Jean-Baptiste Lully - Biography
Jean-Baptiste Lully the celebrated French Baroque composer of Ballets and Opera was born in Florence Italy in on November 28th 1632 and died in Paris on March 22nd 1687. His name was initially Giovanni Batista Lulli and came from a poor family he evidently had very little formal education but learned to play the guitar. He was a boy chorister and while the Chevalier di Guise was in Florence in 1646 he was impressed enough with his voice to send him to Louis the XIVth’s court as a page to the King’s cousin Mlle. D’Orleans. He learned how to play the violin and observed the superb musical life at the court. When he was twenty Mlle. D’Orleans was involved in a political scandal and had to leave Paris. This left Lully without a patron but luckily by this time he caught the eye of the King who made him composer of instrumental music for the court. Louis was a lover of the Ballet and Lully need to supply the court with Ballets such as Les Temps (1655), Les Plaisirs (1655), and Psyche (1657) among many others from this period. Often these ballets were collaborations with other composers and unlike the modern ballet offered singing along with dancing. Besides the Grand Royal orchestra he formed another group Le Petits Violons. Lully was a very strict disciplinarian who according to history had a formidable temper. By 1661 he became a French Citizen.
The next phase of his career had him write the incidental music for Moliere’s integrated ballets with spoken text the most celebrated of is Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme of 1770. Lully was covertly gay at a time when this was a capital offence in France but he was protected by King Louis.
Lully formed Acadamie Royal de Musique in 1672 an opera troupe that performed Lully’s work almost exclusively. This created a significant amount of enmity between Lully and the music community in Paris and his volatile personality only made matters worse. Among the Operas from the period are Isis (1677), Psyche (1678), Persee (1682), Amidas (1684) and Armide (1686). Most of his librettos were supplied by Phillippe Quinault. The texts often had thinly veiled praise to Louis the Sun King. The length these musical rivalries could go is shown by case of a musical competitor to Lully,Henri Guichard was accused in court by Lully of attempting to poison him by mixing arsenic in his snuff, and Guichard was eventually acquitted. In his final years Lully turned to sacred music. His demise is one of the famous oddities in musical history while conducting a choral Te Deum for Louis on January 8th 1687Lully in a moment of exuberance he impaled his toe with the pointed cane he conducted with. He eventually developed gangrene refused to have his toe cut off and died on March 22nd.
Lully through much of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century’s was a famous historical name whose music was rarely performed and when performed in arranged Suites like Richard Strauss’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This changed with the revival of historically accurate performances of French Baroque Opera from the 1970’s on. The leading conductors in this movement are the English William Christie, the Belgian Philippe Herreweghe and the French Marc Minkowski. These conductors have recorded splendid and authentic performances of Lully’s music.