The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 26 (2020) No. 1

Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage: Revisiting the Turkish Ceremony in “Le bourgeois gentilhomme” (1670). Edited by Hanna Walsdorf. Cadences—Schriften zur Tanz- und Musikgeschichte 1. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2019. [546 pp. ISBN 978-3-7329-0373-3.]

Reviewed by Geoffrey Burgess*

1. Overview

2. Findings and Interpretations

1. Overview

1.1 The first report from the Leipzig University-based study group “Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage: Constructions of Popular Culture in European Theatrical Dance, 1650–1760,” this volume makes significant inroads towards reconstituting the circumstances that led to the creation of the Turkish ceremony in Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière and Jean-Baptiste Lully, as well as the nature of the work in its earliest performances and its convoluted reception history. The impetus behind taking this comédie-ballet as an initial project arose partly from the work’s close match to the study group’s charter, and partly (as Walsdorf explains in the Preface) from a pressing need to reexamine documents pertaining to the visit of an Ottoman envoy to France in 1669 that served as catalyst for the work. One of the most influential encounters between a major European power and the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period, this event, which had both lasting political significance and enduring cultural resonances, has been misunderstood through the misreading of primary sources. This volume appears particularly pertinent as reemerging tensions between the West and Middle East impact global politics.

1.2 The book represents a multidisciplinary approach to theater studies and also makes a strong contribution to the study of music at the service of diplomacy and cultural exchange—a topic that has recently come to the fore in works such as Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present, edited by Rebekah Ahrendt, Mark Ferraguto, and Damien Mahiet (2014). The twelve essays cover well-worked terrain, with meticulous attention to detail. And while the distinction between known facts, traditional understandings, and new findings is not always obvious, this does not detract from the ground-breaking nature of the work and the richly nuanced picture that it provides. In addition to close readings of musical, literary, and iconographic sources, the project is grounded in theorization developed in cultural studies and specifically in studies of musical exoticism (a detailed listing appears in the Bibliography to Chapter 6). Methodologies developed by the pioneers of ritual studies Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner are also deployed, but without overshadowing the centrality of historical sources.

1.3 The contributors, led by Walsdorf, are mostly young scholars funded through the Emmy Noether Programm. All exhibit solid grounding in French theater studies, but it is worth noting that for a project focused on a work of such iconic stature in the heritage of French music theater, none of the researchers are French by nationality, and underwriting did not come from French sources but rather from the German Research Foundation. While most essays are single-authored (two are co-authored and Chapter 9, the only one translated from German, is a team effort with three writers), all bear the marks of collaboration, as well as Walsdorf’s presence as project director.

2. Findings and Interpretations

2.1 At the heart of the research lies the attempt to question the established interpretation that the Turkish ceremony was a way for the French to restore confidence after their diplomatic faux pas by ridiculing the Turks, despite this running counter to France’s interest in cultivating economic and diplomatic relations with the Ottomans. The team argues that Lully and Molière were in fact aiming their satire at a different target: the pretense of ceremonial ritual in both French and Turkish cultures. Their revisionist narrative is based on a close examination of the original account of both the diplomatic encounter and the creation of Le bourgeois gentilhomme in the memoirs of Laurent d’Arvieux, an authority on Turkish customs who was called on to advise in both diplomatic and artistic contexts. This source, being known only through an abbreviated and corrupt eighteenth-century edition by Jean-Baptiste Labat, has given rise to a false sense of the work’s background. The rediscovery of the original text shows that the French went to lengths to treat the Turkish dignitaries with respect, and that the embarrassment that arose in the real-time encounter between Louis XIV and the Sultan’s envoy resulted from misunderstandings of customs of address and etiquette from both sides. Still, there remains an uncomfortable slippage between offensive parody and self-reflexive satire. Like the use of blackface, the appropriateness of adopting Turkish dress, imitating Turkish customs, and using a mock Koran as a prop—even if intended as a ridiculous send-up directed at French pretense—remains problematic.

2.2 A detailed examination of surviving exemplars of the livret in its various editions and imprints (a model in source studies), and verbal cues of onstage action in the text, leads to a section on staging and costume design. Drawing on the work of Jérôme de La Gorce, the authors document the site of the work’s première in Chambord Castle, opening space for further speculation on the scale and appearance of the original production. The existence of no prior representations of a Mufti or of dervishes on the French stage allows the team to affirm La Gorce’s association of costume designs likely the work of court designer Henri de Gissey with Le bourgeois gentilhomme, to which they add the corroboration of Turkish costumes described in inventaires après décès of Molière and members of his troupe, and in tailors’ manuals. One of their most striking finds—the Mufti’s “candle crown”—should open new design avenues for modern reconstructions of the work.

2.3 It is not known whether Lully and Molière were present at or were familiar with the proceedings at the diplomatic encounter, begging the question of the origin of their understanding of Turkish customs. Chapter 5 presents a survey of Turkish-themed literature and theatrical productions from the seventeenth century, with Arvieux’s role as informant subjected to scrutiny. Perhaps the team’s most important contribution is information gleaned from The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman, Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation of Le bourgeois gentilhomme staged in London in 1672. Despite the significant differences between English and French relations to the Ottoman Empire, and the greater emphasis placed on absurd comedy and farce by Ravenscroft that resulted in “a much more complex adaptation and redesign of Molière’s Turkish ceremony …, targeting middle-class hubris as well as Oriental and domestic elite self-fashioning” (Jan Rupp, p. 474), the proximity of the two works means that missing details in the parent work can in some cases be filled in by details provided in the British adaptation. In one of three contributions by specialists from outside the team, English dance authority Jennifer Thorp uses this case study to investigate the dissemination of French dance to London in the late seventeenth century.

2.4 In comparison with costumes and stage action, where records are scant, at first it might appear that reconstructing the music of the Turkish ceremony presents fewer obstacles because of the existence of Lully’s score. However, as demonstrated in Walsdorf’s survey of the musical sources in Chapter 7, no score faithfully transmits the original version of the Turkish ceremony. In the previous chapter Judith Haug points to the scarcity of markers of otherness in Lully’s score. But attempts to identify traces of exoticism in seventeenth-century music are problematic as musical performance survives primarily in notation, which, no matter how detailed, can only provide what was performed, leaving the how to speculation. Much of the musical representation of Turkish exoticism remains lost to us. In much the same way that character was conveyed through accoutrements and over-garments superimposed on conventional costume designs (see pp. 207–10), character in seventeenth-century music was demarked more often by the mode of performance of generic formulae than through compositional procedures. Recent interpretations of the Turkish ceremony have relegated exoticism to the addition of percussion, or “grotesque” effects: practices that Walsdorf and her team see as limiting possibilities to modern preconceptions of Turkish “otherness”—jangly percussion, whirling dervishes, and the like—when seventeenth-century sources reveal a greater range of practices. To convey character, musicians had a multiplicity of interpretative details at their disposal—voix de caractère, ornamentation, etc.—elements that could be conveyed in notation only with difficulty, but could be readily transmitted orally or through example in rehearsals as the musicians clothed the bare notes with affect and character.

2.5 Ritual Design for the Ballet Stage marks a distinctive shift in the documentation of European musicological-historiographic research by adopting English as lingua franca academica. With one exception, none of the authors are native English speakers; still the text is expertly crafted and edited. Primary sources are quoted in the original language without direct translation, and the content is not always recapitulated in the narrative account. Each chapter includes a Conclusion and Bibliography, and while this results in some duplication across the volume, it allows sections to be treated autonomously and readers to access those parts of the book most relevant to their interests. There is a generous quantity of illustrations in both color and black and white; regrettably there is no index. Through assiduous archival research and the close readings of sources, the book offers the most expansive survey to date of musical, textual, and iconographic sources pertaining to the subject, from which it is possible to arrive at a more complete impression of the circumstances leading to a work of seminal importance, an impression that nevertheless reveals unresolved lacunae and avenues for further study.

^[*] Geoffrey Burgess (gvburgess@gmail.com) is a Baroque oboist and musicologist whose research has focused mainly on French theater music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.