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^*Jonathan Gibson (gibsonjb@jmu.edu) is Professor of Musicology at James Madison University. His primary research involves the common aesthetics of music and eloquence in late seventeenth-century France, with a focus on reconceiving notions of rhetorical analysis in the era’s French music. Recent publications in this area include an article in the Journal of Musicology. He teaches courses in musicology, performance practice, and graduate music history pedagogy. A gambist and recorder player, he founded and directs the forty-member Valley Collegium Musicum, The Shenandoah Valley’s Ensemble for Early Music.

^[1] Divertissements are found in each act of Lully’s tragédies en musique, and take the form of brief sequences of dances, songs, and choruses, in most cases (as we shall see) integral to the drama of the works they inhabit. One particularly helpful explanation of the structures and mechanics of Lullian divertissements may be found in chapters 1–2 of Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

^[3] My adoption of the word “eloquence” rather than “rhetoric” in portions of this essay reflects a shift in the discipline of rhetoric taking place in and around the 1670s, after which French rhetoricians were more likely to describe their craft (even in the titles of their texts) as l’éloquence than la rhétorique.

^[4] Jean-Laurent Lecerf de la Viéville, Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (Brussels: Foppens, 1705–1706; reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 2:173: “Lully plaça d’abord son Theâtre au Jeu de Paume de Belair, et y fit joüer bien-tôt les fêtes de l’amour et de Bacchus…. Lulli avoit déja eu le bonheur de trouver et de s’attacher Quinaut. Et voilà, Mesdames, l’histoire de la fondation des Opera François.” Nearly all the seventeenth-century texts cited in this article are available online at F-Pn: http://gallica.bnf.fr.

^[5] Philippe Quinault, Les Festes de l’Amour et de Bacchus (Paris: François Muguet, 1672), n.p.: “Ce premier Spectacle sera bien-tost suivy d’un Autre plus magnifique, dont la perfection a besoin encore d’un peu de temps; Cette Academie y travaille sans relasche, et Elle est resoluë de ne rien épargner pour répondre le plus dignement qu’il luy sera possible à la Glorieuse Protection dont Elle est honorée.”

^[6] I borrow this expression (“ ‘Muse-Patronne’ de l’opéra”) from Manuel Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris: M. Vokar, 1992), 287.

^[8] Quinault, Les Festes, 9: “Elles sont precedées de deux Symphonies opposées, dont l’une est tres forte et l’autre extrémement douce, et qui forment une espece de combat….”

^[9] See John Powell’s discussion of this prologue in Music and Theatre in France, 1600–1680 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 316–20.

^[10] The libretto is explicit: “Polymnia directs these two lines to Melpomene” (“Polymnie dit ces deux vers à Melpomène”). Quinault, Les Festes, 11.

^[11] See Marie-Claude Canova-Green, “Melpomène, Thalie, Euterpe, et Clio: La Querelle des Muses dans les prologues des opéras louis-quatorziens (1672–1715),” Continuum 5 (1993): 144–46.

^[12] Étienne Gros, Philippe Quinault: Sa vie et son œuvre (Paris: Champion, 1926), 516–17: “La pastorale en musique disparaît, après l’avènement du Florentin, de la scène de l’Académie royale, et les éléments pastoraux ne se retrouvent plus que disséminés dans les prologues et les intermèdes…. Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus … marquent plutôt la fin de la Pastorale en musique….” James Anthony finds this “too harsh a judgment,” citing a continuing tradition on Lully’s part of invoking the pastorale. Anthony focuses on Act 4 of Roland; I will consider the pastoral elements of this act below. See Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau, rev. and exp. ed. (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1997), 91.

^[13] John Powell, “ ‘Pourquoi toujours des bergers?’ Molière, Lully, and the Pastoral Divertissement,” in Lully Studies, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 196. See also Powell, Music and Theatre, 317: “In one deft stroke, Quinault and Lully banished Comedy from the triumvirate of Muses, silenced the riotous gaiety and esprit gaulois of Molière’s ‘Ballet des Nations,’ and commanded the performing arts henceforth to show more dignity in celebrating Louis XIV.” In a similar vein, Sylvain Cornic, in L’enchanteur désenchanté: Quinault et la naissance de l’opéra français (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2009), 305–6, writes that “Lully, through the voice of Quinault, seems to be saying goodbye to the fantasies of the Molièrian comédie-ballet” (“Lully, par la voix de Quinault, semble ainsi dire adieu aux fantaisies de la comédie-ballet molièresque”). See also Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully, 288: “No more laughter! Moreover, Thalia will not even be allowed to speak…. Through the voice of the Muse, Quinault banished from the stage of the Académie Royale de Musique the comédies-ballets of Molière and Lully” (“Fini de rire! et d’ailleurs Thalie n’aura pas même le droit à la parole…. Par la voix de la Muse, Quinault bannisait de la scène de l’Académie royale de Musique les comédies-ballets de Molière et de Lully”). Couvreur reminds us, though (ibid.), that, just as the Muses of Les Fêtes are ultimately reconciled and join together in their glorification of the king, comedy and pastoral will function in the future alongside tragedy, especially in Cadmus et Hermione, Alceste, and Thésée, which are “heroic by the birth of the main protagonists and by the trials they face before seeing their worth acknowledged, [but] also comedies, by the intrigues woven between secondary characters, and [also] pastorales by the tone of languorous love in the ‘chansonnettes’ that dot the divertissements” (“… héroïques par la naissance des principaux protagonistes et par les épreuves qu’ils traversent avant de voir leur mérite reconnu, ces tragédies en musique sont aussi des comédies, par les intrigues qui se tissent entre les personnages secondaires, et des pastorales par le ton de langueur amoureuse des ‘chansonnettes’ qui émaillent les divertissements”).

^[14] Avant-propos to Pomone, trans. in Powell, Music and Theatre, 46. The historical revisionism in which Lully (and the political machine that elevated him) excelled comes to the fore when one recalls that, while the tragédie en musique is so often branded as the invention of Lully and Quinault, with Cadmus et Hermione being the “first,” Perrin had in fact earned—if not attained—that distinction with La Mort d’Adonis, likely in the mid-1660s; despite its pastoral setting, La Mort was a true five-act tragédie en musique. See Powell, Music and Theatre, 45–46, 295–96; Catherine Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris: Minerve, 1991), 197, 199; and Gros, Philippe Quinault, 514.

^[15] In addition, the body of Les Fêtes borrows from three other collaborations with Molière: Les Amants magnifiques, La Pastorale comique, and George Dandin. A table detailing these borrowings appears in John S. Powell, Music and Theatre, 316. The content and contexts of Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus are well known and summarized often. See especially Powell, Music and Theatre, 315–20, 416–34, and Powell, “Pourquoi toujours des bergers?,” 194–98; Georgia Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 121–23; Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste Lully, 284–90; Cornic, L’Enchanteur désenchanté, 101–3, 303–8; Jérôme de La Gorce, Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 575–81; and La Gorce, “Lully’s First Opera: A Rediscovered Poster for ‘Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus,’ ” Early Music 15 (1987): 308–9. For a concise summary of this and other antecedents to the tragédie en musique, see Jérôme de La Gorce, “Les Débuts de l’opéra français: Origines et formation de la tragédie en musique,” in Les Premières opéras en Europe et les formes dramatiques apparentées (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992): 133–40.

^[16] See Powell, Music and Theatre, 420–34. Even before Les Fêtes’s premiere, Molière had sometimes played the same game but as Lully’s teammate; some of the best examples are to be found in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme itself, such as Monsieur Jourdain’s satirical rendition of Perrin’s “Chanson de Janneton.” See Louis E. Auld, The Lyric Art of Pierre Perrin, Founder of French Opera (Henryville, PA: Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986) 2:18–20, and Stephen H. Fleck, Music, Dance, and Laughter: Comic Creation in Molière’s Comedy-Ballets, Biblio 17 (Paris and Seattle: Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature, 1995), 103–5. See also Powell, Music and Theatre, 419, on Molière’s ridiculing of Perrin and pastoral conventions in George Dandin, Les Amants magnifiques, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, and others.

^[17] Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Act 1, scene 2: “Monsieur Jourdain: ‘Pourquoi toujours des bergers? On ne voit que cela partout.’ Maître à danser: ‘Lorsqu on a des personnes à faire parler en musique, il faut bien que, pour la vraisemblance, on donne dans la bergerie. Le chant a été de tout temps affecté aux bergers; et il n est guère naturel en dialogue que des princes ou des bourgeois chantent leurs passions.’ ” See Powell, “Pourquoi toujours des bergers,” 187–88, and Fleck, Music, Dance and Laughter, 105–6.

^[18] Lois Rosow, “Power and Display: Music in Court Theatre,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music, ed. Tim Carter and John Butt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 208. This was the position taken by early theorists of opera; Rosow cites Battista Guarini, Giovanni Battista Doni, and the anonymous author of Il corago.

^[19] See Cowart, Triumph of Pleasure, 122: “This scene [from the prologue of Les Fêtes de l’Amour et de Bacchus] … marks the demise of the comédie-ballet and the manifesto of a new kind of monarchical entertainment emphasizing tragedy and heroism.” Marie-Claude Canova-Green also refers to French prologues of the era filling the role of “manifeste artistique.” “Melpomène, Thalie, Euterpe, et Clio,” 143.

^[20] Cornic, L’enchanteur désenchanté, 303–4: “… sous forme de préface ou d’avertissement au lecteur: au-delà, de la glorification obligée du prince ou de la justification du choix du sujet, il a su en faire, dans un souci que l’on qualifiera de pédagogique, la vecteur de sa réflexion poétique.” Cornic continues: “In effect, the operatic prologue sometimes appears as a sort of ‘fabric’ for the tragédie en musique, in which Quinault unveils for the audience a few revelations concerning the genre’s pedigree, its poetics, and its morphology” (“En effet, le prologue d’opéra apparaît parfois comme une sorte de ‘fabric’ de la tragédie en musique, dans laquelle Quinault dévoile aux spectateurs quelques révélations sur le pedigree du genre, sa poétique et sa morphologie”).

^[22] Following modern convention, I employ the term récitatif simple throughout this essay to denote typical French recitative with fluctuating meters, accompanied only by continuo.

^[23] Buford Norman, Touched by the Graces: The Libretti of Philippe Quinault in the Context of French Classicism (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 2001), 48.

^[24] For a detailed analysis of references to time and temporality in this prologue, see Downing Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1641–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82–90.

^[27] Aesthetics of Opera, 87. On this prologue, see also Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 142–43, 145–49 (here 143): “Although Quinault did not return to this kind of statement of artistic principles in later operas, the prologue to Atys lays the groundwork for the aesthetic debates that were to feature in operatic prologues in the coming generations.”

^[28] See Cornic, L’enchanteur, 307–8: “Far from challenging the hierarchy established by the prologue of Les Fêtes, the terms of this conciliation confirm it” (“Loin de remettre en cause la hiérarchie posée par le prologue des Fêtes, les termes de cette conciliation la conferment”). See also Canova-Green, “Melpomène, Thalie, Euterpe, et Clio,” 145.

^[29] Triumph of Pleasure, 127. See also pp. 126–27, 133–34, and 159–60, in which Cowart explores Quinault’s membership in the Petite Académie and its relationship to the pro-peace messages one finds in many of his prologues up to and including Isis.

^[30] Brossard, for example, finds it imbued with “sweetness, tenderness, and the natural” (“la douceur, la tendresse, le naturel”). Sebastien de Brossard, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris: Ballard, 1703), s.v. “Pastorale.”

^[31] “Natural expression” in this sense hardly implies a lack of expressive artifice. The complex relationship between these two broad categories is addressed throughout the remainder of this essay.

^[32] Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, vol. 3, “En ce qui regarde la poesie” (Paris: Coignard, 1692), 239, 241: “Or cela ne se peut faire à moins que les paroles, les expression et les pensées ne soient fort naturelles, fort connuës et fort usitées; ainsi, Monsieur, on blasme Monsieur Quinault par l’endroit où il merite le plus d’estre loüé, qui est d’avoir sçû faire avec un certain nombre d’expressions ordinaires, et de pensées fort naturelles, tant d’ouvrages si beaux et si agreable, et tous si differens les uns des autres.”

^[33] Aesthetics of Opera, 81. Along similar lines, Georgia Cowart, in Triumph of Pleasure, 121, writes: “The new opera, like the comédie-ballet of Lully and Molière, carefully negotiated the tastes of its dual audience. It was the genius of Lully and Quinault to balance praise and pleasure, tragedy and pastoral, heroism and galanterie in a manner that assured the success of the genre with the king and at court, as well as with the Parisian public.” See also Alison Calhoun, “The Architecture of Arcadia: Quinault, Lully, and the Complicit Spectator of the Tragédie en musique,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 33 (2011): 115, 116: “For Lully, Quinault, and the stage designers working with them, the best solution was to innovate without alienating their public. Since shocking the sense of their audience with performances that made no reference to the pastoral tradition might lead their tragic works to be misinterpreted as ridiculous or comical, Lully and Quinault’s strength was striking a balance…. The balance between the familiarity of pastoral and the strangeness of mythology encouraged the spectator to redefine the limits of aesthetic distance to include greater degrees of artificiality and fiction.”

^[34] Trans. in Kathryn Hoffman, Society of Pleasures: Interdisciplinary Readings in Pleasure and Power during the Reign of Louis XIV (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 13–14.

^[35] Cornic, L’enchanteur désenchanté, 308. “Le prologue d’Atys résume donc la théorie d’un genre: il équivaut à un petit traité de poétique mis en scène et nous renseigne sur la généalogie de l’opéra français.”

^[36] See, for example, Plato, Laws, Volume II: Books 7–12, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library 192 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 311: “It is evident, they assert, that the greatest and most beautiful things are the work of nature and of chance, and the lesser things that of art,—for art receives from nature the great and primary products as existing, and itself molds and shapes all the smaller ones, which we commonly call ‘artificial.’ ”

^[37] Charles William Dill, “French Theories of Beauty and the Aesthetics of Music, 1700–1750” (M.A. thesis, North Texas State University, 1982), 10. Kate Soper, in What is Nature?: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 1, writes more measuredly of “nature”: “As with many other problematic terms, its complexity is concealed by the ease and regularity with which we put it to use in a wide variety of contexts.” An exhaustive bibliography of sources relating to the imitation of nature in the arts would be massive, but several books and essays are particularly relevant to the present discussion. The most thorough treatment of “the natural” as a concept applied to late seventeenth-century aesthetics appears in Bernard Tocanne, L’Idée de nature en France dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle: Contribution à l’histoire de la pensée classique (Strasbourg: Klincksieck, 1978). Though it draws primarily on eighteenth-century sources, Mário Vieira de Carvalho, “ ‘Nature et naturel’ dans la polémique sur l’opéra au XVIIIème siècle,” in Le Parole della musica. II: Studi sul lessico della letteratura critica del teatro musicale in onore di Gianfranco Folena, ed. Maria Teresa Muraro (Firenze; Olschki, 1995), 95–146, is helpful for its incisive distinctions among competing definitions of “nature.”

^[38] Lecerf, Comparaison, 2:205–6: “… le bruit que fait effectivement le vent, lors qu’il s’entonne dans une maison et dans des roseaux…. Oh, suposé que ce soit un mérite que de bien imiter la nature, il n’y a pas moyen de douter là du mérite de Lulli…. Il a une chose naturelle à copier, il la copie d’aprés nature, il fait de la nature même le fond de sa simphonie; il se contente d’aproprier la nature à la musique, en la revétant de quelques ornemens de l’art. Admirez, vous autres esprits sublimes le contre-point figuré des Italiens. Nous autres gens naturels, nous admirerons cette droiture de goût de Lulli.”

^[39] Period dictionaries are of relatively little help in disentangling meanings. Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire françois (Geneva: Jean Herman Widerhold, 1680), 2:63, for example, requires no fewer than eighteen different entries to define “nature” and its variants, some of which are vexingly circular: “Naturel. Caractere naturel. [Imiter le naturel].” (Brackets are in original.)

^[40] Bernard Lamy, La rhétorique ou l’art de parler, ed. Benoît Timmermans (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 291: “Il faut distinguer le discours en deux espèces: en discours naturel, et en discours artificiel. Le naturel est celui dont on doit se servir dans la conversation pour s’exprimer, pour instruire, et pour faire connaître les mouvements de sa volonté, et les pensées de son esprit. L’artificiel est celui que l’on emploie pour plaire et dans lequel, s’éloignant de l’usage ordinaire et naturel, on se sert de tout l’artifice possible pour charmer ceux qui l’entendront prononcer.” Lamy revised his treatise several times, and for the edition of 1688, even opted for a slightly different title (adding “La rhétorique”). For details on this complex revision history, see the first and second appendices of Timmermans’ edition.

^[41] The Instituto oratoria of Quintilian with an English Translation, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922), 4:277: “There is a difference between true emotion on one hand, and false and fictitious emotion on the other. The former breaks out naturally, as in the case of grief, anger or indignation, but lacks art, and therefore requires to be formed by methodical training. The latter, on the other hand, does imply art, but lacks the sincerity of nature.”

^[42] Buford Norman, in Touched by the Graces, 80n19, has made a similar case for casting these categories in terms of interrelated binary oppositions: “All of these [oppositions], in a way, can be grouped under the larger opposition of to please (music; singing and dancing; spectacular; supernatural; comic) and to instruct (poetry; recitative; verisimilitude; human; serious).”

^[43] Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (Paris: Arnout et Reinier Leers, 1690), fourth entry s.v. “Nature”: “… ce qui est ordinaire, qui arrive toujours. Les miracles surpassent les forces de la nature.…” Furetière is alluding here to the distinction between the natural and the supernatural.

^[44] Lamy, L’art de parler, 191: “Il n’y a rien de si naturel. Nous voyons qu’aussitôt qu’un animal est blessé, et qu’il souffre, il se met à crier, comme si la nature lui faisait demander du secours.”

^[45] Lamy, L’art de parler, 218: “Si on désire savoir les figures de la colère, qu’on s’étudie quand on parle dans le mouvements de cette passion.”

^[46] François Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence, in Œuvres, ed. Jacques Le Brun (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 2:44: “Pour réussir à peindre les passions, il faut étudier les mouvements qu’elles inspirent. Par exemple, remarquez ce que font les yeux, ce que font les mains, ce que fait tout le corps, et quelle est sa posture; ce que fait la voix d’un homme, quand il est pénétré de douleur, ou surpris à vue d’un objet étonnant. Voilà la nature qui se montre à vous, vous n’avez qu’à la suivre.” Barbara Warnick, in The Sixth Canon: Belletristic Rhetorical Theory and its French Antecedents (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 38, has written aptly that “Nothing disturbed Fénelon more than the ostentatious floridity and artificial arrangement of epideictic speaking in his day.”

^[47] Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence, 2:40: “A: …il faut que tout y suive la nature. Bien plus: il y a des choses où l’on exprimerait mieux ses pensées par une cessation de tout mouvement. Un homme plein d’un grand sentiment demeuere un moment immobile; cette espèce de saisissement tient en suspens l’âme de tous les auditeurs. B: Je comprends que ces suspensions bien employées seraient belles, et puissantes pour toucher l’auditeur. Mais il me semble que vous réduisez celui qui parle en public à ne faire pour le geste que ce que ferait un homme qui parlerait en particulier. A: Pardonnez-moi: la vue d’une grande assemblée, et l’importance du sujet qu’on traite, doit sans doute animer beacoup plus un homme que s’il était dans une simple conversation. Mais, en public comme en particulier, il faut qu’il agisse toujours naturellement…. Rien ne me semble si choquant et si absurde que de voir un homme qui se tourmente pour me dire des choses froides: pendant qu’il sue, il me glace le sang. Il y a quelque temps que je m’endormis à un sermon…. Je m’éveillai bientôt, et j’entendis le prédicateur que s’agitait extraordinairement; je crus que c’était le fort de sa morale. B: Eh bien, qu’était-ce donc? A: C’est qu’il avertissait ses auditeurs que le dimanche suivant il prêcherait sur la pénitence. Cet avertissement fait avec tant de violence me surprit, et m’aurait fait rire si le respect du lieu et de l’action ne m’eût retenu.”

^[48] The fact that Fénelon to some degree and René Rapin to a larger degree allied themselves with the ancients in the querelle des Anciens et des Modernes cannot be allowed to obscure the stunning novelty of their views on eloquence. Their objections to the moderns was not born out of mere conservatism, but derived rather from a specific rejection of audience-flattery as an end in itself. They advocated an appreciation of ancient sources, but prioritized within these sources elements of a natural simplicity that liberated rhetoric from pedantic approaches based, for example, on the correct deployment of figures and tropes. One might say, then, that they disavowed aspects of classical knowledge in order to defend what they regarded as classical rhetoric’s most valuable principles. For a more detailed discussion of this shift in the era’s rhetoric sources, see Jonathan Gibson, “ ‘A Kind of Eloquence Even in Music’: Embracing Different Rhetorics in Late Seventeenth-Century France,” Journal of Musicology 25 (2008): 394–433.

^[52] René Rapin, Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote, et sur les ouvrages des poètes anciens et modernes (Paris: F. Muguet, 1674), 88: “… de sçavoir bien distinguer ce qu’il y a de beau et d’agréable dans la nature…. Ce n’est pas assez de s’attacher à la nature qui est rude et désagréable en certains endroits: il faut choisir ce qu’elle a de beau d’avec ce qui ne l’est pas.”

^[53] Georgia Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music 1600–1750 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 66.

^[54] See Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra français, 43: “The concept of imitation in no way refers to the notion of reproduction, but rather to that of a transposition or fictional transformation in which the fruits of the poetic work cannot be reduced to the status of a copy, any more than its real counterpart corresponds to the notion of a ‘model.’ The celebrated classical theory of the imitation of nature is based on the idea of a represented world, whose object is not the real world, immediately observable, but an essentialized world, conceivable and characterized.” (“Le concept d’imitation ne désigne nullement la notion de reproduction, mais renvoie bien plutôt à celle d’une transposition ou d’une transformation fictionnelle dans laquelle le fruit du travail poétique ne peut pas être réduit au statut d’une copie, pas plus que son corrélat réel ne correspond à la notion de ‘modèle.’ La célèbre théorie classique de l’imitation de la nature se fond sur l’idée d’un monde représenté, dont l’objet n’est d’ailleurs pas le monde réel, observable immédiatement, mais un monde essentiel, pensable et caractérisé.”)

^[55] François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac, La Pratique du théatre (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville, 1657), 81–82: “La scene ne donne point les choses comme elles ont été, mais comme elles devoient être, et le Poëte y doit rétablir dans le sujet tout ce qui ne s’accommodera pas aux regles de son Art, comme fait un Peintre quand il travaille sur un modelle defectueux.”

^[56] Chief among these eighteenth-century sources are Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) and Charles Batteux, Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1746). While the terms Batteux, Dubos, and other eighteenth-century authors invoke to explain artistic imitation are similar to those used by Aubignac and by the seventeenth-century authors on eloquence cited in this essay, the aesthetics of Dubos and Batteux are of a different age and should not be mapped onto the era of Lully and Quinault without great caution. See, for example, the following from Dubos (Paris: Jean Mariette, 1719), I:634–38: “Just as the painter imitates the attributes and colors of nature, the musician also imitates the tones, accents, sighs, and inflections of the voice—in short, all the sounds—with whose help nature herself expresses her sentiments and passions…. The natural signs of the passions, which music resembles and employs with art in order to augment the energy of the words set to music, should render them more capable of moving us, because these natural signs have an astounding power to move us. This they borrow from nature herself [footnote to Cicero, De oratore I.3 (recte Book 3, section 197) on the power of sounds to inflame our passions]…. There is therefore a truth [verité] in the sung parts of our opera, and this truth consists in the imitation of the tones, accents, sighs, and all the sounds that are naturally fitting to the sentiments the words contain.” (“Ainsi que le Peintre imite les traits et les couleurs de la nature, de même le Musicien imite les tons, les accens, les soupirs, les infléxions de voix, enfin tous ces sons, à l’aide desquels la nature même exprime ses sentimens et ses passions. Tous ces sons, comme nous l’avons déja exposé, ont une force merveilleuse pour nous émouvoir, parce qu’ils sont les signes des passions, instituez par la nature dont ils ont reçû leur énergie…. Les signes naturels des passions que la musique rassemble, et qu’elle emploïe avec art pour augmenter l’énergie des paroles qu’eille met en chant, doivent donc les rendre plus capables de nous toucher, parce que les signes naturels ont une force merveilleuse pour nous émouvoir. Ils la tiennent de la nature même. Nihil est enim tam cognatum mentibus nostris, quam numeri atque voces, quibus et excitamur, et incendimur, et lenimur et languescimus, dit un des judicieux observateurs des affections des hommes. [fn: Cicero, De Oratore]…. Il est donc une verité dans les récits des Opera, et cette verité consiste dans l’imitation des tons, des accens, des soûpirs, et des sons qui sont propres naturellement aux sentimens contenus dans les paroles.”)

^[57] Aubignac, Pratique du théatre, 42–43: “Mais en considerant la chose peinte, il s’attache à la Nature de ce qu’il représent, et ne faire rien qui ne soit vraisemblable en toutes ses circonstances, à cause qu’il regarde tout comme véritable… Il sera que cette figure aura le teint pâle et defait, parce qu’il n’est pas croiable qu’il fût autre dans ses austeritez…. Il ne sera pas un Palais auprès d’elle, mais un desert…. Il ne fera sa Grotte dans un rocher d’or, mais tout couvert de mousse…. Enfin il ornera son Ouvrage de toutes les choses qui vraisemblablement peuvent convenir à l’état de la penitence, selon la Personne, les Lieux et les dependances de l’Histoire; parce qu’en cette pensée, il considere la verité de la chose qu’il veut peindre. Tout de même le Poëte en considerant dans sa Tragedie le Spectacle ou la Représentation, il fait tout ce que son Art et son esprit lui peuvent fournir pour la rendre admirable aux Spectateurs: car il ne travaille que pour leur plaire.”

^[58] The scholarly literature on vraisemblance is vast. On this idea’s application to music and literature in late seventeenth-century France, see especially Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra français, 163–78, 244–97; Catherine Kintzler, Théâtre et opéra à l’âge classique: Une familière étrangeté (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 14–18; Norman, Touched by the Graces, 36–40; Buford Norman, “Actions and Reactions: Emotional Vraisemblance in the Tragédie-lyrique,” Cahiers du dix-septième 3, no. 1 (1990): 142–51; Geoffrey Burgess, “Ritual in the Tragédie en musique: From Lully’s Cadmus et Hermione (1673) to Rameau’s Zoroastre (1749)” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1999), 81–88; and Stephen H. Fleck, “The Mirror and the Looking Glass: Vraisemblance and Invraisemblances in Later Molière,” in Formes et formations au dix-septième siècle, ed. Buford Norman (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006), 273–82.

^[59] Kintzler, Théâtre et opéra, 201: “un monde parallèle au monde naturel.”

^[60] Bernard de Fontenelle, Réflexions sur la poétique, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, nouvelle éd., vol. 3 (Paris: Bastien, 1790), 151: “Le vrai et le vraisemblable sont assez différens. Le vrai est tout ce qui est; le vraisemblable est ce que nous jugeons qui peut être…. Au Théâtre, où tout est feint, il faut nécessairement que le vraisemblable prenne la place du vrai.”

^[61] This construct, in which one of art’s primary goals is to conceal its own artifice, is perhaps known best by the Ovidian maxim ars est celare artem. I am thankful to Warren Kirkendale for his thoughts on this matter.

^[62] Aubignac, Pratique du théatre, 443–44: “On pourrait objecter, Que si le Discours pathétique est bien ordonné, et que tout y soit bien conduit par les regles, il paroistra trop affecté, sentira l’art, et n’imitera pas la nature qui agite l’esprit humain incertainement et confusément, et qui le porte sans ordre et sans regle sur tous les objects, les motifs et les circonstances de sa passion, selon que les idées s’en rendent presentes. Mais pour y répondre on doit avoüer que ce desordre dans les paroles d’un homme qui se plaint, est un defaut qui affoiblit les marques exterieures de la douleur, et il le faut reformer sur le Theatre, qui ne souffre rien d’imparfait…. Ainsi par l’ordre des choses qui se disent, on reforme ce que la Nature a de defectueux en ses mouvemens; et par la varieté sensible des Figures, on garde un ressemblance du désordre de la Nature.”

^[63] I borrow the concepts of transparency and opacity from the field of semiotics. A transparent signifier reveals its object (the thing represented) while minimizing its own materiality, thereby reducing the appearance of artistic mediation. An opaque signifier, on the other hand, draws attention to its own materiality.

^[64] Trans. in Barbara Warnick, Fénelon’s Letter to the French Academy, with an Introduction and Commentary (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984), 104.

^[65] Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence, 2:38: “Qu’est devenuë cette vivacité? où sont ces paroles coupées qui marquent si bien la nature dans les transports de la douleur?… Dans ces endroits-là, non-seulement il ne faut point de pensées, mais on en doit retrancher l’ordre et les liaisons. Sans cela la passion n’est plus vraisemblable, et rien n’est si choquant qu’une passion exprimée avec pompe, et par des périodes reglées.” Fénelon’s quotation and reworking, respectively, of Gracchus are as follow: “Wretched! Where shall I go? What sanctuary remains to me? The Capitol? It is inundated with the blood of my brother. My home? I shall see there my unhappy mother dissolved in tears and dying of grief” (Gracchus); “I do not know where to go in my grief. No sanctuary remains for me. The Capitol is the place where they have shed the blood of my brother. My home is the place where I shall see my mother weeping in sadness” (Fénelon).

^[66] According to Fénelon, such structures also served to feed the speaker’s vanity: “In poetry as in architecture, all the necessary parts should become natural ornaments. Yet an ornament which serves merely as an ornament is superfluous. Cut it out and only vanity will suffer.” “Lettre à l’Académie Française,” trans. in Warnick, Fénelon’s Letter, 76.

^[67] Fénelon, Dialogues sur l’éloquence, 2:53: “A: Aimez-vous les fredons dans la musique? N’aimez-vous pas mieux ces tons animés qui peignent les choses, et qui expriment les passions? B: Oui, sans doute; les fredons ne font qu’amuser l’oreille; ils ne signifient rien, ils n’excitent aucun sentiment…. A: Je savois bien que la Musique, à laquelle vous êtes fort sensible, me serviroit à vous faire entendre ce qui regarde l’Éloquence; aussi faut-il qu’il y ait une espèce d’éloquence dans la Musique même; on doit rejeter les fredons dans l’Éloquence aussi-bien que dans la Musique. Ne comprenez-vous pas maintenant ce que j’appelle discours fredonnés, certains jeux de mots qui reviennent toujours comme des refrains, certains bourdonnements de périodes languissantes et uniformes? Voilà la fausse éloquence qui ressemble à la mauvaise musique.”

^[68] Don Fader, “The Honnête homme as Music Critic: Taste, Rhetoric, and Politesse in the 17th-Century French Reception of Italian Music,” Journal of Musicology 20 (2003): 17–18. (An editorial comma has been added, in consultation with Professor Fader.) See also p. 8: “This style’s perceived flaunting of compositional ‘learning’ and virtuosity grated against basic standards of politesse, which emphasized the concealment of effort, knowledge, and ‘artifice’ behind a pleasing and ‘natural’ courtly facade.”

^[69] Tocanne, L’Idée de Nature, 287: “La rhétorique offre un chemin directeur possible pour se retrouver dans le labyrinthe de la nature.”

^[70] Lecerf, Comparaison, 2:282: “Tous ces Arts ont une liaison, qui leur rend presque commun ce qu’on peut dire de chacun d’eux; et je prens pour un bon signe que ce qu’on dit d’un, soit en partie vrai des autres.” See also 3:51: “I have taken the method of clarifying and proving my thoughts on music by inference, from rhetoric, from poetry, and from the other fine arts that music resembles, and since that resemblance is certain, my method cannot be wrong” (“J’ai pris la méthode d’éclaircir et de prouver ce que je pense de la musique par des inductions tirées de la rhetorique, de la poësie, et des autres beaux arts ausquels la musique ressemble, et puisque la ressemblance est certaine, ma méthode ne peut être mauvais”). For a more comprehensive list of French sources that allude to commonalities among rhetoric, music, and related disciplines, see Appendix 1 of Jonathan Gibson, “Le Naturel and l’Éloquence: The Aesthetics of Music and Rhetoric in France: 1650–1715” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2003).

^[71] Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1708), 29: “Tous les Arts qui ont pour objet l’Imitation ne s’exercent que pour instruire et pour divertir les hommes par une fidelle representation de la Nature.”

^[72] Lecerf, Comparaison, 2:134: “Mademoiselle auroit-elle le courage de nier que la Musique ne doive sans excuse et sans quartier, être naturelle? Et nierez-vous cét autre principe de Monsieur, qu’elle doit de même être expressive. Pour moi, je donne là-dedans; et quand il vous remontre que … si la Peinture est une representation par les couleurs, la Poësie et l’Éloquence une representation par les paroles; la Musique est apparemment une representation par les sons, cela me paroît vraisemblable aussi: De là s’ensuivra, ce qu’il prétend, qu’être fécond, étant naturel et expressif, comme Lulli, c’est le mérite supréme et la derniere difficulté.”

^[73] Lois Rosow notes that “Lully’s internal divertissements (those not placed at the ends of acts) are followed routinely by a return to recitative, and often by a dramatic turning point….” Review of Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, by Downing Thomas, Journal of Musicological Research 25, no.1 (2006): 99. Nearly half of the divertissements in Lully and Quinault’s tragédies en musique are internal. These internal divertissements appear in Cadmus et Hermione, Acts 1, 3, and 4; Alceste, Acts 1, 2, 3, and 4; Thésée, Acts 2 and 3; Atys, Acts 1, 3, and 4; Isis, Act 3; Proserpine, Act 2; Persée, Acts 1 and 3; Phaëton, Acts 1, 3, 4, and 5; Roland, Act 4; and Armide, Acts 1, 2, 4, and 5. Amadis alone contains no internal divertissements.

^[74] Caroline Wood, Music and Drama in the Tragédie en Musique, 1673–1715: Jean-Baptiste Lully and His Successors (New York: Garland, 1996): 254–55.

^[75] See Laura Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique (1673–1764) (Paris: Champion, 2004), 370–71, on how the spectacle offered in this act is made to seem ridiculous.

^[76] Laura Naudeix’s Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique (1673–1764) is one work to have tackled these issues squarely.

^[77] Furthermore, Rebecca Harris-Warrick has noted that “for the French, strophic structures called attention to themselves as music and had to be used diegetically.” Dance and Drama, 46.

^[78] See Lois Rosow, “The Articulation of Lully’s Dramatic Dialogue,” in Lully Studies, ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72–99, here 89. A clear summary of this relationship also appears in Lois Rosow, “Lully’s Musical Architecture: Act IV of Persée,” Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music 10, no. 1 (2004), https://sscm-jscm.org/v10/no1/rosow.html.

^[79] See Lois Rosow, “The Metrical Notation of Lully’s Recitative” in Jean-Baptiste Lully: Actes du colloque, ed. Jérôme de La Gorce and Herbert Schneider (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1990), 408–10. See also Rosow, “French Baroque Recitative as an Expression of Tragic Declamation,” Early Music 11, no. 4 (1983): 471–72 on meter and tempo irregularity in recitative.

^[80] Lecerf, Comparaison, 2:84–85: “Le récitatif est un fleuve qui doit rouler doucement, également, hormis aux endroits où il est poussé ou ralenti, où il est excité par quelque détour ou par quelque rencontre extraordinaire, et les petits vers d’une mesure courte et reglée forment des cascades impetueuses et bruyantes, ou des ruisseaux d’un gazoüillement perpetuel.”

^[81] Rebecca Harris-Warrick relates the fluid distinction between recitative and air in French music to the separation between divertissements and surrounding drama: “The fuzziness around the edges of many divertissements—or within them—is a significant feature of Lully’s style, as is the fuzzy line between recitative and air. In both cases, attempts to delineate separable units may serve useful analytical purposes but run the risk of over-codifying Lully’s actual practices.” Dance and Drama, 65.

^[82] Toussaint Rémond de Saint-Mard, Réflexions sur l’Opéra (1749), trans. in Caroline Wood and Graham Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), 62.

^[83] Whether the infraction was purposeful or not, Quinault was dismissed as a result, returning to Lully’s side in 1680 for Proserpine. For discussion of the scandal, see Norman, Touched by the Graces, 185–89.

^[84] Kintzler speaks of a such operatic appropriations of the pastorale as “a ‘mixed’ merveilleux, a merveilleux that dares not show itself as a world, that remains on the margins of the staged world and of dramatic vraisemblance” (“On peut parler de merveilleux ‘mixte’, un merveilleux qui n’ose pas se montrer comme un monde, qui reste en marge du monde scénique et de la vraisemblance dramatique”). Poétique de l’opéra, 217.

^[85] See Norman, Touched by the Graces, 209: “One could thus see the scene as an example of mise en abyme: at one level an actress plays a nymph who plays the nymph Syrinx who is in a similar situation to that of Io, who is trying to resist the amorous advances of a god. More generally, Jupiter delegates Mercury who hires sylvains and nymphs to represent a story that will allow Jupiter to outwit Junon and sneak off with the nymph whose situation is so similar to that of Syrinx. One can also see in this sequence of representation and delegation the king who delegates Quinault and Lully to hire actors to represent stories that will silence anyone daring to impose limits on royal prerogatives, be they amorous or political.”

^[87] These include, among others, those of the prologue of Cadmus et Hermione, Act 1 of Persée, and Act 4 of Roland.

^[89] Rebecca Harris-Warrick argues convincingly that groups such as those populating this divertissement in Alceste play an important dramatic role, in part by exemplifying aspects of ideal court society. She writes: “Even the demons who surround Pluton seem more like well-behaved courtiers than fearsome creatures. All of the groups depicted in Alceste, notwithstanding their occasional moments of spontaneity (as in the choral refrains that open Act 1 or in the expressions of mourning in Act 3), act in obedience to powerful beings in activities that uphold the established order. It is no wonder that Alceste seemed an appropriate choice for festivities held to honor a king so set on exhibiting his own powers to his country and the world.” Harris-Warrick, “Lully’s On-Stage Societies,” in Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu, ed. Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 58.

^[90] On the altered sense of temporal progression common in divertissements, see Rosow, “Lully’s Musical Architecture,” 6.3–6.4, and Geoffrey Burgess, “The Chaconne and the Representation of Sovereign Power in Lully’s Amadis (1684) and Charpentier’s Médée (1693),” in Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Sarah McCleave (London: King’s College, 1998), 84.

^[92] Rebecca Harris-Warrick notes that “mocking lustful oldsters was stock-in-trade of the Comédie Italienne, and Thésée provides but one instance of how a more respectful variant on the theme might impinge even upon the tragédie en musique.” Dance and Drama, 20.

^[93] Some early scores place after the vieillards’ song a reprise of the chorus in praise of Thésée from earlier in the scene: “May Victory cover him with glory. Let us follow, let us love his laws. Let us hear everywhere songs of his exploits. Let us join our voices together. May he always defend us, may he triumph, may he command, may he savor the sweetness of his reign over all our hearts.” (“Que la Victoire / Le comble icy de gloire; / Suivons, aimons ses Loix. / Que l’on entende / Chanter partout ses Exploits. / Joignons nos voix. / Que toujours il nous défende, / Qu’il triomphe, qu’il commande, / Qu’il joüisse des douceurs / De regner sur tous les cœurs.”) In such a case, the objects of Thésée’s remarks are the members of the admiring chorus rather than the old Athenian men, but in both cases Thésée’s exhortation is an interruption. See Jean-Baptiste Lully, Thésée: Tragédie en musique, ed. Pascal Denécheau, in Œuvres complètes, ser. 3, vol. 4 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010), 222–24, 415.

^[95] First strophe: “Ce beau jour ne permet qu’à l’Aurore / De s’occuper à respandre des pleurs. / Que d’éclat! Que de vives couleurs! / Mille Fleurs vont esclorre; / Tout charme nos cœurs; / Il naistra plus encore / D’Amours, que de Fleurs.”

^[96] According to Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, 66, Lully’s usual procedure would be to insert a reprise of the dance between the two stanzas of the song.

^[97] According to Lecerf, the divertissement represented an exception to Lully and Quinault’s normal composition order: “That is how Quinault and Lully composed the body of the opera, where the words were written first. On the contrary, for the divertissements, Lully wrote the melodies first, at his convenience and in his own style. Then words were necessary. So that these would fit correctly, Lully sketched out verses, and did the same for some airs de mouvement. He himself added verses to these airs de mouvement and to these divertissements, the main function of which was to align perfectly to the music, and he sent these materials to Quinault, who adjusted them.” (“C’est ainsi que se composoit par Quinaut et par Lulli le corps de l’Opera, dont les paroles étoient faites les premieres. Au contraire, pour les divertissemens, Lully faisoit les airs d’abord, à sa commodité et en son particulier. Il y falloit des paroles. Afin qu’elles fussent justes, Lulli faisoit un canevas de vers, et il en faisoit aussi pour quelques airs de mouvement. Il apliquoit lui-même à ces airs de mouvement et à ces divertissemens, des vers, dont le mérite principal étoit de quadrer en perfection à la Musique, et il envoyoit cette brochure à Quinaut, qui ajustoit les siens dessus.”) Lecerf de la Viéville, Comparaison, 2:218–19. See also Jean Duron, “L’Instinct de M. de Lully,” in La Tragédie lyrique, ed. Patrick F. Van Dieren and Alain Durel (Paris: Cicero, 1991), 95; and Norman, Touched by the Graces, 22.

^[98] Norman, Touched by the Graces, 274. See pp. 273–75 for Norman’s insightful discussion of this moment and his proposed explanations for Quinault and Lully’s choices in this act.

^[100] While it is clear that the musical-dramatic commonplaces explored here and the aesthetic constructs they imply continued to resonate with composers and librettists after the time of Lully, the scope of this essay is limited to the works of Lully and Quinault. Similarly, I will withhold comments on Psyché and Bellérophon, for which Quinault did not serve as librettist. For an in-depth exploration of changes in relative prioritizations among tragedy, comedy, dance, and other expressive modes on the French operatic stage after Lully’s death, see chapters 7–14 of Harris-Warrick, Dance and Drama, which include the following observation: “As time went on, a new balance established itself among the three Muses: Melopomène retained her prestige, but lost stage time to Thalie and Terpsichore….” (204).

^[101] On the relationships between tragédie and the tragédie en musique, see especially Norman, “The Exile of Reason: The Representation of Emotion in the Tragédie Lyrique,” Ars Lyrica 7 (1993): 65–74, and Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra français, part 2, sec. 1.

^[104] See Norman, Touched by the Graces, 308–9, and Harris-Warrick, “Reading Roland,” 7.1.

^[107] While I employ the terms récitatif simple and récitatif mesuré in this essay, it is important to note that they do not belong to the seventeenth century. Any rigid taxonomy they might imply would probably have perplexed French musicians of Lully’s day. For a critical explanation of the origin of these terms and their twentieth-century reception, see Charles Dill, “Eighteenth-Century Models of French Recitative,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 120, no.2 (1995): 234.

^[108] Syllable counts are given for libretto excerpts from Roland. The “+” sign indicates a feminine line-ending.

^[109] Harris-Warrick, “Reading Roland,” 7.6. Harris-Warrick’s full description of this divertissement is highly recommended (ibid., 7.4–7.9).

^[111] The re-entry of a tragic character into a divertissement is rare in the tragédies en musique of Lully and Quinault, but not unprecedented. Æglé, for example, interrupts the Act 3 divertissement of Thésée and interacts with the inhabitants of hell.

^[112] By this point, the act is remote from the manner in which it began in virtually every sense, and Lully employs a clever tonal scheme to underscore the point. Beginning the act in C major, he reclaims this key after a brief foray into C minor (most of scene 2). Scene 4 (the scene of Roland’s reentry into the divertissement) serves as a G minor harmonic pivot—for a final arrival in scene 5, coinciding with Tersandre’s appearance—to the key of B-flat major. This tonal scheme was also noted by James Anthony in French Baroque Music, 101.

^[113] Richard Leppert, Arcadia at Versailles: Amateur Musicians and their Musettes and Hurdy-gurdies at the French Court c. 1660–1789 (Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1978), 30.

^[114] According to Buford Norman, Touched by the Graces, 314–15, the peasants’ “comments on [Roland’s] impressive appearance … underline the incongruity of the situation: an armed and richly dressed knight listens to some pastoral songs that would normally have nothing to do with his own situation. But here two genres with incompatible values are brought together, the epic meets the pastoral, and the result—for Roland, but not for the spectator—is madness.” See also Girdlestone’s comments on this juncture: “It is now on Roland that the spotlight is trained; the shepherds are now mere spectators, reduced to adding interjections that convey the warrior’s attitude” (“C’est maintenant sur Roland que portent les feux de la rampe; les bergers ne sont plus que spectateurs, réduits à pousser des interjections qui reflètent l’attitude du guerrier”). Cuthbert Girdlestone, La Tragédie en musique (1673–1750) considérée comme genre littéraire (Geneva: Droz, 1972), 111.

^[116] Quinault departs significantly from Ariosto in his characterization of Roland’s madness. The madness of Ariosto’s Orlando, portrayed in cantos 23 and following, leads him to utterly destroy the bucolic setting, uprooting trees and decapitating helpless shepherds. See Gros, Philippe Quinault, 571: “Roland, in Quinault’s opera, is no longer properly speaking mad; he is no longer in any case the frenetic madman that he was in the Italian poem. He is nothing but a despairing lover whom pain has led astray.” (“Roland, dans l’opéra de Quinault, n’est plus à proprement parler un fou; il n’est plus en tout cas le fou frénétique qu’il était dans le poème italien: il n’est plus qu’un amant désespéré que la douleur égare.”)

^[117] Buford Norman writes of Roland’s outburst that “one can almost hear Lully savoring his victory over Perrin and his pastorals that inaugurated his Académie Royale de Musique” (Touched by the Graces, 321). While on the surface this moment supports an anti-pastoral reading, the pastoral characters’ creative and intellectual dominance throughout much of the portion in question suggests a more complex message.

^[118] Naudeix, Dramaturgie de la tragédie en musique, 107: “Si le monde pastorale est un univers de repos, l’ombre, de perfection et de bonheur, il est évident que l’enjeu de la tragédie est de renverser cet équilibre afin que l’action puisse avoir lieu.” See also p.104: “One of the most obvious differences between the pastoral and tragedy lies in the treatment of violence…. The world of the pastoral is in fact fundamentally happy, and the introduction of disorder, of unhappiness, are only annoyances on the level of the real world.” (“L’un des points de dissemblance les plus évidents entre la pastorale et la tragédie est le traitement de la violence…. L’univers de la pastorale est en effet fondamentalement heureux, et l’introduction du désordre, du malheur, ne constituent que des contrariétés à l’échelle du monde reel.”)

^[119] To be sure, there are several other divertissements in which a tragic protagonist is present and integral to the unfolding narrative, as in Act 3 of Atys (in which Atys sleeps and dreams) or Act 2 of Armide (in which Renaud is put to sleep as the result of an enchantment), but in no such case does the tragic protagonist interact with divertissement characters to the degree we see in Act 4 of Roland.

^[120] See Rosow, “The Articulation of Lully’s Dramatic Dialogue,” 90–92.

^[121] Saint-Mard, Réflexions sur l’Opéra (1749), trans. in Wood and Sadler, French Baroque Opera: A Reader, 134–35.

^[122] Trans. in Warnick, Fénelon’s Letter, 76. Fénelon writes elsewhere in the same letter: “When poets wish to charm men’s imaginations, they lead them far from great cities and cause them to forget the extravagance of their century. They put them back into the golden age and, rather than portraying turbulent courts and great men unhappy in their greatness, they show us shepherds dancing on flowery grass under the shade of a grove in a delightful season” (109).

^[123] Louis Auld, “ ‘Dealing in Shepherds’: The Pastoral Ploy in Nascent French Opera,” in French Musical Thought, 1600–1800, ed. Georgia Cowart (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 72. Auld continues: “A low mimetic level (to adopt [Northrop] Frye’s terminology) accepts certain traits of those real people, but selectively: their leisure, the open-air setting, a certain simplicity of mores and dress. From there, rising through levels of idealization, one may progressively ascribe to them a series of traits no real shepherd ever had, such as refinement of sentiment/feeling, elegance of manner, eloquence in conversation, and political acuity.”

^[124] Claire Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures, and Accidents that Made Modern France (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 178.

^[125] André Félibien, Description de la grotte de Versailles (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1679), 6: “Il y a deux sortes de Grottes; les unes sont des ouvrages de la Nature, et les autres des ouvrages de l’Art: et comme l’Art ne fait jamais rien de plus beau, que quand il imite bien la Nature; aussi la Nature ne produit rien de si rare, que lors qu’il semble que l’Art y a mis la main.” See Goldstein’s discussion of this passage in Vaux and Versailles, 195.

^[126] I am thankful to Georgia Cowart for her valuable thoughts on this connection.

^[127] Promenade de Versailles, trans. in Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles, 190, 188.

^[128] Félibien, Description de la grotte de Versailles, 6: “On peut dire de Versailles que c’est un lieu où l’Art travaille seul, et que la Nature semble avoir abandonné, pour donner occasion au Roy d’y faire paroistre par une espece de création, si j’ose ainsi dire, plusieurs magnifiques ouvrages, et une infinité de choses extraordinaires; mais qu’il n’y a point d’endroit dans toute cette Royale Maison, où l’Art ait réüssi plus heureusement, que dans la Grotte de Thétis.”

^[129] Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles, 197. See also p.195: “In a zone evacuated of nature’s influence, Louis masters the art of ‘natural representation.’ The ‘execution’ of masterful king artist can counterfeit or replace the now redundant natural world.”

^[130] Jennifer Montagu ascribes a similar power to Charles Le Brun, whose Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière, she argues, “is a monument to … the artist’s confidence in his power, not to follow nature as an imitator, but to become a creator who … could bring into being a world at once in conformity with natural laws, and free from natural imperfections.” Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière” (London: Yale University Press, 1994), 8.

^[131] Pierre-Charles Roy, writing in 1749, was among those who cautioned listeners “to be conscious of the liaisons between the divertissements and the plot, and to be conscious of [Quinault’s] singular skill in deriving an interesting situation from a decorative element.” Trans. in Anthony, French Baroque Music, 101. In our own time, Rebecca Harris-Warrick has been among the most ardent champions of the divertissement’s non-superfluity. She remarks in a recent essay that “even scholars of Baroque opera have been inclined to see divertissements as ornamental appendages … or as ‘a decorative but nonessential and dramatically neutral ornament.’ ” “Discussions of the dramaturgy of divertissements,” she writes, “have generally remained on the level of the plot.” She concludes that “Lully and his associates had just as clear ideas about divertissements as they did about the rest of the opera, and … it is our job to make sense of their choices.” “Reading Roland,” 1.1–1.2. See also Harris-Warrick, “Lully’s On-Stage Societies,” 56, as well as her Dance and Drama in French Baroque Opera, in which she expresses her concern that underestimating the significance of the divertissement “has had the unfortunate effect of deflecting attention away from what is often some of the most beautiful music in an opera” (2). See also Girdlestone, Tragédie en musique, 42; and Wood, Music and Drama, 245.

^[132] See Jean-Noël Laurenti, Valeurs morales et religieuses sur la scène de l’Académie Royale de Musique (1669–1737) (Droz: Geneva, 2002), 21: “If the resulting effect is sometimes artificial, at other times the divertissement plays a role in the dramatic progression” (“Si parfois l’effet produit est artificiel, à d’autres moments le divertissement jou un rôle dans la progression dramatique”).

^[133] Geoffrey Burgess has noted as much: “The obsession over the need to justify the divertissement suggests that, to some at least, it was a subject of embarrassment. That it could be, and was, enjoyed in its own right was without question, but this enjoyment was constantly challenged and contested by being held in check by the dramatic context. Its position of subservience to the tragédie defined the divertissement as the abject of the tragédie—that which had to be constantly denied and constructed as a threat to wholeness but, at the same time, that which was essential and without which the tragédie en musique could not exist.” “Ritual in the Tragédie en musique,” 338.

^[135] “Recovering the Lullian Divertissement,” in Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Sarah McCleave (London: King’s College, 1998), 67.

^[136] Michel de Pure, Idées des spectacles anciens et nouveaux (Paris: Brunet, 1668; reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1972), 250: “La dance ne consistoit pas en la seule dexterité de ses pieds, ny en la justesse de la cadence … mais dans une certaine maniere concertée et prise sur les mouvements naturels, qui échapent au corps selon les troubles et les diverses agitations de l’ame, et qui signifient contre nos propres desirs les mouvemens interieurs que nous tâchons de cacher et de tenir secrets.”

^[137] For a fuller examination of this matter, see Gibson, “A Kind of Eloquence.”

^[138] Fénelon shared freely his pointed opinions on tragedy. He writes in his letter to the Académie Française, for example: “As for tragedy, let me begin by declaring that I have no desire for us to improve upon spectacles which only portray corrupt passions so as to incite them…. Our poets have made them languid, insipid, and mawkish like novels. The heroes speak of nothing but fires, chains, and torments. Everyone wishes to die while making a good impression. An exceedingly imperfect person is called the sun, or at least a sunrise, and his eyes are two stars.” Trans. in Warnick, Fénelon’s Letter, 84.