Fénelon evidently agreed, as the following exchange from his Dialogues illustrates:

B: You would strictly banish all frivolous ornaments from discourse. But tell me by concrete examples how to distinguish them from those that are serious and natural.

A: Do you like fredons [i.e. repetitive, predictable refrains or ornamental passages] in music? Do you not prefer animated notes that portray things and express the passions?

B: Yes, without a doubt. Fredons do nothing but amuse the ear; they mean nothing; they excite no feelings….

A: I knew well that music, to which you are very sensitive, would help me to make you understand the concerns of eloquence; there must then be a kind of eloquence even in music, and we must cast fredons from eloquence as well as from music. Do you not now understand what I call verbal fredons—certain word games that ceaselessly reappear as refrains, certain murmurings of languid and uniform periods? There you have false eloquence that resembles bad music.^[67]

5.11 From Fénelon’s Dialogues and other non-musical sources, then, an outline emerges of the constructs of the natural and artifice as competing modes of artistic expression. Authors regularly referenced these ideas by name, appealing to an understanding of le naturel that strove for vraisemblance rather than le vrai, thus conforming to standards of propriety dictated by the ideal of la belle nature—even as they advocated the feigning of structural and syntactical disorder in order to attest to an oration’s “naturalness.” This was taken to be the antithesis of an artificial, florid, or grandiloquent style, which one could identify both by its obvious goal of pleasing auditors, and more specifically by its reliance upon “uniform periods,” predictable forms, and opaque structural norms. While such “artificial” styles of oratory were not uniformly derided, they clearly occupied a lower place in the minds of Fénelon and Lamy.

6. From eloquence to music

6.1 This cursory summary can do little to resolve the multifarious nature of “nature,” but it may illustrate that seemingly disparate understandings of natural expression may in fact be less contradictory than has typically been appreciated. The equating of natural expression with disordered expression, for example, may appear to fly in the face of competing understandings of le naturel as allied to bienséance, propriety, and honnêteté—that is, to decorum and civility. After all, as Don Fader has noted, “the influence of the mondain conception of taste on French criticism can be felt in critics’ use not only of the concept of bienséance but also of ‘the natural’ to attack certain works as ‘affected.’ The idea of the ‘natural and simple’ was thus an important critical yardstick not only for academics but also for honnêtes gens, whose tenets shared the same classical basis, but ultimately rests upon codes of aristocratic social comportment.”^[68] But in reality, the natural disorder rhetoricians advocated was rarely of a type or degree that would strain norms of propriety. Rather, constructions of what Fénelon called “a fine disorder” rested invariably on a foundation of artistic refinement, built in turn upon the rules unique to each respective discipline, and of course, upon prevailing socio-cultural sensibilities. What links these two definitions of the natural, then—one scorning pedantry and embracing an unaffected, honnête comportment, and the other advocating expressions of inflamed passions via a transparent authenticity—is that both hinge on the concealment of effort, or of art. The degree to which one has achieved a natural mien in the first sense determines in part one’s adeptness at constructing nature in the second sense. As a corollary, the more comportment one exhibits—the more mastery one has over his own passions—the more license he has to feign a lack of control when the subject matter requires it.

6.2 It is no accident that one finds such interrelations elucidated most clearly in texts on eloquence; as Bernard Tocanne has written, “rhetoric offers a possible passageway to find oneself in the labyrinth of nature.”^[69] That many of the constructs described in rhetoric texts are relevant to other artistic disciplines, however, is beyond question, as references above to a popular theatre treatise by Aubignac illustrate. In fact, numerous French texts written during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries concerning eloquence (or rhetoric), poetry, theatre, dance, painting, and music state explicitly that these disciplines operate via a common aesthetic. Lecerf, for one, insists that “all these arts [painting, eloquence, and poetry] have a connection that makes whatever can be said of each of them nearly identical, and I take it to be a sign of this that whatever one says about one of them is also partly true of the others.”^[70] Very often, such assertions revolve around the common ideal of natural expression, as when the painting critic Roger de Piles affirms that “all arts that have imitation as their object are practiced only to instruct and divert men by a faithful representation of nature.”^[71]

6.3 In another passage, Lecerf (speaking here through his Marquis character) reiterates these same ideas and finds them exemplified in the music of Lully:

Would Mademoiselle have the courage to deny that music ought not, without excuse and without quarter, be natural? And would you deny Monsieur’s other principle, that it must also be expressive? For my part, I concede the point. And when he teaches furthermore that, if painting is a representation through colors, and poetry and eloquence a representation through words, music is apparently a representation through tones—this also seems likely to me. From this it follows, as he claims, that in being inventive, being natural, and being expressive, like Lully, lies the supreme merit and utmost difficulty.^[72]

Nobody familiar with Lecerf’s Comparaison will be surprised at the hero status he confers upon Jean-Baptiste Lully, and his bias in this regard should discourage us from reading too much into this passage. Yet, the notion that Lully’s music might provide another passageway—alongside that of eloquence and related disciplines—into the “labyrinth of nature” is an enticing one. If, as I have argued, the heightened attention paid by writers on eloquence and related disciplines to constructions of le naturel on one hand, and to an expressive mode that embraced opaque artifice on the other, was indeed part of a wide-ranging aesthetic paradigm, it would have been curious if music had had no part to play. Conversely, since French discourse on music simply did not have a great deal to say on such matters until Lecerf’s early eighteenth-century Comparaison, the notion that the music itself—including that of Lully—might harbor elements of these constructs may in turn contribute to rendering the paradigm, still regarded by some as too general or multivalent to be of much use, more precise.

7. Interrupting the divertissement: Cadmus et Hermione

7.1 Earlier in this essay, I argued that the prologues of several Lully-Quinault collaborations—namely, Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, Cadmus et Hermione, and Atys—were meant to function in part as self-reflexive manifestos, asserting the primacy of “elevated” tragic expression over pastoral entertainment. As we saw, this message derived from the juxtaposition of contrasting musical and textual archetypes, often in the form of a contest between representatives of tragic and pastoral expression. When regarded alongside the works of Lully’s contemporaries in the fields of eloquence and related disciplines, however, these efforts to define and foreground specific generic hierarchies on the French operatic stage appear to be musical manifestations of the broader dialectic so apparent in non-musical sources between competing notions of natural and artificial expression.

7.2 When, for example, the “sudden disorder” prefiguring l’Envie’s entrance in the prologue of Cadmus et Hermione sends members of the “rustic assembly” fleeing, and when l’Envie’s ensuing récitatif simple displaces the scene’s airs and choruses, it is difficult not to think of Fénelon’s “fine disorder” that “comes from rapture and concealed art”—particularly when the “measured periods” the rhetorician viewed with such scorn are displaced rather explicitly by what Aubignac deemed a “likeness to the disorder of nature.” Of course, the “disorder” that brings the rustic celebration to an untimely close is in fact as ordered as what it displaces, and l’Envie’s ensuing récitatif simple, though a fitting example of impassioned natural expression, is no less guided by “artificial” constraints than the preceding pastoral songs and dances. As numerous rhetoric sources clarify, the goal was to construct a highly moderated vraisemblance, “natural” only in contrast to expressive types whose formal artifice was designedly opaque.

7.3 To examine these matters in greater detail requires that we leave behind operatic prologues to confront the divertissements that inhabit each act of Lully and Quinault’s tragédies en musique. Among the genre’s many fascinating traits is that its most expressively antithetical components—the divertissement on one hand and tragic dialogue or monologue on the other—necessarily collide with one another as many as ten times in each work. These expressive juxtapositions, particularly those that take place at the margins of an internal divertissement (that is, a divertissement that does not conclude an act), might then be understood to function as expressive “nodes.”^[73]

7.4 Caroline Wood is among those to have focused her attention on the conclusions of operatic divertissements, and her summary is worth quoting here at length:

Where the divertissement does not conclude the act, librettists attempt to make an easy or at least credible transition from the divertissement to whatever follows it. Their solutions fall into four groups, ranging from the natural to the cataclysmic. In the first group, the endings are natural or expected. After the songs and dances, the main characters simply pick up the action again, usually in récitatif simple dialogue…. The type of divertissement in which there is a “discordant” character present often produces the second type of ending, in which cessation is brought about by a direct order or by the instigator or recipient leaving or attempting to leave…. The arrival on the scene of a character who has not taken part in or witnessed the divertissement usually produces a third type of ending, the unexpected. The newcomer tends to bring bad news or make threats. Finally comes the ending in which the divertissement comes to an unexpected conclusion through a physical disturbance.^[74]

Wood’s categorization is certainly apt. However, her second and fourth types in particular (the entrance of a “discordant character” and the occurrence of a physical disturbance, respectively) may in some sense contradict the notion of “an easy or at least credible transition.” After all, if the transition is in some way unexpected, jarring, or violent, it seems less a “transition” than a purposeful elision of disparate elements and a calculated avoidance of transitional material. To begin to address this possibility, we might return to the first of Lully and Quinault’s works in the genre, as the stark juxtapositions exhibited in the prologue of Cadmus et Hermione set the scene for similar clashes in later portions of the work.

7.5 Near the end of Act 2, Cadmus departs on a quest to prove his bravery to Hermione’s father, Mars, by vanquishing a dragon. The act’s divertissement takes place in the final scene, and revolves around the efforts of l’Amour (Cupid) to use song and dance to divert Hermione from her sorrow. A number of statues are animated by l’Amour and descend from their pedestals to perform two dances, in alternation with the stanzas of l’Amour’s air, in which he admonishes all lovers to cease complaining about their suffering and instead embrace the pleasures of love (see Example 3 and Cadmus, p. 102):

L’Amour	Cupid
1. Cessez de vous plaindre	1. Stop complaining
De souffrir en aimants.	that you suffer from love.
Amants, vous devez ne rien craindre,	Lovers, you have nothing to fear;
Si vous souffrez, vostre prix est charmant.	if you suffer, your reward is charming.
Après des rigueurs inhumaines	After inhuman rigors
On aime sans peines	you love without pain,
On rit des jaloux;	you laugh at the jealous.
Un bien plein de charmes	A good thing full of charms
Qui coûte des larmes,	that costs tears
En devient plus doux.	becomes even sweeter.
2. Tout doit rendre hommage	2. All must give homage
A l’Empire amoureux;	to the empire of lovers.
Il faut tôt ou tard qu’on s’engage,	Sooner or later you must join it.
Sans rien aimer on ne peut être heureux.	Without anything to love, one cannot be happy.
Après des rigueurs inhumaines …	After inhuman rigors …

[Return to paragraph 8.1]

7.6 The statues return to their pedestals, and l’Amour calls on a group of golden cherubs (petits amours d’or) to “sow a thousand flowers under [Hermione’s] feet,” presumably signaling the start of another entrée for a different group of dancers. Before this can come to fruition, however, Hermione interrupts the proceedings to chastise l’Amour—and by extension the dancers—for their efforts to divert rather than help her (see Example 4 and Cadmus, p. 104):

L’Amour reprend sa place sur le nuage qui l’a apporté. Les statues se remettent sur leurs Pié-d’estaux, tandis que dix petits amours d’or, qui tiennent des corbeilles pleines de fleurs, sont à leur tour animés par l’Amour, et viennent par son ordre jeter des fleurs en volant autour d’Hermione.

(Cupid takes his place again upon the cloud that brought him. The statues return to their pedestals, while ten little golden cherubs holding baskets full of flowers are in their turn animated by Cupid and come at his command to cast their flowers as they fly around Hermione.)

L’Amour	Cupid
Amours, venez semer mille fleurs sous ses pas.	Amours, come spread a thousand flowers under her feet.
Hermione	Hermione
Laissez-moi ma douleur, j’y trouve des appas.	Leave me to my sorrow; I find it has its charms.
Dans l’horreur d’un péril extrême,	Amidst the horror of an extreme peril
Est-ce là le secours que l’on me doit offrir?	is this the only help you can offer me?
Peut-être ce que j’aime	Perhaps the one I love
Est tout prêt de périr.	is already close to death.
L’Amour (s’envole au milieu des dix Amours)	Cupid (flying in the midst of the ten cherubs)
Je vais le secourir.	I will go to help him.

L’Amour’s compliant six-syllable reply concludes the act. Thus, while the divertissement is not technically an internal one (there being no personnel changes that would mark a new scene prior to the end of the act), Hermione’s dialogue with l’Amour is distinctly outside the conceptual and musical zones of the divertissement that it has effectively curtailed.^[75]

[Return to paragraph 8.1]

7.7 The third act divertissement is more grandiose than the second, featuring a cast of Cadmus, two princes, Arbas, the High Priest, and chorus and dance ensembles of priests, all of whom lend an air of formality to the ceremonial sacrifice of the dragon. The High Priest—his supplications punctuated by the “Air pour les sacrificateurs” (a dance with a rich accompaniment gilded by trumpets and kettledrums) and the adulatory chorus of priests— does his best to flatter Mars, hoping that the sacrifice will appease him (Cadmus, pp. 127–29; see also p. 123):

Le Grand Sacrificateur	The High Priest
Que les tumultes des alarmes,	Let the tumult of alarms,
Que le bruit, que le choc, que le fracas des Armes,	the noise, the clash, the crashing of arms
Retentisse de toutes parts.	resound on all sides.
Tous	All
O Mars! O Mars! O Mars!	Oh, Mars! Oh, Mars! Oh, Mars!
Mars redoutable!	Formidable Mars!
Mars indomptable!	Indomitable Mars!
O Mars! O Mars! O Mars!	Oh, Mars! Oh, Mars! Oh, Mars!
Le grand sacrificateur	The High Priest
Qu’on fasse approcher la victime:	Let the victim be brought forward;
Puisse-t-elle calmer le courroux qui t’anime,	May it calm the wrath that animates you
Et n’attirer sur nous que tes plus doux regards	and draw upon us only your kindest attention.
Tous	All
O Mars …	Oh, Mars …

But it is not to be. “Interrupting the priests,” according to the stage directions, Mars enters and summarily deems the entire assembly’s efforts, and thus the divertissement, “useless” (see Video 2 and Cadmus, p. 130):

Mars paroit sur son char, et interrompt les sacrificateurs.
(Mars appears on his chariot and interrupts the priests.)

Mars	Mars
C’est vainement que l’on espère	It is in vain that you hope
Que d’inutiles vœux apaisent ma colère;	these useless offerings will appease my anger;
Je ne révoque point mes loix.	I shall not revoke my laws.
Si Cadmus veut me satisfaire	If Cadmus wishes to satisfy me,
Qu’il achève, s’il peut, de mériter mon choix.	let him succeed, if he can, in meriting my choice.
Un vain respect ne peut me plaire,	A vain deference cannot please me;
On ne satisfait Mars que par de grands exploits.	one satisfies Mars only through great deeds.
Vous, que l’enfer a nourries	You who are nourished by hell,
Venez, cruelles Furies,	come, cruel Furies,
Venez, brisez l’Autel en cent morceaux épars!	come, break the altar into a hundred scattered pieces!
Le Chœur	Chorus
O Mars! ô Mars! ô Mars!	Oh, Mars! Oh, Mars! Oh, Mars!

Quatre Furies descendent qui brisent l’Autel, et s’envolent ensuite, tenant chacune un tison du sacrifice à la main. Le char de Mars tourne dans un même temps, et l’emporte au fonds du théâtre, où l’on le perd de vue, et tous les sacrificateurs et les assistants se retirent, criant, ô Mars!

(Four Furies descend and break the altar, then fly away, each carrying an ember from the sacrifice. Mars’s chariot turns at the same time and carries him upstage, where he can no longer be seen, and all the priests and attendents depart, crying “Oh, Mars!”)

The parallels between this episode and the conclusion of the Act 2 divertissement are readily apparent: in each case, several characters deploy the conventions of the divertissement in an ill-fated attempt to please a tragic (or non-divertissement) character. This character in turn interrupts the divertissement and, in a chastising tone, reduces its cast to exiting with little more than dejected murmurs.

7.8 The similarities are hardly unique to these two acts; they are extensions of the explicit aesthetic agenda advanced in the prologue, in which the chorus members ultimately abandon their revels in a gesture of self-deprecating reverence toward the Sun. All three of these portions of Cadmus et Hermione can be regarded in turn as manifestations of the explicit generic ordering, already in evidence in the previous year’s Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, that asserted the primacy of tragedy. These interrelations within Cadmus and preceding works suggest that further explorations about the nature of this form’s interaction with the drama that surrounds it may be profitable, especially as these interactions relate to issues of genre and expressive norms.^[76]

8. Recitative and the natural

8.1 In musical and poetic terms, operatic divertissements are distinguished not only by instrumental music to accompany dances, but also by a preponderance of airs and choruses in closed forms and frequent strophic settings that tend toward shorter line lengths of eight, six, or even fewer syllables—as well as odd numbers of syllables, rare in recitative.^[77] L’Amour’s strophic air from the Act 2 divertissement of Cadmus et Hermione (“Cessez de vous plaindre”), transcribed above in paragraph 7.5 and shown in Example 3, offers a suitable example. Such musical types, then, are the antithesis of Quinault and Lully’s dramatic monologues and dialogues, which gravitate toward recitative and shun strophic forms, and typically employ longer line lengths in a free mixture of mostly (but not exclusively) twelve-syllable alexandrines, decasyllables, and octosyllables “whose patterning does almost nothing to demand any particular musical structure.”^[78] Hermione’s curt reply to L’Amour in that scene (“Laissez-moi ma douleur, j’y trouve des appas”) illustrates this convention. L’Amour’s own use of an alexandrine in the line prior to Hermione’s reply (“Amours, venez semer mille fleurs sous ses pas”) pairs with Hermione’s reply to form a balanced and rhymed couplet; it also illustrates the tendency of divertissement characters to share this style when engaging in dialogue, particularly with tragic characters (see paragraph 7.6 and Example 4).

8.2 The constantly fluctuating meters that characterize most French recitative were, as is now widely appreciated, part of Lully’s effort to approximate the tragic declamation of contemporaneous actors. But these metric shifts could also, as Lois Rosow has explained, signal affective fluctuations.^[79] While it would be simplistic to equate potent affects with varied delivery without qualification, it is clear that closed forms and other predictable structures are far less common when the singing character’s passions are in a state of flux. Most significantly, metrical freedom was understood to lend recitative a sense of natural fluidity. As part of his effort to explain this style to confused foreigners, Lecerf described French recitative as “a river that should flow quietly and evenly, except for those places where it is pushed forward or slowed down, where it is disturbed by some change in direction or by some unusual obstacle, and little poetic lines of regular, short lengths form impetuous and noisy cascades or streams that babble constantly.”^[80] The fluid mixture and deft musical elision of subtly differing récitatif settings, and of recitative with brief dialogue airs—more like a continuum of colors on a spectrum than discrete types—exemplified for many a naturalistic expressive tendency and stood in binary opposition to the perceived artifice of closed airs and similar forms.^[81] Thus, the notion of operatic récitatif as a musical manifestation of natural expression would remain a mantra of French opera criticism well into the following generation, as the following passage from Rémond de Saint-Mard illustrates:

This succession of different inflections, this mixture, this variety of sounds, high and low, growing or fading, come together to form a vocal line, and it is certain that when this vocal line, which is none other than our recitative, is well written by the composer and well delivered by the singer, it is far from being unnatural, but is rather in all times and in all countries the simplest depiction of our impulses and the most faithful language of emotion.^[82]

8.3 Thus, through his jarring insertion of récitatif simple amidst the ceremonial opacity of the priests’ chorus, Mars revels in a naturalistic flow that stands in contrast to what he regards as the chorus’s tiresome and ineffective (inutile) repetitions of “O Mars! O Mars! O Mars!” Here, as in l’Envie’s similar interruption during the work’s prologue, the individual tragic character is pitted against the group of celebrants. Given the frequency and consistent manner in which this convention appears in the prologue and first three acts of Cadmus et Hermione, one might assume that such affective collisions were simply a distinguishing trait of this particular work. On the contrary, the tendency within Cadmus to conclude divertissements in this manner inaugurated what would become a commonplace for Lully and Quinault—one on which they would continue to rely throughout the entirety of their partnership as co-creators of tragédies en musique. While it appears in somewhat different guises, the practice always involves a deliberately stark juxtaposition between competing expressive modes in which, through an appeal to “natural” expression, a single tragic character emerges as preeminent—a convention we may examine by turning to several parallel moments in works succeeding Cadmus et Hermione.

9. Interrupting the divertissement: from Alceste to Phaëton

9.1 The fifth collaboration of Quinault and Lully in the genre, Isis (1677), is perhaps best known for the scandal it generated arising from its apparent portrayal of the King’s new favorite, Madame de Ludres, as the nymph Io and Madame de Montespan as a jealous and manipulative Junon (Juno).^[83] Our purposes, however, draw us to Act 3, noteworthy for its complicating of established divertissement norms. The sprawling divertissement—dominating scenes 5–7, but beginning perhaps as early as scene 3—is instigated by Mercure (Mercury), who, to charm Argus (charged with guarding the imprisoned Io) to sleep, presents the story of Pan and Syrinx. The tale mirrors Io’s own plight: Syrinx spurns Pan’s love just as Io has refused the advances of Jupiter. A cast of shepherds, satyrs, and sylvans dance and sing along with Pan and Syrinx, and for the moment the divertissement appears to be of a common type, featuring a diversion staged for the benefit (or here, to the detriment) of onlooking tragic characters. Argus watches the drama unfold as Syrinx, fleeing Pan, throws herself into a lake and is transformed by the Naiads into reeds. In a sommeil engineered to lull Argus to sleep, a pair of recorders mimics the wind blowing through and across the reeds near the edge of the lake.

9.2 This is, of course, the very same sonic portrayal that Lecerf described with the help of six distinct meanings of the word “natural.” The scene demonstrates, though, that the problems with the polysemic term “nature” were never merely semantic. On one hand, the scene’s pastoral cast of woodland creatures, water nymphs, and shepherds, to say nothing of its heightened focus on water, plants, and other organic materials, clearly merits the term “natural,” as does its setting—part rustic, part Arcadian, but entirely bucolic. In other senses, however, such pastoral scenes and the characters who inhabit them are bound by a conventional code whose opacity and straining of vraisemblance were acknowledged and even celebrated as part of their charm.^[84] By the time Lully and Quinault appropriated them in their tragédies en musique, such pastoral references had become well-worn clichés, allusions to an outmoded literary genre whose only remaining vestiges were grottoes and lakes, shepherds and satyrs, and the rustic strains of recorders, musettes, and (in Lully’s scores in particular) trios de hautbois. As emblems of pastoral artifice, these scenes functioned in part as dramatic foils to heighten by contrast the naturalness of expressive and musical types that would invariably displace them. The novelty of this portion of Isis, then, lies in the fact that, while its pastoral conventions at first seem to provide pleasing (if vacuous) entertainment for Argus, they also serve to deceive him. In a clever turning of tables, the pastoral characters ply their artifice with uncharacteristic self-awareness, embracing their clichés and exploiting them as tools of deception.^[85]

9.3 Once Argus can no longer keep his one hundred eyes open, the ruse need not continue, and Mercure, still disguised as a shepherd, silences Pan (see the score,^[86] Isis, pp. 210–11):

Pan	Pan
Que ces roseaux plaintifs soient à jamais aimés…	May these plaintive reeds be loved forever…
Mercure	Mercury
Il suffit, Argus dort, tous ses yeux sont fermés,	That’s enough, Argus is asleep, his eyes are all closed.
Allons, que rien ne nous retarde,	Let us go, let nothing stand in our way,
Délivrons la nymphe qu’il garde.	let us free the nymph he guards.

As Mercure begins to lead Io to safety, Hierax enters to confront him. He awakens Argus and together the two call upon Junon to come to their aid, whereupon Mercure kills Argus and transforms Hierax into a bird of prey.

9.4 The divertissement seems to have concluded, then, with Mercure’s interruption and silencing of Pan (“Il suffit”). In reality, however, its endpoint is as indistinct as was its beginning. Signaling that we are still in a liminal state between the world of the divertissement and tragic narrative, the “chorus of sylvans, satyrs, and shepherds,” who evidently remained on stage only to deliver these words, cry: “Let us flee; Juno is coming here!” (“Fuyons, Junon vient dans ces lieux”: Isis, pp. 213–14). In doing so, they join a long list of fleeing divertissement characters in Quinault’s librettos, all of whom exclaim “fuyons!” as they depart.^[87] Finally, Junon answers the calls of Argus and Hierax, and enters in her chariot to begin scene 8 with a fluid stream of récitatif simple in alexandrines:

Junon	Juno
Revois le jour, Argus, que ta figure change.	See the day again, Argus, let your appearance change.

Argus transformé en paon, vient se placer devant le char de Junon.
(Argus, transformed into a peacock, takes his place before Juno’s chariot.)

Et vous, nymphe, apprenez comment Junon se venge.	And you, nymph, witness how Juno avenges herself.
Sors, barbare Erinnis, sors du fond des enfers,	Come out, cruel Erinnis, emerge from hell’s depths.
Viens, prends soin de servir ma vengeance fatale.	Come, take care to serve my deadly vengeance.

While the musical and expressive tensions that separate the third act divertissement of Isis from what follows it are more complex than the parallel juxtapositions in Cadmus et Hermione, the same essential traits are present: a solitary tragic character rejects the artifice of the divertissement, silencing it and causing its remaining characters to seem ridiculous or weak as they exit.

9.5 Strikingly parallel examples of this convention appear in the majority of the tragédies en musique of Quinault and Lully, beginning with Cadmus et Hermione and continuing in the following year with Alceste (1674). Compared to the tale of Pan and Syrinx that dominates the middle portion of Isis, the fourth act divertissement of Alceste is quite brief—an infernal celebration in Pluton’s palace to welcome Alceste (who has volunteered to die in place of her beloved Admète) to Hades. Pluton and Proserpine (Pluto and Persephone) call for the fête infernale, consisting of two dances in alternation with a chorus, in which Pluton’s followers revel in the inevitability of death (see the score,^[88] Alceste, pp. 240–42):

Suivants de Pluton	Followers of Pluto
Chacun vient ici bas prendre place,	Everybody comes down here to take their place.
Sans cesse on y passe,	They continually come here,
Jamais on n’en sort.	but nobody ever leaves.
C’est pour tous une loy necessaire,	It is a necessary law for all;
L’effort qu’on peut faire	the effort one can expend
N’est qu’un vain effort.	is only a vain effort.
Est-on sage de fuir ce passage?	Is it wise to flee from this passage?
C’est un orage	It is a thunderstorm
Qui meine au port.	that leads to port.
Chacun vient ici bas …	Everybody comes down here …
Tout les charmes,	All the charms,
Plaintes, cris, larmes,	plaints, cries, tears,
Tout est sans armes	all are without defense
Contre la Mort.	against death.
Chacun vient ici bas …	Everybody comes down here …

Following the reprise of the second dance air, the key changes suddenly from F major to B-flat major as Alecton (the Fury Alecto) appears and demands that they “leave these revels” so that they might prepare to defend themselves against the coming intruder, Alcide (Alceste, pp. 242–43):

Alecton	Alecto
Quittez, quittez les jeux; songez à vous défendre.	Leave behind these revels; prepare to defend yourselves.
Contre un audacieux unissons nos efforts.	Against this intruder let us join our efforts.
Le fils de Jupiter vient ici de descendre;	The son of Jupiter approaches these depths;
Seul, il ose attaquer tout l’empire des morts.	alone, he dares to attack the entire kingdom of death.

9.6 In contrast to the abrupt conclusion of the Act 3 divertissement of Cadmus et Hermione, discussed above, there is no hint here of antagonism toward the divertissement characters, nor does the speaker disparage their dances and choruses as “useless.”^[89] Rather, Alecton’s interruption is simply born out of urgency. But, while the divertissement here is not characterized as frivolous or superficial, it is nevertheless curtailed as a direct result of Alecton’s command, and the suddenness of the shift back to recitative (in alexandrines from the outset, in contrast with the particularly short lines of the preceding chorus) speaks to the impatience Alecton feels toward the divertissement’s characters, whose once welcome songs and dances are now in danger of putting others at risk.

9.7 As is the case with many divertissements, the temporal flow is altered, or indeed halted, during the Underworld celebration. As engineers of this altered temporality, the dancers and chorus members are absorbed within it to such a degree that they seem unaware of it. This ignorance, for which they are blameless, nevertheless seems to annoy both Alecton and Pluton; the latter follows Alecton’s interruption with his own urgent command (“Courez tous! Courez tous!”) as he prepares to unleash Cerberus.^[90]

9.8 Lully and Quinault were evidently satisfied with the effect, as they incorporated the same convention in Act 2 of Thésée the following year. The act’s divertissement features dancers representing various groups of Athenian commoners celebrating Thésée’s most recent victory. Two old Athenian men (vieillards) then proclaim in a strophic duet that, since the elderly are resigned to constantly watching death approach, they might as well join in the singing and enjoy life while they can (see the score,^[91] Thésée, pp. 189–90).^[92] Their song is interrupted by Thésée himself who, politely at first, then with a threat, puts an end to their celebration (Audio 1 begins with the duet’s final refrain):^[93]

Vieillards	Old Men
Le plaisir se presente,	Pleasure presents itself;
Chantons quand on chante,	let’s sing whenever others do,
Vivons au gré du destin;	let’s live as destiny dictates.
L’affreuse vieillesse	Horrible old age
Qui doit voir sans cesse	that must constantly watch
La mort s’approcher	as death approaches
Trouve assez la tristesse	finds enough sadness
Sans la chercher.	without searching for it.
Thésée	Theseus
C’est assez, amis, c’est assez.	That’s enough, friends, enough.
Allez, et que chacun en bon ordre se rende	Leave, and let everyone go in good order
Aux endroits qu’au besoin il faudra qu’on defende	to the places we will need to defend.
Allez, je suis content de vois soins empressez,	Go—I am content with your enthusiastic offering.
Si vous voulez que je commande,	If you wish for me to order you:
Allez, allez, obeïssez!	Go, go, obey!

Thésée’s almost comic exasperation (expressed in vers libres and simple recitative) is even more pronounced than was Alecton’s in Act 4 of Alceste. He treats the old men gently at first, but his tone throughout is one of condescension rather than respect. Eventually, he loses patience and resorts to barking orders via a pair of emphatic eight-syllable lines.

9.9 We find strikingly similar dramatic nodes in most of the tragédies en musique of Lully and Quinault, and one further example is particularly worthy of our attention before proceeding. The final divertissement of Phaëton (1683) finds the title character steering the chariot of the Sun on its course as King Mérops and Queen Clymène rejoice in Phaëton’s impending ascendency to the Egyptian throne. As in Act 3 of Isis, the mode is decidedly pastoral, featuring a cast of dancers and singers who play the roles of Egyptian shepherds and shepherdesses celebrating Phaëton’s illustrious future. Mérops and Clymène set the scene in motion, encouraging all present to rejoice (see the score,^[94] Phaëton, p. 241):

Mérops et Clymène	Merops and Clymene
Que l’on chante, que tout responde,	Let everyone sing, let all reply:
C’est un Soleil nouveau	It is a new Sun
Qui donne la lumiere au Monde;	that illuminates the world.
C’est un Soleil nouveau	It is a new Sun
Qui donne un jour si beau.	that provides so beautiful a day.

The pastoral choir echoes their words, and thereafter the celebration grows more lighthearted with every moment.

9.10 In due course, a shepherdess sings what begins as a somewhat unremarkable love air,^[95] but her offering becomes more interesting when she elaborates on her feelings in the refrain and in the second strophe: she prefers laughter and revelry to the kind of all-consuming, often detrimental love that is characteristic of tragic narratives. “Let us mock the constant suffering,” she sings, of those whose love is “too tender” (Phaëton, pp. 254–55):

Une Bergère Egyptienne	An Egyptian Shepherdess
L’Amour plaist, je consens qu’il m’enchante	Cupid pleases, I consent to his enchantments
Lorsqu’il suivra les Ris et les Jeux:	as long as he favors the gods of pleasure;
Mais s’il me tourmente	but if he torments me,
Je rompray ses nœuds.	I will break free of his bonds.
Un Amant qui toujours soûpire	A lover who is always sighing
Doit allarmer.	must alarm us.
Ce n’est que pour rire	It is only for laughter
Qu’on doit former	that one should form
Le dessein d’aimer.	a plan to love.
Jeunes cœurs qui cherchez à vous rendre,	Young hearts that seek to surrender,
N’aimez pas tant:	you should not love too much.
Un amour trop tendre	A love that is too tender
N’est jamais content.	is never content.
Puisqu’il faut qu’une chaîne nous lie,	Since it is necessary that a chain bind us,
Ne faut-il pas choisir un nœud charmant?	mustn’t one choose a pleasing bond?
Moquons-nous de souffrir constament;	Let us mock constant suffering;
On doit rendre la vie	One should make life
Plus douce en aimant,	sweeter by loving,
Ce n’est qu’une folie	it is nothing but folly
D’aimer son tourment.	to love one’s torment.
L’Amour plaist …	Cupid pleases …

Neither a simpleton nor a pushover, this shepherdess agrees to submit to Cupid only when he acts as she wishes. Furthermore, her mockery of those who are “always sighing” clearly refers to non-divertissement characters, and specifically to Libye and Epaphus, who just prior to the divertissement had indeed done their share of sighing over their hopeless plight as members of a love triangle with Phaëton at the apex.

9.11 However, neither the unrestrained merriment nor the mockery of those whose cares are more serious will last. Théone, daughter of Protée (Proteus) and Phaëton’s former lover, enters to convey the message that her father has foretold Phaëton’s demise. But rather than simply delivering her message, she commands members of the pastoral gathering, in récitatif simple, to “transform this sweet music into funereal plaints” (see Example 5 and Phaëton, p. 256):

Théone	Théone
Changez ces doux Concerts en des plaintes funebres.	Transform this sweet music into funereal plaints.
L’instant fatal arrive où d’épaisses tenebres	The fatal moment has arrived when thick darkness
Couvriront pour jamais le Soleil qui nous luit;	shall cover forever the Sun that gives us light;
Phaëton va tomber dans l’éternelle nuit.	Phaethon will fall into eternal night.

Audio 2 begins with the shepherdess’s final refrain and continues with a reprise of the related dance air (not explicitly called for in the score).^[96] In this performance, then, it is the dancers that Théone interrupts.

9.12 As was the case in the aforementioned moment from Act 4 of Alceste, the intervening character here has little unkind to say about the divertissement, even describing its music as “sweet.” The message here has nothing to do with disparaging the preceding dances and airs or asserting the generic superiority of tragedy. As an expressive contrast, however, the disparity between Théone’s grim message and the air it interrupts could hardly be starker. The short lines of the air’s refrain (many just four or five syllables long), paired with the exuberance of the shepherdess’s gigue rhythms, are in a different expressive universe from the recitative that curtails them. The gravity of Théone’s announcement, together with the solemn, mostly stepwise ascent of the first phrase Lully writes for it, are enough to guarantee that there will be no need for the kind of prodding to which Thésée resorted to silence the two vieillards; it is clear from Théone’s very first syllable that the divertissement is over.

10. Engineering interruptions

10.1 In each of these examples from Cadmus et Hermione, Alceste, Thésée, Isis, and Phaëton, one may rightly question how noteworthy the tactic we have seen Lully and Quinault employ really is; after all, something must happen to conclude any divertissement—especially an internal divertissement—and restore the train of tragic narrative. Furthermore, a clearly articulated conclusion to a divertissement has the benefit of affording dancers and chorus members a logical exit strategy, particularly when that conclusion involves a primary character commanding them to stop what they are doing. Finally, it is instructive to recall that in most cases, Lully composed music for the divertissements without Quinault’s complete libretto in hand.^[97] The dramatic nodes I have described are in reality, then, something like seams in the patchwork fabric of the tragédie en musique, each piece of which the work’s co-creators had to exchange, compile, and stitch to another as best they could, using threads of transitional material.

10.2 At the same time, however, “transitional material” does not seem to be what Quinault or Lully had in mind in these passages. In each of the moments on which I have focused thus far, the transitional stitching one might expect to find is conspicuously absent, leaving in its place a jarring overlap. After all, there is a clear difference between a transition, born out of necessity and handled judiciously to allow one scene to flow freely into the next, and a marked omission of transitional material, calculated to draw attention to the juxtaposition (or perhaps better, collision) of disparate dramatic elements—and it is clear that Lully and Quinault frequently chose the latter when they were more than capable of constructing the former.

10.3 Buford Norman has argued that Quinault and Lully may have engineered the affective collision in Act 5 of Phaëton in part because “it makes for effective drama to interrupt a divertissement that is a scene of rejoicing (V, 4) with the announcement of Phaéton’s impending fall (V, 5).”^[98] Were this tactic deployed in Phaëton alone, the notion that it was primarily dramatic prowess that informed the decision might be tenable. But the frequency with which tragic characters forcibly curtail divertissements throughout the tragédies en musique of Lully and Quinault belies the notion that this was an isolated dramatic choice.

10.4 When carefully-crafted transitions are unnecessary, the simplest strategy—and one that Lully and Quinault employ with some regularity—is to do nothing. In these cases, to quote Caroline Wood, “after the songs and dances, the main characters simply pick up the action again.”^[99] For an example we need look no further than the divertissement from Phaëton directly preceding the one interrupted by Théone cited above. Here, the Hours and Seasons dance and sing first in praise of the Sun, then in celebration of Phaëton’s arrival. In the divertissement’s final moments, a chorus invites the “young hero” to “come meet your happy fate” (“Venez, venez jouir d’un sort heureux”). In an entirely inconspicuous departure from the world of the divertissement, Le Soleil (the Sun) sings in recitative: “Approach, Phaëton, let nothing astonish you. I soften here the brightness that surrounds me” (“Approchez, Phaëton, que rien ne vous étonne. / J’adoucis en ces lieux l’esclat qui m’environne”). Le Soleil has nothing to say to or about the divertissement, and he does nothing to call attention to its conclusion, which amounts to a fluid—indeed, barely detectable—transition.

10.5 The point is not, though, that some transitions at the margins of the operatic divertissement are less fluid than others, which is of course to be expected. (In the passage above, for example, it is hardly surprising that a monarch presiding over a ceremony should simply turn his attention elsewhere at its conclusion.) It is rather that Lully and Quinault seem at times to have manipulated what might otherwise have been fluid transitions in order to draw attention to the forcible silencing of one narrative mode or generic type by another, and thereby showcase the dramatic contrasts between the elements they elide. Quinault’s primary means of doing so was to write dialogue for tragic characters at the level of metanarrative. When characters outside the world of the divertissement address those within it, they can easily do so in the affirmative: Hermione might have simply asked L’Amour to help Cadmus; Alecton might have simply told the dancing and singing followers of Pluton to “get ready to defend themselves”; Théone might have simply enjoined the Egyptian Shepherdess to “lament with me the plight of Phaëton.” Instead, all of these tragic characters cast their commands in the negative, and refer specifically to the celebratory nature of the divertissement, ordering the other characters to terminate their musical revelry: “Leave me to my sorrow…. Is this the only help you can offer me?” “It is in vain that you hope these useless offerings will appease my anger.” “That’s enough … let us go.” “Leave behind these revels.” “That’s enough, friends, enough…. If you wish for me to order you: go, go, obey!” “Transform this sweet music into funereal plaints.”

10.6 When regarded within the broader context of the Lullian tragédie en musique and its predecessors, the consistency of these rebukes suggest that they functioned in part as sophisticated metacommentaries upon competing genres and expressive modes, as well as concerted attempts to harness the dramatic potential underlying the resulting tensions. As such, the earliest of these examples served as forceful reminders of Melpomène’s victory over Euterpe even prior to the inception of the tragédie en musique, in Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, and demonstrated a fidelity to the promise Lully made through Polymnie, in the prologue to the inaugural work of the Académie Royale de Musique, to “elevate your music” to please the “greatest king in the universe.”

10.7 Lully and Quinault’s evident pleasure in the practice described here—a practice that would persist in some form even after their deaths^[100]—may have played a part in their broader efforts to defend the potential of the tragédie en musique to function as true tragedy, and may also be regarded (particularly after Alceste) as a musical response to Saint-Evrémond, Boileau, the abbé Villiers, and others who had felt compelled to defend Racinian and Corneillian tragédie from what they perceived as the degrading influence of music.^[101] Nevertheless, while Quinault and Lully’s earliest operatic deployments of this convention in Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus and to some degree Cadmus et Hermione may arguably be understood as efforts to champion tragedy, later examples reveal a more nuanced and complex dynamic. This dynamic changed significantly even during the three years separating Cadmus from Atys, for in the latter, Iris refuses to accept Melpomène’s wholesale rejection of Flore’s “rustic charm,” insisting instead that “pleasures must come from all areas in the mighty empire where the new Mars reigns.” These later works seem to argue that Euterpe’s “artificial” modes of expression (to borrow from the narrative of Les Fêtes) had in fact always been worthier of sustained attention than either Melpomène or Polymnie had understood. What appeared at first glance, then, to be a forceful insistence upon a simplistic generic hierarchy that demotes non-tragic elements evolved, particularly in the later works of Quinault and Lully, into a more sophisticated metacommentary upon—and celebration of—the dramatic potential underlying these purposeful collisions of antithetical expressive modes.

11. The Rhetoric of Roland

11.1 As we have seen, these metacommentaries arise from a specific structural convention that Lully and Quinault invoked with some frequency, and that adheres with few exceptions to an established pattern: a celebratory or ceremonial group within an internal divertissement (often, but not always, pastoral) is interrupted by the appearance of a solitary tragic character, nearly always during a strophic air or chorus that the group then brings to a close. The intruding character’s dialogue, typically in récitatif simple, often betrays a sense of anger, impatience, or condescension toward the divertissement characters as he or she orders them to cease their songs and dances, occasionally going so far as to characterize their revels as “useless.”

11.2 Lully and Quinault embraced this convention in their tragédies en musique with remarkable regularity; only Prosperine and Amadis are exceptions, and the paucity of internal divertissements in each work—just one in Proserpine and none at all in Amadis—helps to explain the omission. All of these instances seem in retrospect, though, like preparation for a single moment within the pair’s penultimate tragédie en musique, Roland of 1685. I alluded to the moment in question from Act 4 at the beginning of this essay, arguing that the act should be understood as just one manifestation of an aesthetic agenda propagated by its creators throughout their work in the genre. But if this portion of Roland, which assimilates and magnifies all of the elements and aesthetic tensions on which this essay has focused, is not unique in kind, it is certainly unique in degree.

11.3 Taken from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the story of Roland revolves around a love triangle. We learn in Act 1 of the love of Roland (paladin and nephew of Charlemagne) for Angélique, Queen of Cathay. After tending the wounds of an African soldier named Médor, however, Angélique falls in love with the warrior, and he with the Queen. Médor’s inferior lineage (his “sang obscure”) causes Angélique, even while acknowledging her love for Médor, to banish him and decide that “the time has come to attend to my glory” (“il est temps d’avoir soin de ma gloire”).  Meanwhile, Roland has sent a bracelet to Angélique as a token of his eternal love.

11.4 In Act 2, a bereft Médor is on the verge of attempting suicide, but Angélique—heretofore invisible thanks to a magic ring—reveals herself. She declares her love for Médor, leading to the problem of Act 3—the lovers’ need to escape Roland. The allegiances and romances in this portion of Quinault’s libretto, feigned and real, are so fickle that they border at times on the comical: Roland laments ceaselessly the unfairness of his unrequited love for Angélique, but it takes Angélique just a few lines of half-hearted assurances to convince Roland beyond doubt that she loves him after all. The remainder of the act is devoted to Angélique’s attempts to make Médor understand that her apparent love for Roland was a ruse. Médor, in contrast with Roland, is far too constant. He continues lamenting his fate as the patient Angélique spends the entirety of scene 4 trying in earnest to help him comprehend the state of things. Their duet, lapsing into and out of a chaconne framework, elongates the process until finally, as if to celebrate Médor’s long-awaited comprehension, the full-blown chaconne materializes, one of the longest ever employed in a French opera.^[102]

11.5 In addition to celebrating the eternal bonds uniting Angélique and Médor, and the triumph of love generally, this monumental chaconne also serves as an important means of partition; if the first three acts present the story of Médor and Angélique, the rest of the opera belongs to Roland. More importantly, these earlier acts unfold via a structure in which every narrative twist is carefully prepared and executed. As Buford Norman states, “There will be no unexpected arrivals, no surprising news; one of the three characters either enters or leaves, and the audience immediately understands what the reaction of the two other characters will be.”^[103] The contrast with Act 4 could scarcely be greater. Whereas the first three acts were criticized (especially by Boscheron and the Parfaict brothers) for Roland’s general absence, and Act 5 was deemed superfluous by some, the praise for Act 4 was nearly unanimous.^[104] The fourth act is also exceptional for its length; it is the second longest act (in terms of its libretto) from any of Quinault’s tragédies en musique, eclipsed only by Act 2 of Proserpine.^[105]

11.6 Act 4 takes place in a woodland grotto, and commences with Roland’s friend Astolf begging him to leave behind the solitary setting, cease “languishing in shameful repose,” and defend his empire so that he might crown himself with the “immortal laurels” of glory. But Roland is blinded by his love for Angélique and her recent promise to meet him in the woods. At Roland’s command, Astolfe departs. The prelude to the following scene confirms Roland’s beguilement, not only with love, but also with the physical space of the grotto (see Example 6, Audio 3, and the score:^[106] Roland, pp. 219–20). Marked doux, it is a sultry, C minor prelude calculated to tempt Roland further into a stupor of contented repose. Its constant quarter-note pulse and gentle stepwise rise and fall continue until Roland begins a deservedly famous extended monologue, his surrender to love complete.

11.7 Roland expresses his pleasurable anticipation of the coming night in accompanied récitatif mesuré.^[107] When a more distinct melody emerges—a sequential descending triad motive heard first among the instruments—the entranced Roland mimics the melody, marveling at the verdant grass and at the beauty of the grotto (see Example 7, Audio 4, and Roland, pp. 224–26). As the instruments continue, Roland reads silently verses he has found written on the grotto wall. He then continues his quatrain, in the common mixture of octosyllables and alexandrines, and the meter remains constant:^[108]

	Roland	Roland
12+	Que ces gazons sont verts! Que cette grotte est belle!	How green is this grass! How beautiful is this grotto!
12	Ce que je lis m’apprend que l’Amour a conduit,	What I read tells me that Cupid led
8	Dans ce boccage, loin du bruit,	to this wood, far from noise,
12+	Deux amants qui brûloient d’une ardeur mutuelle.	two lovers burning with a mutual passion.

The first meter change, signaling a brief passage of metrically free (but still orchestrally accompanied) recitative, takes place in the following line (see Example 7, fifth system, and Audio 5). This change underscores the error of Roland’s delusional hopes and prefigures the turmoil of what is to come:

12	J’espère qu’avec moy l’Amour bientost icy	I hope that Cupid will soon, here to me,
8+	Conduira la beauté que j’aime.	bring the beauty I love.
8+	Enchantez d’un bonheur extrême,	Enchanted by extreme happiness,
12	Sur ces grottes bientost nous escrirons aussi.	upon this grotto wall we too shall soon write.

In a very brief air, Roland then re-reads the inscription, this time aloud (Audio 6; Roland, p. 227):

5+	“Beaux lieux, doux azile	“Beautiful place, sweet sanctuary
7	De nos heureuses amours,	for our happy love,
7	Puissiez-vous estre toûjours	may you always remain
5+	Charmant et tranquille.”	charming and tranquil.”

What Quinault accomplishes in the poetry, setting the quotation apart via short lines with odd numbers of syllables and a quatrain in chiastic form (in both line length and rhyme scheme: abba), Lully achieves through the sudden shift to a lilting regularity and to the time signature “3.”

11.8 Roland then recognizes that some of the handwriting is Angélique’s. In response, Quinault returns to the octosyllables and alexandrines of récitatif simple, but also begins to insert shorter lines of six syllables, as the reigning rhythmic values in Lully’s music shift from half notes and quarter notes to eighth and sixteenth notes (Audio 7; Roland, pp. 228–30).

8	Voyons tout… qu’est-ce que je voy?	Look further… but what do I see?
12+	Ces mots semblent tracez de la main d’Angélique…	These words seem written by Angélique’s hand…

Roland lit tout bas deux vers qu’Angélique a écrits.
(Roland reads to himself two verses that Angélique wrote.)

8	Ciel! c’est pour un autre que moy	Heavens!  It is for somebody else
6+	Que son amour s’explique.	that her love is meant.
8	Angélique engage son cœur,	Angélique has promised her heart,
6	Médor en est vainqueur!	and Médor is the winner!
12+	Elle m’auroit flatté d’une vaine espérance?	She has flattered me with vain hope?
12+	L’ingrate!… n’est-ce point un soupçon qui l’offense?	The ingrate!… but does this suspicion not offend her?
12	Médor en est vainqueur! non, je n’ay point encor	Médor is the winner! No, I have not yet
12	Entendu parler de Médor.	heard of Médor.

When at last he identifies words written by Médor himself declaring unequivocally that he and Angélique are in love with one another, Roland refuses to believe it (see Example 8, Audio 8, and Roland, pp. 234–35):

12	Angélique a comblé les vœux d’un autre amant?	Has Angélique fulfilled the wishes of another lover?
12+	Elle a pû me trahir!… non, je ne le puis croire.	She has betrayed me!… no, I cannot believe it.
12	Non, non, quelqu’envieux a voulu par ces mots	No, no, some envious person has written these words
12	Noircir l’objet que j’aime, et troubler mon repos.	to defame the one I love and disturb my repose.

Roland’s delivery mirrors his emotional volatility; the rapidity of his speech has increased incrementally and he now sings almost exclusively in eighth and sixteenth notes.

11.9 At this moment of engineered instability, Roland hears one of the least likely sounds one could imagine at such a juncture: a trio de hautbois playing a sprightly tune in C major (see final system of Example 8). A well-worn pastoral cliché, these instruments represent in this case the bruit de musettes referenced in the stage direction that follows, but such an ensemble would have been out of place even amidst Roland’s serene bliss near the beginning of the act, so its appearance here is surprising. No less puzzling is Roland’s reaction. In his current state, he must feel that this is the wrong time for such a jaunty tune and for the divertissement it surely portends, yet he permits the approaching sounds of music to lift his spirits (Audio 9; Roland, pp. 236–38):

On entend un bruit de musettes et Roland continuë.
(The sound of musettes is heard, and Roland continues.)

10+	J’entends un bruit de musique champestre	I hear the sounds of rustic music.
10	Il faut chercher Angélique en ces lieux.	I must find Angélique in this place.
8	Au premier regard de ses yeux	At the first sight of her eyes
8+	Mes noirs soupçons vont disparaistre.	my dark suspicious will disappear.
8+	Elle s’arrestera, peut-estre,	Perhaps she will stop
10	À voir danser au son des chalumeaux	to watch, dancing to the sound of the pipes,
8	Les bergers des prochains hameaux.	the shepherds from nearby hamlets.

Une troupe de bergers et de bergeres, prend part à la joye de Coridon et de Belise, qui doivent estre mariez le lendemain, et s’aproche de la grotte en dansant et en chantant. Roland n’aperçoit point Angelique, et va la chercher dans les lieux d’alentour.

(A troup of shepherds and shepherdesses share in the joy of Coridon and Bélise, who will be married the following day, and who approach the grotto dancing and singing. Not finding Angélique among them, Roland leaves to search for her nearby.)

The extremity of Roland’s delusion is proportional to the import of the message: those who choose love and repose over duty are blind to their own waywardness.

11.10 In vain, then, Roland departs to search for Angélique, and the divertissement is free to begin in earnest (see Roland, p. 239). It seems initially to take a form Lully and Quinault had employed many times before—a divertissement that erupts spontaneously as a dramatically integrated fête with tragic characters present. But in reality, this case fits no prior model perfectly. Roland was indeed present to hear the start of the musique champêtre, but he has departed by the time of the first entrée, which takes the form of a sprightly triple-meter march in which the normal five-part texture frames short interludes for the trio de hautbois alone. The dance is followed by a chorus for shepherds and shepherdesses, their language rich with organic imagery (Roland, pp. 243–44):

	Le Chœur	Chorus
7+	Que d’oiseaux sur ce feuillage!	How many birds there are among the foliage!
7	Que leur chant nous doit charmer.	How their song must charm us.
7+	Nuit et jour par leur ramage	Night and day with their warbling
7	Leur amour veut s’exprimer.	their love will be expressed.

Following this is a minuet, leading into a reprise of the very same oboe trio that Roland heard prior to his departure.

11.11 While the divertissement remains pastoral throughout, it shifts in the next dance from one pastoral mode to another. Rebecca Harris-Warrick has characterized the distinction thus: “Village weddings have a long history on the French stage, one that draws upon two overlapping traditions: the idealized, pastoral Arcadia populated by bergers héroïques and an earthier depiction of rustic characters as laughable country bumpkins. This divertissement partakes of both visions.”^[109] Indeed, the remainder of the scene is dominated not only by dancing “bergers et bergères,” but also by dancing and singing “pastres et pastourelles,” implying one further remove from the Arcadian topos that would resonate with Roland or other tragic characters. The peasant herdsmen and women dance not minuets, but a fort gay duple dance that “changes the tone from the sentimental to the humorous.”^[110] Any humorous tone is reined in, however, when a descent in the bass (a chute) leads from C major—the divertissement’s home key up to this point—to G minor. The trio de hautbois reappears, but now the instruments exercise their low register to play a sultry tune that will figure prominently in the next scene (see Example 9, Audio 10, and Roland, pp. 249–50).

11.12 The divertissement’s focus now shifts from generic shepherds and herdsmen to the peasant bride Bélise and her groom Coridon. For the remainder of the act, the couple function as rustic stand-ins for Angélique and Médor, who had in the very same grotto given their love physical form as poetry scratched into the wall—and perhaps in other ways as well. The peasant couple even refer explicitly to Angélique and Médor, Coridon declaring that “I would not leave my shepherdess for her” (“Je ne quitterois pas / Ma bergère pour elle”) and Bélise insisting that, even if it would make her Queen, “I still would not leave my shepherd for Médor” (“Non, je ne voudrois pas encor / Quitter mon berger pour Médor”). For a character who is entirely absent from the act, Angélique commands a great deal of its attention, particularly when one recalls that Roland has spent the entire divertissement thus far searching offstage for his beloved queen.

12. Roland returns

12.1 At this point, violating all expectations that the divertissement will either conclude shortly or continue in its pastoral vein, Roland returns, effectively poking his head through the curtain to re-insert himself into the rustic dialogue.^[111] But he does not at this point interrupt or forcibly conclude the divertissement as we might expect, given the frequent use of this tactic in other operas. Rather, he simply overhears the villagers’ references to Angélique and Médor and hopes that someone in the wedding party might help him find his beloved. Despite Roland’s interaction with Coridon and Bélise, however, there is no question in their dialogue of Roland adapting to, or even comprehending, the remote world of the divertissement he now inhabits. He breaks the train of airs, dances, and choruses that have dominated the score since his departure, speaking now in récitatif simple. It is Coridon and Bélise, rather, who must leave off their airs and engage in recitative dialogue with Roland (Audio 11; see Roland, pp. 253–54):

	Roland	Roland
12+	Que dites-vous icy de Médor, d’Angélique?	What is it you say about Médor and Angélique?
	Coridon	Coridon
12+	Ce sont d’heureux amants dont l’histoire est publique	They are happy lovers, whose story is known
8	Dans tous les hameaux d’alentour.	in all the nearby hamlets.
	Belise	Belise
12	Ils ont avec regret quitté ce beau séjour;	With regret, they left this beautiful place;
12+	Ces arbres, ces rochers, cette grotte rustique,	These woods, these crags, this rustic grotto,
8	Tout parle icy de leur amour.	everything here recounts their love.
	Roland	Roland
10+	Ah! Je succombe au tourment que j’endure.	Ah! I succumb to the suffering I endure.
	Coridon	Coridon
10+	Reposez-vous sur ce lit de verdure.	Rest upon this bed of grass.
12	Vous paraissez chagrin; escoutez à loisir	You seem sorrowful; listen at leisure
12+	De ces heureux amants l’agréable aventure,	to the agreable exploits of these happy lovers,
8	Vous l’entendrez avec plaisir.	you will hear them with pleasure.

12.2 The tables have turned, and now Roland is effectively held captive, forced to listen patiently to misguided attempts at kindness—expressed in récitatif simple—on the part of Coridon and Bélise, who have somehow come to idolize Médor while having no familiarity whatsoever with the epic hero Roland. As their tale progresses, the peasants notice that the poor wretch in front of them is on the verge of tears, and they begin to understand why. But lest the tension be released between the wedding celebration’s giddy artifice and Roland’s tragic pain, Bélise’s father Tersandre begins scene 5 by striking up a cheerful chorus: “Go, leave us, troublesome cares” (“Allez, laissez-nous, soins fâcheux”)—a line that seems directed at Roland, who is, after all, an uninvited and oddly troubled guest at his daughter’s wedding festivities (Roland, pp. 259–60).^[112] Tersandre’s air and the chorus it instigates are particularly clever when one identifies them as a reversal of the convention we have grown to expect, in which a tragic character dismisses other characters inhabiting a divertissement. In this case, the villager Tersandre is the authority figure, and he is doing the dismissing:

	Tersandre	Tersandre
8	Allez, laissez-nous, soins fâcheux,	Go, leave us, troublesome cares,
10	Esloignez-vous de nos paisibles jeux.	leave us to our peaceful diversions.
10+	Nous possedons un bien inestimable	we have a tremendous advantage
6	Qui comblera nos vœux:	that will fulfill our desires:
8	Laissez couler nos jours heureux	Let our happy days flow
8+	Dans un loisir doux et durable.	in sweet and everlasting leisure
	Allez, laissez-nous …	Go, leave us …

Tersandre’s impatience with Roland becomes increasingly evident when, twice in rapid succession, the former finishes the latter’s alexandrines, as if to hasten the exchange (Audio 12; Roland, p. 263):

	Roland		Roland
12	Angélique est partie?		Angélique has gone?
		Tersandre		Tersandre
		Et Médor avec elle		And Médor with her.
12	Elle en fait un grand roy, c’est son unique soin.		She is making him a great king, that is her only care.
	Roland		Roland
12	Ils sont partis ensemble?		They left together?
		Tersandre		Tersandre
		Ils sont déjà bien loin.		They are already long gone.

12.3 Tersandre is an unusual divertissement character, not only because Quinault permits him to challenge implicitly the authority of a tragic protagonist, but also because he displays at times a keen consciousness of the dramatic tension between his invented world and that of Roland. Seemingly aware of his own world’s inherent artificiality, Tersandre seeks to maintain the artificial facade for his daughter, son-in-law to be, and the whole pastoral troupe, but this can be accomplished only by protecting it from Roland’s threatening presence. Rather than departing, as would a divertissement character subjected to forcible silencing, Roland does not leave. Rather, he remains and is further demoted, transformed from paladin hero into little more than a mildly interesting spectacle.

12.4 In an important narrative shift, Tersandre finally questions his daughter about the identity of this unknown guest. From this point on, the three wedding party members speak to each other about Roland rather than to him, taking on the roles of distant observers commonly reserved in divertissements for tragic characters such as Roland. When, at the outset of the divertissement, Coridon and Bélise imagined themselves in the places of Angélique and Médor, the comparison was fanciful—but now the peasants have upturned dramatic conventions in earnest, commandeering for themselves lofty places of privilege from which they might watch the scene unfold. As with many theatrical reversals, this one has profound societal implications. Richard Leppert writes: “That the lower classes served as a source of amusement for the upper classes is vividly evident in paintings of the period which depict peasants in their natural surroundings, such as village wedding dances or fairs, and at which an aristocratic audience is shown witnessing the proceedings from a position discreetly outside the main arena of action.”^[113]  Rather than reversing this image completely, Quinault is selective in his manipulations. He maintains the peasants’ “natural surroundings,” but through their third-person dialogue, transforms Roland—who has strayed into territory where he does not belong—into something of a caged and carefully monitored animal (Roland, pp. 266–67):^[114]

	Tersandre				Tersandre
12+	Mais quel est ce guerrier? Aisément on devine				But who is this warrior?  One can easily tell
8+	Qu’il sort d’une illustre origine.				that he is of illustrious origin.
	Coridon				Coridon
8	Nous l’avons trouvé dans ces lieux.				We found him in this place.
	Bélise				Bélise
12	Le trouble de son cœur se montre dans ses yeux.				The trouble in his heart shows in his eyes.
12+	Coridon				Coridon
	Il s’agite…				He is agitated…
		Bélise				Bélise
		Il menace…				He threatens…
			Coridon				Coridon
			Il paslit…				He turns pale…
				Bélise				Bélise
				Il soûpire.				He sighs.

12.5 Since Roland’s reappearance, the members of the pastoral collective have expressed themselves largely in recitative. But now that Roland can no longer be said to dominate the scene, Coridon, Bélise, and Tersandre are free to rekindle the flow of airs and choruses proper to a wedding celebration—and to a divertissement. As Roland’s thoughts of the blissful life he had imagined for himself with Angélique bring him a brief moment of calm, the villagers take advantage of this lull in his anguish to begin ignoring the tragic spectacle they no longer find amusing. After singing a maxim air about the dangers of love, Tersandre expresses his hope that “we will at last be able to soften [Roland’s] fatal grief.” His means of doing so, inexplicably, is to sing an air celebrating the love of Angélique and Médor. Summoning the tune that began scene 4, but now in B-flat major rather than G minor, the jaunty air proceeds, then morphs into a duet between Coridon and Bélise, and finally into a full-blown chorus. The poetry celebrates the relocation of love—the Arcadian version of love championed by pastoral characters—to court, and stands in stark relief to the tragic plight of Roland, who has suffered the loss of both love and glory (see Example 10, Audio 13, and Roland, pp. 272–74):

	Tersandre		Tersandre
(12)		… J’espère qu’à la fin		… I hope that in the end
12	Nous pourrons adoucir son funeste chagrin.		We can soften his fatal grief.
8+	Benissons l’amour d’Angélique,		Let us bless the love of Angélique,
8	Benissons l’amour de Médor.		let us bless the love of Médor.
12+	Dans le riche séjour d’une cour magnifique,		In the opulent setting of a magnificent court,
8	Puissent-ils sur un trône d’or		may they, on a throne of gold,
12+	S’aimer comme ils faisoient dans ce séjour rustique.		love each other as they did in this rustic setting.
	Coridon et Bélise		Coridon and Bélise
8+	Benissons l’amour d’Angélique,		Let us bless the love of Angélique,
8	Benissons l’amour de Médor.		Let us bless the love of Médor.

12.6 Lois Rosow has noted that “many passages in Lully’s operas seem to begin as recitative then gradually redefine themselves, becoming ‘songs’ by the time they end, with no strong line of demarcation.”^[115] The same may also be said of larger structures, and even entire scenes. This portion of Roland, for example, slides gradually across that same continuum, reasserting little by little the divertissement’s pastoral charm that Roland had disturbed, and eventually reaches a level of pastoral artifice bordering on lampoon, made all the more absurd by Roland’s presence. In turn, Roland—out of sorts and structurally out of place—has attempted to commandeer the divertissement, as past operas suggest is the right of virtually any tragic character in the genre. But instead, he has been subjugated by the scene’s inhabitants, who spare no insensitivity as they strive to reclaim the celebratory artifice of the wedding fête. When at last Roland can no longer endure it, he enacts the moment for which audience members must have been waiting (see Example 11, Audio 14, and Roland, pp. 275–76):

	Le Chœur	Chorus
8+	Benissons l’amour d’Angélique,	Let us bless the love of Angélique,
8	Benissons l’amour de Médor.	Let us bless the love of Médor.
	Roland	Roland
12+	Taisez-vous, malheureux! oserez-vous sans cesse	Be quiet, wretches! Do you dare without cease
12	Percer mon triste cœur des plus horribles coups?	to pierce my grieving heart with horrible thrusts?
6	Malheureux, taisez-vous.	Wretches, be quiet.
8+	Rendez grâce à vostre bassesse	Be thankful for your baseness
8	Qui vous désrobe à mon courroux.	that shelters you from my wrath.
	Le Chœur	Chorus
6	Ah! Fuyons, fuyons tous!	Ah!  Flee, flee everyone!

12.7 With the words “Taisez-vous!” Roland calls for an end to the artifice of the divertissement, and by the brute force of the “mad air” that follows (“Je suis trahi!”), he achieves it. The narrative rupture of Roland’s outburst is, of course, much more than a transition from chorus to récitatif simple—it is a purposeful juxtaposition of the most “artificial” sounds of the tragédie en musique with the least. The pastoral choir, whose cries of “fuyons, fuyons, tous” echo the cries of fleeing shepherds past, are opaquely artful and repetitive even in their fear.

12.8 The outburst that scatters them would have fulfilled the expectations of audience members in more ways than one. Not only would many have been familiar with Ariosto’s narrative, but by the time of this twelfth Lullian tragédie en musique (the tenth with Quinault as librettist), spectators must have come to anticipate that the composer and librettist would invoke yet again the convention with which they had concluded so many past divertissements. While Roland’s anger is rooted in Ariostian furore, it also—more vitally in Quinault and Lully’s retelling—serves to counterbalance a pastoral divertissement that has in Roland’s estimation overstayed its welcome.^[116] Roland is not angry that he has been mistreated, nor does he seem anymore to grieve the loss of Angélique. Although he suffers gravely from the villagers’ words, the primary target of his censure is now clear: the pastoral revelry and all of its musical trappings must be silenced, and it is only the pastoral characters’ low station (bassesse)—and thus their non-threatening status—that save them from the epic hero’s wrath.

12.9 Roland’s actions clearly echo those of tragic characters past. Yet it is clearer in this opera than ever before that it is not the tragic character’s perspective alone that matters. Indeed, the bulk of the dramatic interest in Act 4 derives not from Roland but from the dialogue and agency of divertissement characters, through their deft manipulation of the act’s narrative and ultimately through their manipulation of Roland. Their alternate care for and cruelty toward Roland establishes their dominance, and the only way Roland can regain narrative command of the act is by invoking his noble station.^[117]

12.10 This remarkable role reversal illustrates what had in fact always been true of this type of juxtaposition: namely, that the often exasperated and uniformly dismissive tragic characters who silence pastoral divertissements are at least as ignorant of the “artificial” universe and its complexities as divertissement characters are of theirs. Roland dispels the notion, then, that tragic characters’ generic pedigree guarantees them anything other than a superficial supremacy, characterizing them instead as beings sequestered in their own universe and doomed to ignorance of other worlds.

12.11 Laura Naudeix has argued that “if the pastoral world is a place of rest, shade, perfection and well-being, it is clear that the role of tragedy is to reverse this balance so that the action can take place.”^[118] Such a reversal might take any number of possible forms, but for the fourth act of Roland, Quinault chose once again to employ metanarrative verbiage similar to that in parallel moments from his previous tragédies en musique. Roland’s “taisez-vous” may be more forceful than Thésée’s “c’est assez,” Hermione’s “laissez-moi ma douleur,” or Alecton’s “quittez les jeux,” but these admonishments all amount to efforts to silence divertissement characters who have chosen momentarily to propagate particularly artificial musical styles; Lully and Quinault’s use of the convention in Roland is exceptional mainly for its epic scale. But it is also distinct from prior manifestations in one other important sense. Whereas, in previous works, the divertissement is interrupted by an outsider observing from a distance, Roland first inhabits the very divertissement he would ultimately terminate. He comes to know the world of pastoral artifice from the inside, more intimately than had any other non-divertissement character from Quinault’s librettos, and the result of this intimacy is that he rejects that world more violently than had any character before him.^[119]

12.12 Roland’s madness could only be temporary. While his natural expression can be understood to have fulfilled an ingrained aesthetic ideal, such expression was tolerated only as a temporary dissonance, one expected to resolve quickly to the status quo of comportment. This resolution, accomplished by Logistille with little help from Roland himself, occupies Act 5 of Quinault’s libretto. Little of Roland’s behavior prior to this act was a model for imitation; after all, he had left king and country exposed to foreign invasion so that he might pursue his unrequited love.

13. Roland and the eloquence of nature

13.1 Recall that when, in 1675, the rhetorician Bernard Lamy distinguished between artificial and natural discourse, he argued that the former uses “all possible artifice to charm listeners,” and he likened the latter to the raw outbursts of a wounded animal who “begins to scream, as if nature made him cry for help.” As I have noted, this distinction figured heavily in other writings on eloquence, including those of Fénelon, who argued that “broken” words and phrases best mark “nature in the transports of grief.” It was Fénelon, too, who was offended by passions expressed artificially, in “measured periods.” Yet, even when Roland strains the limits of decorum to shout down the artifice of the divertissement, he is never quite the same as Lamy’s wild animal, or Fénelon’s natural human subject “struck by the sight of a shocking thing.” Despite Roland’s constantly shifting meters and rapid-fire declamation, he adheres even during moments of profound inner turmoil to the typical mixture of alexandrines, decasyllables, octosyllables, and hemistichs, all in a perfectly clear rhyme scheme. Indeed, even in the most pathetic recitative from Quinault and Lully’s collaborative works, rhyme schemes and syllabification maintain some level of consistency.^[120]

13.2 This ordered undercurrent, though, itself brings the musical-rhetorical parallel into clearer focus once we remember advice such as Fénelon’s, to “hide artifice so well … that one takes it for nature itself.” In this sense, Saint-Mard’s praise for Gabriel-Vincent Thévenard, who played the role of Roland in productions of 1705, 1716, and 1721, was lofty indeed: “I won’t say anything about his gestures,” he wrote, “maybe they were not as refined as they might have been, but they always appeared natural.”^[121] For Quinault and Lully, Lamy and Fénelon, and perhaps for Thévenard himself, the goal of “natural” expression had always been to feign disorder and enjoy its affective benefits without embracing it completely and incurring its risks—or in the words of the abbé d’Aubignac, to use “ordered” means to “preserve a likeness to the disorder of nature.”

13.3 It is no accident that Quinault and Lully so often chose to play out this dynamic upon the fertile ground of pastoral settings. Writing to the Académie Française, Fénelon desired poets to “set before me a ploughman who fears for his crops, a shepherd who knows only his village and his flock…. How much more grace has this rustic simplicity than a subtle and refined work of wit!”^[122] But Fénelon knew as well as anyone that his shepherds and ploughmen were carefully fabricated images of an imagined bucolic (or “natural”) life, and had little resemblance to actual shepherds or farmers, whose labors were less picturesque. As Louis Auld reminds us, “real shepherds, goatherds and neatherds, untutored, unwashed, have been of no literary interest to anyone since Theocritus”^[123]—a fact undoubtedly behind the partly ironic notion in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme that one achieves vraisemblance simply by adding shepherds to the mix.

13.4 Another noteworthy “natural” construction in Roland is, of course, the grotto setting, which draws on the rich history in France of grottoes as “highly symbolic spaces, … artificial caves [that] invoke both mastery over water and the topos of retreat or introspection.”^[124] While the grotto setting was preordained by Ariosto’s narrative, it was in fact the ideal setting for the fourth act, rural and remote enough for the divertissement’s villagers to believably inhabit, but wild enough in its construction to complement Roland’s pathetic disarray. More significantly, grottoes had long been celebrated in France as sites that showcased the tension between nature and artifice. Félibien, in fact, touches on this relationship at the outset of his Description de la grotte de Versailles. “There are two types of grottoes,” he begins, “the first are works of nature, and the others are works of art; and as art never makes anything more beautiful than when it imitates nature well, so nature never produces anything as extraordinary as when art seems to have had a hand in it.”^[125] If Félibien’s characterization of art and nature as mutually dependent is essentially Aristotelian, his description itself is strikingly similar to an aforementioned passage by Lecerf, who maintained that when Lully “has a natural thing to copy, he copies it after nature; he makes nature the very foundation of his symphonie; he is content to adapt nature to the music, gilded with a few ornaments of art.”

13.5 References to grottoes, operatic or otherwise, were bound to conjure visions of the Grotto of Thetis, particularly in a work whose earliest performances took place at Versailles.^[126] (See Figure 1 and Figure 2.)  The imitation of nature here, however, relied on rather more than a “few ornaments.” According to Madeleine de Scudéry’s vivid description, “a thousand birds in relief, perfectly imitated, trick the eyes, while the ears are agreeably tricked: for through a completely new invention, there are hidden organs placed so that an echo in the grotto broadcasts them from one side to the other; this bucolic music, combined with the murmur of the waters, produces an effect that cannot be described.” She admits, in fact, that “the only thing that indicated from a distance that it was a grotto was a long row of gilded shells that reigns on the top of the arcades.”^[127] Félibien also acknowledges, in his Description, this opacity of art in the Grotte de Thétis, and at Versailles as a whole:

One can say of Versailles that it is a place where art works alone and that nature seems to have abandoned, in order to give the king the occasion to make appear there—by a kind of creation, if I may dare call it—several magnificent works and an infinity of extraordinary things; but there is nowhere in this entire royal dwelling where art has succeeded more happily than in the Grotto of Thetis.^[128]

13.6 As Claire Goldstein explains, “any appearance of nature in the grotto is the artful achievement of the king. Thus, when Félibien seems to evoke a tension or conflict between two opposing artistic sources, the rhetorical mechanism at work is actually redundant, equivalent praise…. References to nature and fantastic descriptions are reinserted into what has been explicitly constructed as a fictional space.” She concludes elsewhere that “nature itself becomes a staged effect of the king’s creative repertoire.”^[129] Affirmations of the king’s authority, however, can be destructive as well as creative; the Grotto of Thetis was razed less than a year prior to the premiere of Roland to make way for an expansion of the chateau’s north wing.

13.7 It is essential to note that, whatever aesthetic priorities and agendas we might perceive in the music and poetry of Lully and Quinault and thus ascribe to them, these stances were not, and could not be, their own, given their roles as agents of king and kingdom. Similarly, the grotto imagined at the premiere of Roland on 8 January 1685 in the riding school of Versailles’s Grande Écurie was also in some sense an appropriated creation of Louis XIV; it was part of a universe invented and ordered by the king through his surrogates Lully, Quinault, and the stage designer, Jean Bérain, and designed in part to affirm the dramatic potency of natural expression, the aesthetic primacy of tragédie, and the nobility of choosing gloire over répos. As hands of the king, Quinault and Lully in turn built into the tragédie en musique a dialectic between nature and artifice, a paradigm woven already into the fabric of French eloquence and other disciplines.^[130] Melpomène’s victory over Euterpe was never in question, nor was Roland’s silencing of the village wedding party, for they all served at the pleasure of Lully and Quinault.

14. Conclusion

14.1 To identify particular portions of operatic divertissements as loci of artifice (as described in seventeenth-century sources) is not to imply that divertissements are or ever were frivolous, extraneous, or dramatically divorced from the works of which they are a part. Thankfully, a growing body of recent scholarship has all but banished such notions.^[131] In fact, while the relationship between the divertissement and “dramatic progression” is sometimes cast as an oppositional one,^[132] the reality—as Act 4 of Roland makes particularly clear—is that spectators’ identification of specific divertissement elements as “artificial” is very often prerequisite to an understanding of and absorption in the dramatic, narrative, or aesthetic tensions at the heart of a given act, and is thus integral to the tragédie en musique as a whole.^[133] Without the divertissement, the tragédie en musique would make little sense, for natural and artificial modes of expression in Lully’s France were, of course, fully interdependent artistic constructions, a point made clear by Furetière’s circular definition of each term: “Nature. is considered as it is opposed to art.” “Artificial. That which is accomplished through art, and which does not come naturally.”^[134] Each concept depends entirely on the other for its existence.

14.2 This dialectic is played out in numerous forms, including of course the dances at the heart of each divertissement. As Rebecca Harris-Warrick argues, “Dance is not perceived as an interruption or as a parenthesis within the action, but as part of a natural continuum that incorporates multiple modes of expression.”^[135] While dance has not been the primary focus of this study, it is worth noting that the very same tensions I have discussed between natural and artificial expression inhabit the dances themselves. Employing terms strikingly similar to those of Lamy, Fénelon, and other seventeenth-century rhetoricians, Michel de Pure insisted in his Idées des spectacles anciens et nouveaux of 1668 that “dance does not consist solely in the dexterity of the feet, nor in rhythmic accuracy … but in a certain manner united with and taken from natural movements, which escape from the body according to the troubles and diverse agitations of the soul, and which make known, against our own desires, the interior movements that we try to hide and keep secret.”^[136]

14.3 It would take the rhetoricians cited in this essay several years to reach similar conclusions, and to argue that these “interior movements” should form the greater part of an orator’s study. However, these resonances among different artistic disciplines should not always, or even often, be taken to suggest causal relationships. For example, while Quinault’s training in law would have included the study of oratory, there is no reason to believe that either he or Lully drew in any calculated sense on the discipline of rhetoric in the formation of their aesthetic doctrine.^[137] Nor, conversely, would Fénelon ever have regarded the tragédies en musique of Lully and Quinault as the ideal realization of his teachings.^[138] Nevertheless, while we need seek no causal link between eloquence and music, it seems prudent to exploit the comparatively rich explanations of the former discipline to help overcome the paucity of similar discourse in the latter.

14.4 Unlike rhetoric texts, the era’s French music-centered texts only rarely and obliquely mention a dialectic between topics of natural expression and opaquely ordered artifice—nor should this surprise us; in music there simply was no discursive model for tackling such matters in France prior to Lecerf’s eighteenth-century publications. As I have argued, though, the works of Lully and Quinault—and particularly the conclusions of selected operatic divertissements—betray a keen self-reflexivity of a complexity that has not been fully appreciated, and so provide a valuable means of accounting for this dialectic in musical terms. But it is only by first contemplating in earnest sources on eloquence and other disciplines outside music that we might begin to grasp the degree to which the same paradigms that occupied the thoughts of rhetoricians also informed music, manifested not in treatises or other texts, but rather in the structural peculiarities of musical works themselves.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Georgia Cowart, Buford Norman, and this Journal’s anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this essay.  I am particularly grateful to Lois Rosow, from whose wisdom this article has benefited immensely.

Examples

Example 1. Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus, Prologue: “C’est moy dont la voix éclatante”

Example 2. Atys, Prologue: beginning of “Air pour la Suite de Melpomène”

Example 3. Cadmus et Hermione, Act 2, scene 6: “Cessez de vous plaindre”

Example 4. Cadmus et Hermione, Act 2, scene 6: “Amours, venez semer mille fleurs”

Example 5. Phaëton, Act 5, scenes 4–5: “L’Amour plaist” and “Changez ces doux Concerts”

Example 6. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: beginning of Prélude

Example 7. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: “Que ces gazons sont verts!”

Example 8. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: “Angélique a comblé les vœux”

Example 9. Roland, Act 4, scene 4: transition from scene 3 and beginning of trio de hautbois

Example 10. Roland, Act 4, scene 5: “J’espère qu’a la fin”

Example 11. Roland, Act 4, scene 5: “Benissons l’amour d’Angélique” (chorus) and “Taisez-vous”

Video Examples

Video 1. Cadmus et Hermione, Prologue: “Hé pourquoi ne rirons-nous pas?” and “Quel désordre soudain!”

Video 2. Cadmus et Hermione, Act 3, scenes 6–7: “O Mars” and “C’est vainement que l’on espère.”

Audio Examples

Audio 1. Thésée, Act 2, scenes 6–7: “Le plaisir se presente” and “C’est assez, amis”

Audio 2. Phaëton, Act 5, scenes 4–5: “L’Amour plaist” and “Changez ces doux Concerts”

Audio 3. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: beginning of Prélude

Audio 4. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: orchestral interlude and “Que ces gazons sont verts!”

Audio 5. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: “J’espère qu’avec moy”

Audio 6. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: “Beaux lieux, doux azile”

Audio 7. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: “Voyons tout…”

Audio 8. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: “Angélique a comblé les vœux”

Audio 9. Roland, Act 4, scene 2: trio de hautbois; “J’entends un bruit de musique champestre”

Audio 10. Roland, Act 4, scene 4: transition from scene 3 and beginning of trio de hautbois

Audio 11. Roland, Act 4, scene 4: “Que dites-vous icy de Médor, d’Angélique?”

Audio 12. Roland, Act 4, scene 5: “Angélique est partie?”

Audio 13. Roland, Act 4, scene 5: “J’espère qu’a la fin”

Audio 14. Roland, Act 4, scene 5: “Benissons l’amour d’Angélique” (chorus) and “Taisez-vous”

Figures

Figure 1. La Grotte de Thétis, engraving of facade by Jean le Pautre

Figure 2. La Grotte de Thétis, engraving of interior by Jean le Pautre