Géraldine Gaudefroy-Demombynes
Achille et Polyxène (1687): the Trojan war and a plea
for peace at the Académie royale de musique
T
he subject chosen for a French opera during
the Ancien Régime resulted from an enlightened, meticulous assessment that determined its
political scope and its musical and theatrical effects.
The preoccupation with a ‘good subject’, which was
‘hard to select’, is notably in evidence in a letter of 13
January 1695 from the scholar Louis Ladvocat to the
abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, author of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719), in which
he was to offer an overall theory of tragic pleasure.
‘Subjects from the Metamorphoses’, Ladvocat also
wrote, ‘do not make good operas’.1
During the reign of Louis XIV, the ‘Petite Académie’
(created by Colbert on the model of the artistic policies of Augustus, which held even the least docile artists in subjugation) oversaw the efficacy of all opera
librettos after the king had made his choice.2 Librettos
were considered privileged vectors for the assertion of
royal absolutism, as can be seen from the 13 tragédies
set to music by Jean-Baptiste Lully between 1673 and
1686.3 In the view of the ‘Petite Académie’, poetry,
owing to its fictional power, was the most efficient
form of memorialization, since it ‘resisted time’.4
The score of Achille et Polyxène, left unfinished
by Lully, the ‘Surintendant de la Musique du Roi’
(Overture and Act 1), was completed in a few months
by Pascal Collasse (Prologue and Acts 2–5), the
‘Maître de la Chapelle du roi’ and ‘compositeur de
la Musique de la Chambre’.5 The score was set to a
libretto by Jean Galbert de Campistron, a member of
the Académie française from 1701. Having been Lully’s
secretary since 1677 and composer of the ‘middle
parts’ of his orchestrations, Collasse was familiar in
every respect with the Florentine composer’s writing.
Dedicating the opera to Louis XIV, he stressed that he
had endured ‘unbelievable fatigue over the twelve full
years when he worked with the world’s most skilful
man in bringing forth the productions of his Genius’.6
Inspired by Homer’s Iliad, the opera was unveiled
before the Parisian public on 23 November 1687 by
Jean-Nicolas de Francine, the new director of the
Académie royale de musique, in association with
Lully’s heirs (as per a royal brevet of 27 June 1687).7
At that time, scholarly milieus were rediscovering
Homer, as evidenced by the work of Anne Dacier8
and the abbé Terrasson,9 but the operatic stage preceded even these publications. In this opera, the
Iliad was combined with a post-Homeric myth
treated by Dictys, narrating the passion of Achilles
for the Trojan princess Polyxena. The fratricidal war
between the two peoples, symbolized by the treacherous Paris—who wishes for the fighting to resume in
order not to give up Helen, while avenging his brother
Hector—quickly brings to an end their love and marriage prospects. The final catastrophe, inspired by
the death of Dido (Aeneid, Book 4), shows Polyxena,
terrified by the spectre of her ‘husband’, immolating
herself near the temple of Apollo with the arrow that
killed the Greek hero. Contemporary Italian opera,
by contrast, was concerned with the love affair of
Achilles and Deidamia, the subject of several works,
all with a lieto fine (happy ending).10
References to epic poetry, other than to Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, were already in evidence in the
last two tragédies en musique by Philippe Quinault
and Jean-Baptiste Lully: Roland (1685, after Ariosto)
and Armide (1686, after Tasso).11 Though inspired by
Homer, these Renaissance Christian epics differed
Early Music, Vol. xliii, No. 3 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press.
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397
in one crucial respect: in the words of Michel
Woronoff, ‘the originality [of the Iliad] is to describe
a war in which the defeated are as worthy of esteem
as their victors and more worthy of pity’.12
As Amy Wygant has argued, the closeness between
ancient classical sources and the plots of the librettos is not a good starting point for understanding
the peculiar aesthetics of the tragédie en musique;
one should, rather, take advantage of the ‘distance’
(the metaphorical use of the ‘ghost of Alcestis’) that
exists between the Greek subject matter and the
modern world to identify the values defended by
Ancien Régime poets and musicians.13 It should also
be borne in mind that the tragédie en musique, from
Lully to Rameau, was codified by the standards of
French neoclassical tragedy,14 sustained by a ‘verisimilitude of the supernatural’ (to borrow Catherine
Kintzler’s phrase),15 which was particularly original
and efficient from an aesthetic standpoint.
While these dramatic and aesthetic strategies
appear strikingly consistent, it is necessary from a
political perspective to shed light on a certain degree
of ideological ambivalence and disentangle a complex web of ‘ideological voices’.16 Indeed, given the
bellicose, intolerant policies of the ‘Roi de guerre’,
there were, in France, more or less covert signs of
resistance and dissent in certain spheres of influence, even within the king’s entourage.17 A ‘court
of Meudon’18 gathered around the Grand Dauphin,
while another such circle was dominated by the figure of Louis Joseph de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme.
When Louis XIV stopped attending operas after
Armide (under the pressure of the dévots and the
clergy and the influence of Mme de Maintenon,
leading to Quinault’s retirement and Lully’s disgrace),19 the influences of the Grand Dauphin and
the ‘Grand Vendôme’ (and his brother Philippe,
the ‘Grand Prieur’) were strengthened. It was at the
château of Anet, residence of the Vendôme princes,
that Campistron’s and Lully’s pastorale héroïque
Acis et Galatée was staged on 6 September 1686
in honour of the Grand Dauphin. Campistron,20
a member of ‘Racine’s school’,21 was secretary to
Vendôme. The references to Achilles and Patroclus
(‘friend of Achilles’ in the libretto), a locus classicus of homoerotic love,22 and the virile chorus of
the ‘Greek Soldiers and Chiefs’ might thus be seen
as signs that the opera’s genesis took place within
398 Early Music AUGUST 2015
the freethinking community to which librettist
and composer both belonged; as Georgia Cowart
has shown, the Vendômes’ circle was open to other
sensibilities, especially poetic and ideological.23
During the same period (as early as 1681 and also
outside Versailles and its climate of austerity), there
appeared a musical circle of ‘resistance to the monarchy’,24 which promoted the Italian style, with the
blessing of Philippe d’Orléans.
At this critical juncture in the history of absolute monarchy and of Louis XIV’s attitude towards
opera, which also corresponds to a period of ‘literary
crisis’,25 it is interesting to examine this first French
operatic contribution to the ‘refiguring of Troy’,
based on the myth of Achilles and Polyxena, just at
the moment when the fall of Troy appears as imminent and ineluctable. How did tragédie en musique
relate to an ideology opposed to that of absolutism?
Did ‘overtly political themes’, ‘generally thought illsuited to opera’, as Graham Sadler has noted,26 find a
major exception in Achille et Polyxène?
Homer at the Académie royale de musique:
from a warlike epic to a plea for peace
In a previous article27 I surveyed the long mythical and literary tradition surrounding Achilles and
Polyxena, from the nostos (homecoming) compiled by Stesichorus to the fragment of Sophocles’s
Polyxena28 and right through to the six 17th-century
spoken tragedies. The 1687 work is not an ‘operatic
reproduction’ of any of these plays; however, the one
by Isaac de Benserade (1613–91) shows a number of
similarities to it. Campistron’s libretto belongs in a
singular way to this complex poetic web and is characteristic of the ties between humanistic theatre and
the tragédie en musique.29 The performance, it should
be said, was met with a lukewarm reception at the
Académie royale de musique and was even the object
of a cabal, resulting from the highly sensitive rivalry
between Collasse and Lully’s sons.30 According to
the Nouvelles extraordinaires de divers endroits for 4
December 1687, the Grand Dauphin, for his part, was
‘so satisfied’ with the opera that he rewarded Francine
with ‘500 Louis’.31 At a time when tragédies en musique
were seldom revived, the opera was performed again
on 11 October 1712, with a new prologue. The work
was also staged in Hamburg in 1697, though at the
time French operas were little known in Germany.32
Significantly, Campistron approached his task by
taking up Quinault and Lully’s attempts in Alceste
to reappropriate the Greek tradition. In addition to
the characters themselves, thematic, geographical
and theatrical parallels can all be found between
Alceste and Achille et Polyxène. The 1687 opera was
doubtless seen by Campistron and Lully as a kind of
‘mythological continuation’ of the 1674 opera.
In her discussion of the illusory nature of
spectacles and the various propaganda systems
for which it was a vehicle, Georgia Cowart has
referred to the spectacle as ‘an intertextual or dialogic system’ resorting to a vast array of means,
especially allusion.33 Ambivalent ‘allusions’ in
Quinault’s librettos show that the poet, a member
of the ‘Petite Académie’, was no unconditional supporter of absolute monarchy.34 As Buford Norman
has noted, ‘Quinault also points out that the arts
are neglected at the expense of war and evokes
the dangers of such a choice’ and between 1673
and 1683 ‘seven out of eight libretti show a hero
[opposed] to the established power’.35 Quinault
emphasizes conflicts between ‘guerre/victoire/
gloire’ and ‘amours/plaisirs/harmonie/paix’, a tension climaxing in Roland. Yet Roland gives up
love and returns to the pursuit of military glory.
L’Amour is thus described as an important power,
yet inferior to la Gloire, and one even linked to
a physical and moral weakening, a ‘love sickness’
opposed to heroism, as Rebecca Harris-Warrick
has pointed out.36 In the prologue to Armide,
Wisdom and Glory are rivals but are soon—as a
stage direction indicates—to reach ‘perfect understanding’, their concord being exalted in terms of
choreographic union. In Armide, Quinault staged
the greatness of the triumph of reason over passions and of ‘a plea to peace in the kingdom’ as
his themes, while referring to the Revocation of
the Edict of Nantes as a twofold allegory of the
triumph of Louis le Grand over the Turks and
‘the Protestant heresy’.37 In more ways than one,
the libretto of a tragédie en musique, especially
of the ‘epic’ variety, can thus be seen as paradoxical.38 Its recurrent ‘pleas for peace’ were evidently
the expression of ‘the official position of the Petite
Académie’, whose members exhibited a ‘moderation not to be found in most other encomiasts’.39
Campistron, however, went much further.
Campistron was indeed the heir to this literary current, which predisposed him towards antiestablishment political allusion, for example in his
Phraate, which was banned after three performances
at the Comédie Française in 1686.40 His Arminius
(1684), another fairly successful tragedy, referred to
the interpretation of 16th-century German humanists, who presented ‘the Arminius story as an allegory of German unity and freedom from the tyranny
of Catholic Italy, Spain, and France’.41 Campistron’s
sensibility predisposed him towards the themes of
liberty and resistance to tyranny, and in the bellicose
framework of the ‘Trojan matter’ the poet found
openings into love and peace.
From the very prologue, a dedicated propaganda
tool for the absolute monarch, explicit political allusions, not only textual but also musical and theatrical, appear in Achille et Polyxène. First, three
Muses lament their sudden disfavour, the great art
patron and commissioner that was Louis XIV having abandoned the Opéra. Reversing the triumphant
arrival of Melpomene (Muse of Tragedy), accompanied by a ‘troop of heroes’ in Atys (Prélude pour
Melpomène in C major in the style of a French overture), Campistron depicts the tragic muse without
retinue and lamenting. Collasse, besides, supplied
only a Prélude (G major, ternary rhythm, 16 bars)
instead of the standard Ouverture, French opera’s
most famous ‘trademark’ (an Ouverture in C major,
by Lully, does introduce Act 1, yet the symmetry of
the repeat was broken for the first time). Moreover
Campistron, while retaining the traditional hyperbolic language, renders Louis’s thirst for conquering responsible for the desolation of the theatre, a
notorious metaphor for the world (and in the recent
context of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, possibly also a metaphor for the ‘promptly demolished’
Protestant places of worship). Jupiter depicts the ruling monarch through the figure of Achilles, who is
called a ‘perfect hero’, while the ‘goodness’ and ‘wisdom’ supposedly dominant in Louis XIV are lauded
ironically (‘Sa valeur, sa bonté, sa sagesse profonde’);
these two virtues are crucial to the political stakes of
the libretto, namely, what is an ‘ideal monarch’?
The first allusion to Persée can be detected when
the recorders announce Mercury’s arrival.42 A single ‘Palace’, a standard set at the Académie royale
de musique traditionally associated with Louis’s
Early Music AUGUST 2015 399
magnificence, figures among the sets for Achille et
Polyxène—and it is that of the old, barbarian king.
Using the word-frequency statistical method (counting occurrences, independently from repetitions of
various types), we can also highlight not only dominant linguistic patterns, but also the nature of the
thematic duality introduced by Campistron: there is
indeed an opposition between what has been called
‘the rhetoric of peace, happy passions, life, and freedom’43 and ‘the rhetoric of war, sad passions, death,
and oppression’.44 The word ‘héros’ (20 occurrences)
is applied first to the warlike, then to the peaceful
side of Achilles. The word ‘paix’ recurs 13 times, the
phrases ‘lieux paisibles/heureux, séjours tranquilles’
eight times (including ‘cour tranquille’, four times).
A complete reversal of values is thus achieved: war is
no longer organically linked to ‘monarchical order’,
it drives all peoples to war against one another as
well as against themselves, thus representing absolute ‘Evil’.45 The dramatic suspense thus hangs on the
following issue: between War, which has lasted nine
years (represented by Paris, Juno and the ‘captive’
Briseis), and Peace (figured by the lovers, Venus,
Cupid, Priam, the Shepherds and the Trojans, eventually joined by the Greeks), which is going to win?46
Campistron’s modern Achilles retains the bellicose nature of the character in Act 1 and part of
Act 2 of the libretto. The librettist also reproduced
his softer sides, namely his homo- and heterosexual
eroticism and his gift for singing and the cithara. In
the libretto, Achilles feels ‘a friendship that was ever
so tender’ towards his ‘generous friend’ Patroclus
(1.1) and a reciprocated love for his ‘captive’ princess Briseis; he then clearly expresses his amorous
attraction to Princess Polyxena (‘Je veux la posséder
/ Il est temps de soulager ma peine’, 3.1), his carnal
desire being clearly portrayed in a récitatif accompagné (5.1). One can detect an echo of ‘the object of my
friendship’ (i.e. Patroclus, 1.2) and ‘the object I adore’
(Briseis, 1.2). Campistron condenses seven books of
the Iliad into one act and two scenes. Achilles has
barely killed Hector when his marriage to Polyxena
is scheduled ‘before the day is over’. This observance
of the classical unity of time—no more a ‘rule’ in
French opera than the other unities, as Catherine
Kintzler reminds us—renders the metamorphosis of
Achilles into a hero of peace all the more spectacular
and edifying.
400 Early Music AUGUST 2015
As a result of the revelatory power of the ‘distance’ between Homer’s Iliad and the French opera,
the figure of Achilles is totally reversed when compared to tradition,47 as is the political power and its
need for glorification. In this respect, Achilles recalls
Quinault’s Alcide in Alceste: not only are the two
heroes not ridiculous in ‘modern’ eyes, they embody
values that were highly prized at the time when the
operas were performed.
The sacrifice of Patroclus and the wrath of
Achilles (Act 1, scenes 1–6)
Campistron’s libretto features the emblematic image
of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles. The hero refuses
to participate in the fight after being outraged by
Agamemnon, who stole Briseis (Chryseis in Homer)
from him—the ‘rash Chief ’ having subjected him to
‘[sa] violente loy’ (1.1), a possible allusion to Louis
XIV’s programme of ‘une foy, une loy, un Roy’.
Deploring the losses suffered by the Greeks owing
to his friend’s absence from the battlefield, where
Hector has been distinguishing himself, Patroclus
(basse-taille, bass clef) begs Achilles to let him borrow his armour ‘designed by Vulcan’ and restore the
honour of the Greeks himself. Patroclus then delivers his own fateful augury, uttered in the bellicose
tone familiar from the absolutist rhetoric, in which
‘victoire’ rhymes with ‘mémoire’ (1.3).
Aristotle called such unexpected reversals of fortune peripeteia, here with the announcement of the
death of Patroclus by Arcas, confidant of Achilles
(Antilochus in Homer), interrupting a sensuous
divertissement (1.4–5) located on the isle of Tenedos
(the Turkish Bozcaada). At this point Campistron
introduces a theme dear to him, that of maternal
love, since Achilles recalls it was his mother, Thetis,
who urged Venus to visit him every day to ‘[end
his] regrets’ and ‘[suspend] his sighs’, the followers
of the goddess being ‘of great help against the darkest sadness’ (1.3). Music (combined with dance) is
thus seen as a quasi-medical remedy to the hero’s
pain. In Homer, Achilles actually sings, ‘taming his
worries’ and accompanying himself on the cithara.
In a 40-bar instrumental chaconne in D major in
Lullian style, the mother of Aeneas and the protector of the Trojans in the Iliad ‘appears in the airs
together with Cupid’—as in the final scene of Persée,
in a Bérain-designed set—with the help of machinery and ‘on a chariot surrounded by clouds and
drawn by two swans’.48 Then, in a long instrumental
and vocal passacaglia (in three symmetrical parts:
A major/A minor/A major) of 383 bars (including
repeats), the Graces and Pleasures dance on stage.
While the chaconne and passacaglia (a reference to
the one in Armide, 5.2) correspond to the voluptuous traditional character of those dances and match
the temperament of Achilles, the subsequent dialogue in récitatif simple in A major (1.6)49 seems dry,
brief and cruel for the hero (see ex.1).
Ex.1 Campistron, Lully, Achille et Polyxène, simple recitative (Achille, Diomède, Arcas) ‘O déplorable
coup du sort!’, 1.6 (pp.49–50)
Achille
Je
Arcas
O
Basse-continue
Dé - plo - ra - ble coup du sort !
O
fré - mis,
par - le !
mal - heur !
Pa - tro - cle est
[aux Plaisirs]
Ciel !
quel - le af - freu - se nou - vel - le !
Lais - se - moy, fuy - ez
de ces lieux,
Vos ap - pas,
vos con -
mort.
- certs
- tel
-
et tous
le.
les
soins
des
Cou - rons ven - ger
Dieux
ne sçau - roient plus
cet a - my
-verts ! Que son fier vain - queur pé - ris -
se !
que je
Je dois à
cal
-
perds, Que de sang
l’a - mi - tié
mer
ma
tris - tes
-
se
mor -
et de morts tous ces champs soient cou-
ce jus - te sa - cri - fi -
ce.
Early Music AUGUST 2015 401
The death of his fighting companion having
thus increased his ‘just anger’, the ‘fury’ of Achilles
(haute-contre, tenor clef) prompts him to go back
to fighting the Trojans. In this récitatif simple, then
accompagné, Lully resorts to the rhetorical power of
tonal language50 to convey the hero’s rage and thirst
for revenge, the expression of pathos being concentrated within seven bars, in particular in the line
‘Ciel! quelle affreuse nouvelle’, in which Achilles is
overcome with grief. The emotion is underlined by
a modulation from A major (the main key of the
Venusian divertissement) to F! minor and a rising
chromaticism in the voice. Dismissing the followers
of Venus, still present on stage, Achilles soon regains
control of himself and defies Hector. The warlike
fury that animates him is expressed in a melodic line
based on disjointed intervals, a classic tonal plan—
F!, the relative minor; E, the dominant key; D, the
subdominant), this last key being the one associated
with victory and the triumphant return featured in
Act 2 (scene 2). In a burst of anger, on the line ‘Que
son fier vainqueur périsse!’, the voice reaches the
highest note of its tessitura (B, a rise underlined by
the continuo), after which his love and the memory
of his duty towards Patroclus soften his melodic line
on the line ‘Je dois à l’amitié ce juste sacrifice’ with a
perfect cadence in A major.
As in Benserade, Achilles then launches into an
invocation in A major to Patroclus’s shade, ‘Mânes
de ce guerrier’ (see ex.2), with a short five-bar prelude incorporating a descending chromatic motif
for the basses which is repeated when the voice
enters (marked doux). After two solemn bars, an
angry burst is heard once again, marked by a similar
rise of the voice towards the upper register. All the
orchestral parts hammer out the syllables uttered by
Achilles, especially on the line ‘Je vous promets une
prompte vengeance’. His anger reaches a paroxysm
on the line ‘Je cours chercher Hector, je cours hâter
sa mort’ (chromaticism for the voice, with rapid and
abrupt modulations). In this final scene of the act,
the composer was able to emphasize the question of
Achilles’s fate: the death of Patroclus is to lead him
either to victory or death. Achilles gives his own
fateful augury in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy: in his last line, ‘Ou moy-même aujourd’huy je
cesserai de vivre’, one notes an unusual minor-7th
descent for the voice.
402 Early Music AUGUST 2015
A ‘just sacrifice’, forcing the royal family to buy
back the body of its prince (Act 2, scenes 3–5)
The second emblematic scene derived from the Iliad
(Book 24) is the purchasing of the body of Hector.
Campistron disposed the episode in three scenes
(70 lines), which Collasse set to music in no fewer
than 246 bars.51 For Achilles, avenging Patroclus
is a ‘just sacrifice’ (1.5). The beginning of the third
scene corresponds to the arrival in the Greek camp
of three members of the Trojan royal family: Priam,
his youngest daughter Polyxena and Hector’s widow
Andromache, all accompanied by a ‘Trojan retinue’.
They prepare themselves to beg Achilles to return to
them the body of their hero, son, husband, brother,
and possibly father as well. Dictys, indeed, mentions Hector’s two young children (Astyanax is one
of them) whom Andromache gets to kneel before
Achilles (Book 3, ch.22). In Homer, Hector prays
to Zeus for his son Astyanax, the ‘Trojan Dauphin’,
to become a ruler (6.402–3). According to Nicolas
Tessin le Jeune,52 the 1687 première featured ‘six living children’ (cupids, including the son of Venus)
on stage next to the Cytherean goddess in the Act
1 divertissement; it is thus possible to imagine the
presence of a child at this point. Comforted by a line
for Andromache, the hypothesis would eloquently
double the kind of ‘family pathos’ that was in the process of becoming one of Campistron’s trademarks.
The departure of the joyful, bellicose Greeks and
the solemn entrance of Priam and his court are
depicted in a Prelude recalling the French overture,
but as though reflected in a distorting mirror (dotted notes, imitative entrances for the five orchestral
parts, ternary, indication Gay, G major). Then, in
C major, the composer gives Priam (basse-taille,
bass clef) a sad, soft exhortation, ‘Restes infortunés’
addressed to his daughters, who, like him, need to
use their tears to mollify an infamously inflexible
hero. His recitative, accompanied by the five-part
orchestra (in constant cut time, marked doux), is
introduced by a 24-bar prelude, with its majestic,
grave character and dotted rhythms (especially for
the dessus de violon) recalling the traditional French
overture. Priam’s subsequent intervention (followed
by his court, 4.5) is introduced by an instrumental
air (alla breve, C major, 32 bars), also typical of
the rhythmic, dynamic canons of the French-style
overture.
Ex.2 Campistron, Lully, Achille et Polyxène, accompanied recitative (Achilles) ‘Mânes de ce guerrier’, 1.6 (p.51)
In his evocative music and instrumentation, Collasse
has sought dialectical effects that express at once the
three characters’ distress as well as their moves and
gestures on stage (one of the principles of Lully’s writing), hence the trio of delicate, feminine motifs in the
upper parts (probably for two flutes, but unspecified
in the score) superimposed over the voice of Priam
and alternating with the tutti. These motifs form a
melodic and rhythmic movement that is conjunct,
regular and sweet, based on parallel 3rds which render the mutual tears and graceful, affectionate gestures
of Polyxena (dessus, soprano clef) and Andromache
(dessus, mezzo-soprano clef). The fearful and hopeful
Trojans come together in a 16-bar meditative trio in
C minor, ‘Puissions-nous attendrir le cœur’ (see ex.3).
After the successive entrances of the two upper voices,
the trio remains homorhythmic, expressing the sacred
unity of the family, as shown in the final unison and
Early Music AUGUST 2015 403
Ex.3 Campistron, Collasse, Achille et Polyxène, Trio (Andromache, Polyxena, Priam) ‘Puissions-nous
attendrir le cœur’, 2.4 (p.104)
Andromaque
Puis - sions - nous at - ten- drir
le
coeur
De
ce su - per
-
be vain - queur. Puis - sions - nous at - ten - drir
le
Polyxène
Puis - sions - nous at - ten - drir le
Priam
coeur
De
ce su - per
-
be
vain -
Basse-continue
coeur.
Puis - sions - nous
at - ten - drir
le
coeur
De
ce
su - per
-
be
vain - queur.
Puis - sions -
- queur
.
Puis - sions - nous
at - ten - drir
le
coeur
De
ce
su - per
-
be
vain - queur.
Puis - sions -
Puis - sions - nous
at - ten - drir
le
coeur
De
ce
su - per
-
be
vain - queur.
- nous
at - ten - drir
le
coeur
Puis - sions - nous
at - ten-drir
le
coeur
De
ce su - per
-
be
vain -
- nous
at - ten - drir
le
coeur
Puis - sions - nous
at - ten-drir
le
coeur
De
ce su - per
-
be
vain -
Puis - sions - nous
at - ten-drir
le
coeur
De
ce su - per
-
be
vain -
octave on the last word, a particularly symbolic one in
the absolutist rhetoric, ‘vainqueur’.
The long confrontation with the ‘guerrier indomptable’ (Priam apropos Achilles, 2.5) highlights the
404 Early Music AUGUST 2015
‘family pathos’ while prolonging the musical effects
initiated in the previous scene. The prelude to this
confrontation is an eight-bar sequence in duple time
and trio writing, based on a rising melodic motif,
with imitative entrances, harmonically dominated by
parallel 3rds. The musical depiction of the Trojans on
stage becomes even more manifest since the printed
source at this point specifies two flute parts. The interventions of the two ‘flute princesses’ punctuate their
father’s speech. Reinforcing the ardent plea, Collasse
thus cleverly underlines the turning-point of the
plot. Indeed, it is at the very moment when Polyxena
pleads for the remains of her brother that Achilles falls
in love with the princess. Here Collasse makes full
use of the symbolic power of recorders,53 one of the
most efficient characteristics of Lully’s instrumentation techniques, directly related to the mythological
imagery as disseminated by French classical painting. This ‘Hellenic sound’54 had been put in place by
Pierre Perrin, Antoine Boësset and Robert Cambert.
The technique was taken up by Lully, notably in the
tragicomedy and ballet of Psyché.55 Collasse’s music
completely dissociates—contrary to Armide (prologue)—the sweet sound of ‘Wisdom’ (embodied by
the old king and his daughters) from ‘Glory’ and its
frightening warlike noise (the bellicose Achilles and
his Greeks in the second scene of Act 2), reinforcing
their opposition. Moreover, the composer systematically uses all the resources of the orchestra for the
pleas of the Trojans (in C minor—the key of the Act
4 ‘chaconne troyenne’—with the indication doux)
with a view to gaining Achilles’s compassion. Priam
and Andromache sing a recitative accompanied by the
five-part orchestra, while Polyxena recalls Achilles’s
divine origins in a highly melodic 16-bar récitatif simple before launching the final supplication of the trio,
an equally melodic récitatif accompagné. Conversely,
Achilles sings in major tones (mainly in C) and in a
fairly dry récitatif simple. However, when he resolves
to make peace, after being struck by love (‘Suivez
l’ardeur qui vous anime’), Achilles sings in the most
lyrical form of récitatif accompagné (C major), that is
‘en mesure réglée’ (to borrow Sébastien de Brossard’s
terminology),56 and with the same doux indication as for the three supplicants. Collasse thus uses
the suggestive power of the orchestra to express the
most extreme feelings and the edifying conversion
of Achilles. Then in a monologue in A minor (3.2),
Achilles appears musically ‘pacified’: we can observe
exactly the same principle of writing that characterized the Trojan trio, here sustaining a quiet and sweet
little air (in 3/2 time) preceded by a ritournelle. This
emotional climax of the Iliad served as the frontispiece
of the libretto published by Christophe Ballard in 1703
in his Recueil général des opéras (illus.1). The engraving corresponds to the setting specified in the libretto
at the beginning of Act 2: ‘Le Théâtre représente le
camp des Grecs devant Troye; Cette superbe ville
paroît dans l’éloignement’.57
The divertissements, or the fight between war
and peace
In the opera’s first two acts, there are two contrasting types of embassy to Achilles: that of Diomedes
1 Frontispiece (etching on paper, 120 × 65mm) of Act 2,
scene 5 by F. Ertinger, Achille et Polyxène, libretto (Paris:
C. Ballard, Recueil général des opéras représentés par
l’Académie Royale de Musique depuis son établissement,
1703) (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France)
Early Music AUGUST 2015 405
(1.3), Agamemnon’s envoy (Ulysses in Homer, Book
9), the two ‘Chiefs of the Greek army’ exhorting the
King of Thessalia to return to the fight; and that of
Priam and his daughters, motivated by grief and the
desire for peace (2.3–5). Two long divertissements
figure this dramatic tension between war and peace
in a spectacular way. First, a ‘divertissement guerrier’ (2.2), marking the return of Achilles after his
victory over Hector, is a demonstration of force on
behalf of the Greek army glorifying ‘the invincible
Achilles’. And there is also the ‘divertissement pacifique’ (4.5), in which the Trojans openly rejoice for
the future spouses and celebrate the power of love,
which makes peace possible. The predominance of
these last two values is clear: out of a total of five
divertissements, four sing the pleasures of love and/
or peace; they are contrasted not only with the Act
2 ‘divertissement guerrier’ but also to the infernal
episode (a type of ‘horrific supernatural’, to borrow Kintzler’s phrase) exalting the furies of war
and vengeance associated with hatred and jealousy
(3.6–7). Briseis invokes Juno/Hera (protector of the
Acheans in the Iliad), who descends in her chariot,
invoking Hatred, Fury, Discord and Envy, while the
libretto specifies: ‘Dans le temps que les Divinitez
sortent des Enfers, tout le Théâtre est obscurcy’.58 The
‘hundred various prodigies’ announced by Juno are
displayed in the form of an 18-bar Air des Furies (G
minor, in binary form, with repeat) corresponding
to the dances of the allegories and the ‘Followers of
Discord’. War is thus associated with ‘infernal night’,
whereas the pastoral divertissement that follows
(3.9) is linked to the ‘Sun’ and the rebirth of nature,
which here symbolizes the restoration of peace.
The ‘divertissement guerrier’ (32 lines without the
choral repeats, 256 bars without the repeats) shows
how Campistron invents a scene by means of ‘literary
expansion’—Homer had made no mention of a triumphant return. Indeed the praise Achilles receives
functions as a narrative, pictorial,59 sonic, choreographic and theatrical symbol of warlike power and
glory as they relate to the quasi ‘petrified’60 ‘fabrication’61 of the image of Louis XIV, of which Alceste,
Thésée,62 Bellérophon63 and Persée are significant
testimonies. In the 1687 divertissement, this unavoidable topos of the absolute monarchy is significantly amplified and transformed: a Marche pour
les trompettes in D major (in 2/2 time), in rondeau
406 Early Music AUGUST 2015
form; and a four-part male chorus (alto, tenor, baritone and bass clefs)—an unusual option (with only a
few examples in Lully, in a magical or infernal context, which could be another allusion)64—to which
Collasse adds full orchestral forces, including trumpets and timpani. In the prologue, the Thessalian
king was already presented (twice) as ‘l’invincible
Achille’ and ‘the greatest of heroes’ (1.4), ‘who always
[triumphs]’ over ‘Hatred and Envy’ (1.5). This second scene of Act 2 is a concentration of absolutist
rhetoric. The ‘divertissement guerrier’ comprises
30 musical sections, built on an internal extension
of the rondeau principle. The form is first used in
the overall structure: two large-scale choruses serving as refrains, the first ‘Guerrier terrible’ (see ex.4),
initially espoused by a Greek chief, and the second
‘Chantez/Chantons la valeur et la gloire’, initially
espoused by two Greek captains; this latter grand
chœur returns at irregular intervals during many of
the interludes, which can be called ‘rondeaux pour
les trompettes’. Three gigues (including one for the
voices) serve as pivots between the two rondeaux.
Collasse draws effects from both the instrumentation and the polyphonic structure. In the first rondeau, the air/chorus alternation is underlined by
the alternation solo continuo/Chœur des trompettes
(tutti). A less usual device, in the second, more
modulating rondeau, is the multiple, irregular repetitions of the verses and refrains by the grand chœur
and the duo of Greek Captains (alto clef, hautecontre; tenor clef, taille), parallel to the instrumental
alternation (violins or trumpets and timpani) in the
interludes. This highly elaborate ‘marche grecque
triomphale en rondeau’ not only resonates like an
infinite, ironical echo of the absolutist rhetoric, it
also shows much sonic and staging potential which
testifies to a theatrical sense at least equal to Lully’s.
The ‘divertissement pacifique’, sung and danced
by the Trojans (4.5) before Arcas, Achilles’s ambassador for his marriage proposal, celebrates the power
of desire and love, capable of transforming the most
bellicose king into a ‘champion of peace’. It features
one of the themes dear to Quinault, the link between
peace and the flowering of the arts.
The imposing instrumental and vocal chaconne
(24 lines, not counting the choral repetitions,
552 original bars without indications of repeat, 15
musical sections) belongs to the erotic and exotic
Ex.4 Campistron, Collasse, Achille et Polyxène, Chorus (Greek Soldiers and Chiefs) ‘Guerrier terrible’, 2.2 (p.63)
tradition of this dance,65 and responds in a magisterial fashion to Lully’s ‘Chaconne pour la descente
de Vénus’ and ‘Passacaille des Grâces et des Plaisirs’
in scenes 4–5 of Act 1 of the same opera. With its
cyclical power, it introduces a suspension of time
in the interest of a hope for peace between two
enemy peoples. Beside being characteristic traits of
Lully’s works,66 the chaconne and passacaglia (found
together also in Acis et Galatée) form a group of
four ground basses, along with the récitatif accompagné of Briseis ‘Qu’est devenu l’amour dont vous
brûliez pour moy?’ (3.5, Collasse). This chaconne by
Collasse is much more complex than those by Lully,
with their simple moves to the dominant and the
subdominant, their diatonic effect, and their limited
ambitus. Polyxena—whose ‘charms … disarm [her]
enemies’—is the object of an extended homage on
the part of the Trojans, as witnessed by the air of
a Trojan (haute-contre, alto clef), ‘Vos beaux yeux,
adorable princesse’ (see ex.5).
There is no room here to bring to light the entire
architecture of this ‘Trojan chaconne’. It will suffice
Early Music AUGUST 2015 407
Ex.4 Continued
[Chefs et soldats Grecs]
Guer
-
rier ter - ri
-
ble,
So - yez
tou - jours
in
-
vin
-
ci
-
ble,
Guer
-
rier ter - ri
-
ble,
So - yez
tou - jours
in
-
vin
-
ci
-
ble,
Guer
-
rier ter - ri
-
ble,
So - yez
tou - jours
in
-
vin
-
ci
-
ble,
Guer
-
rier ter - ri
-
ble,
So - yez
tou - jours
in
-
vin
-
ci
-
ble,
Trompettes
Tymbales
B. C.
to list Collasse’s principal techniques, which, while
challenging the Lullian model, expressively translate
in audible terms the joy, tenderness and sweetness
expressed towards Polyxena while dark omens hover
over the characters. Collasse utilizes every available
vocal form: air, duo, trio, petit chœur and grand
chœur. Their melodic profiles are characterized by
a fairly wide ambitus, a tense upper register for the
high voices, with clashes of 7ths caused by appoggiaturas. Oscillating between two modes of the key of
C, Collasse launches into highly complex variations
408 Early Music AUGUST 2015
around two motifs for the bass, including the traditional tetrachord (descending, in C major for the
first instrumental section of the chaconne): while
still perceptible despite modulations (all from neighbouring keys), the ostinato is based on different harmonic cycles and exhibits rhythmic and harmonic
variations (including chromatic movements). Like
the ‘Greek March’, the ‘Trojan chaconne’ contains
numerous interpolations67 (one of them marked
Lentement et doux), except that here they are particularly long. A single ‘roulade’ (to borrow the term
Ex.4 Continued
of Lecerf de la Viéville) in the section ‘Que l’amour
est puissant sur les cœurs / Il enchaîne sans peine
les plus redoutables vainqueurs’ (air and petit chœur
for the Trojans) is a rare instance of imitation in a
chaconne movement. Last, Collasse further stresses
the tragic irony and underlines the fragile character
of glory with an effect of textual symmetry:
2.2 Chefs et Soldats Grecs: ‘Que vos exploits / Fassent
trembler tous les Roys’ (‘Let your glorious feats make all
kings tremble’), D major
4.5 Troyens et Troyennes: ‘Un Héros dont le nom fait
trembler tous [les]68 Roys’ (‘A hero whose name makes all
kings tremble’), C minor
The joy and hope expressed by the Trojans are thus
tainted with a sombre colour, beginning with the
death, that very day, of their hero Hector; the key of
C minor may also foreshadow the impending death
of the hero of the other side. Life and peace alike
appear utterly fragile, even as the inherent hypnotic
whirl of the chaconne (ground bass, closed and
repetitive forms, haunting ternary rhythm) holds
back time and maintains the suspense. To the chorus
and group of virile Greek warriors celebrating the
glory of Achilles with their songs and dances (march,
rhythmic dominance, melodic and rhythmic simplicity, military tutti, four-part male chorus), the
Early Music AUGUST 2015 409
Ex.5 Campistron, Collasse, Achille et Polyxène, air (a Trojan), ‘Vos beaux yeux, adorable princesse’, 4.5 (pp.233–4)
chorus and group of Trojans of both sexes respond
with their graceful songs and dances celebrating the
power of love in bringing forth peace (melodically
refined chaconne, complex harmony, doux indication, emphasis on the violins, four-part mixed
chorus). The textual motif, previously expressed in
all its male, brutal force, here takes on a feminine,
melancholy, anxious and even sinister aspect. By
the standards of the dramatic chaconne, as studied
by Rebecca Harris-Warrick69 in the case of Roland
(3.6), Campistron and Collasse here rival Quinault’s
and Lully’s semantic brilliance and musical theatricality, introducing an ‘ironical distance’ underlying
an ideological reversal. Collasse, described as ‘more
adventurous’ by Caroline Wood,70 can even be said
to surpass his master greatly in terms of the chorus
and dance development on a ground bass.
The lovers’ sacrifice at the temple of Apollo,
and the death of peace
The tragic destiny of the two lovers is played out on
the same stage: inside and in front of the temple of
Apollo, an especially symbolic setting in terms of
410 Early Music AUGUST 2015
sacrificial ritual, as can be seen both in Greek history and in Greek tragedy.71 In the Iliad, Apollo
is the tutelary god of the Trojans and of Hector—
whom he ultimately abandons. In the ballet de cour
and French opera he is the god most often identified
with Louis XIV—aged 16, in 1654, the king appeared
in the part in the opening scene of Les Noces de Pélée
et de Thétis. A warlike god, a sun god and the god of
the arts, he became the tutelary god of the Académie
royale de musique. Here, the sanctuary of Apollo
witnesses the separation of the lovers. Apollo is the
one ‘guiding’ Paris (offstage in Campistron as in
Benserade, which underlines his furtive, shady side)
towards Achilles’ heel.
In the first scene of Act 5, Priam leads his daughter
there with a view to sealing on the ‘altars’ the sacred
vows of her marriage to Achilles. A chorus and troupe
of Greeks follow Achilles and Arcas, while a chorus
and troupe of Trojans (including ‘Trojan girls’) follow Priam and Polyxena; all rejoice in a divertissement (A minor, 296 bars without the repeats) over
the impending union (5.3). At Priam’s urging, the
two peoples ‘join their voices’ to ‘sing the virtues and
happiness of Achilles’. One final time, a ‘trio of flutes’
is heard in a rondeau, a sad and melancholy echo of
the one in Act 2, after which Achilles and Polyxena
sing the only duet of the opera (A minor, 18 bars),
‘Ne perdons plus de précieux moments’. Just before
the offstage murder of Achilles, a furious Briseis
appears: ‘Mon amour outragé demande une victime,
Courons, courons l’immoler ou périr’ (scene 4). The
fifth scene includes the following stage direction:
‘Briséis, Choeur de Grecs qui sortent en désordre
du Temple d’Apollon, Arcas’.72 Greeks among the
‘Followers of Achilles’ (in the middle ground), terrified by the death of their hero, form the grand chœur
in A major, ‘Fuyons, fuyons une mort certaine / Nous
n’avons plus de défenseur’, which Collasse sets in 2/2
time and with a quick, descending motif with imitative entrances. The atomization of chorus members
on stage (resulting from the panic of the Greeks),
whereas the two peoples were previously united,
may be an inverted reference to the three well-structured choral groups of Persée (4.1, ‘Courons, courons
tous admirer / Le vainqueur de Méduse’), in which
the Ethiopians eagerly pay homage to Perseus; we
can also take note of the common textual repetition
and rhyme, in addition to the word already used by
Briseis.
The failure of peace is thus postponed to the very
end of the tragedy, with the death of Achilles (offstage, like the deaths of Patroclus and Hector) and
the suicide of the princess; this single violent scene
in the opera was a novelty at the Académie royale
de musique. Her ultimate soliloquy ‘Va punir les
Troyens’ brings the opera to an abrupt close (5.7).
Here Campistron follows the modern tragic psychology embodied by his master, Racine, who
restored the ‘fashion’ of soliloquies. Polyxena’s feelings towards Achilles come through powerfully. At
no time is she treated as an accomplice in Paris’s
crime, by contrast with ancient sources (Dyctis,
for one) or neoclassical ones (like Benserade). She
is therefore a pure heroine, prompted by amorous
despair, who chooses to sacrifice herself with full
consent in order to remain faithful to the manes
(soul) of Achilles, thus becoming an expiatory victim for his murder. This exemplar of a ‘heroic suicide’ may evoke the cult of the ‘courageous woman’
lauded by Jesuits during the Counter-Reformation.73
The idea of ‘feminine glory’ which Polyxena stands
for (‘Ah! n’est-il pas moins glorieux / De le venger
que de le suivre?’, 5.7) may be compared to the
attempts by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, a major figure of ‘culture mondaine’, to subvert the absolutist
ideology in its very stereotypes throughout her own
‘Contes de fées’, as Anne E. Duggan has shown.74 In
this monologue of Polyxena, no mention is made
of a ‘stage’ apparition of Achilles’s shade: the infernal image is conveyed through the sole voice of the
princess. At a paroxysm of fright (anapaests scanned
with long musical values), Polyxena imagines she
sees ‘her husband on the infernal bank’, an ‘angry
Shade’ whose cries she can hear (a dialogue and
‘noise’ rendered in the orchestra with a repetitive
rhythm, swift rising figurations for the upper violins
and various notated variations of intensity—fort,
doux). In this final soliloquy for Polyxena in récitatif
accompagné, Collasse, once again, uses orchestral
textures (as he does in the dialogue with Briseis); he
is evidently the first modern composer to do without writing for strings in five parts (with a ‘modern’
arrangement in four parts). In similar passages (for
instance, the final monologue of Armide, 5.5), Lully
always maintained the five orchestral parts, with the
violas divided into three inner parts.75 In the last ten
bars of the opera, it can be seen that the disposition
of the parts, with that low Ey for the Tailles (which in
five parts would no doubt be played by the Quintes),
was indeed conceived for four. It is not writing in
five that would be missing a part. Very rarely did the
Dessus play on the fourth string. The low arrangement of the orchestra on ‘Je meurs’ makes complete
sense.
*
After Achille et Polyxène and until 1732, 26 tragédies
en musique out of the 62 staged at the Académie royale de musique during the same period were based
on epic cycles, 21 of them on the Trojan cycle taken in
a broad sense. This choice of critical moments of the
Trojan War is significant in this period when absolute monarchy was declining, a period otherwise
referred to as ‘the end of the performative phase’ of
the reign of Louis XIV (as Jean-Marie Apostolidès
phrases it). By 1687 the king was confronted with the
human, economic and religious disasters of his bellicose European policies, which could have led him
to reflect on the fragility of power and life and on
Early Music AUGUST 2015 4 11
human destiny. These universal questions were, in
any event, in the minds of authors of operas such
as Campistron, Lully and Collasse, who in this work
gave a new emotional power to the genre of the tragédie en musique. They did so by combining sensuous and aesthetic pleasure and a moral lesson, in
which the divertissements take an active part, since
their rituals of celebration carry the strongest message of the libretto: essentially a protest, it is part of
an ‘anti-war’ trend already evidenced in the theatre
under Louis XIII.76 This counter-ideology was all the
more remarkable since, as Jean Rohou has pointed
out, ‘absolutism is an anti-humanist religion’.77 As
Georgia Cowart has noted, the ‘literature of protest’ grew in intensity in that period.78 In Achille et
Polyxène, as its character of a moral warning shows,
the ideological reversal reveals a sophisticated protest model, more so by necessity than that in the
operas staged in the Venetian Republic in the 17th
century, which ‘show with an obvious didactic intention the abuses and crimes of tyranny’.79 Already in
1672, Quinault, in a sonnet published in his collection À la gloire de Louis le Grand, warned Louis XIV
by using the figure of Achilles.80 Perrault, for his part,
reminded Louis XIV in his ‘Harangue pour la paix’
(1678)81 that war was not inevitable and that peace,
in order to be durable, demanded ‘heroic virtues’
that ‘VÔTRE MAJESTÉ’ could exhibit in addition
to all others. Nine years later, and after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the authors of Achille et
Polyxène achieved a solemn and edifying invocation
to peace in the context of the revival of Préciosité
in the Vendôme circle. The ‘Sun King’ remained all
the more deaf to the 1687 supplication as he failed to
attend a performance of the opera. But the image of
absolute power on which the official historiography
rested was fissured thanks to the use of tragic irony
based on a constant manipulation of the topoi and
canons of the Lullian tragédie en musique.
In the opening dialogue of his Parallèles des
Anciens et des Modernes,82 published from 1688
onwards, Perrault went on to denounce wars and
their ravages, which caused nations to decline
culturally and economically. In Les Aventures de
Télémaque (1699), Fénelon extolled the art of making peoples happy by avoiding wars and creating the
conditions of prosperity.83 The ideal of the enlightened monarch, full of self-control, magnanimous
412 Early Music AUGUST 2015
and loved by his subjects, was contrasted with the
figure of the tyrant. Like Fénelon himself, Quinault,84
Lully and Campistron experienced the rigours of
Louis XIV’s disfavour and censorship.
Hopes that the ‘War King’ might at last become a
‘Peace King’ like the ‘sage’ and ‘generous’85 Achilles
thus had to be transferred to the monarch’s only surviving legitimate child, the Grand Dauphin, protector
of free-thinking and humanist milieus. Campistron’s
Christian reinterpretation of the Augustan virtues
sung by Virgil86 comforted the Grand Dauphin’s
benevolent image. Louis XIV’s son, who, unlike his
father, regularly attended opera performances, was
thus invited to witness the decline and the renaissance of the figure of the hero. Was the Académie
royale de musique thus an early site of the struggle
‘against the absolutism of despotic kings’ and for
the promotion of the ‘positive civilizing hero’? Does
this tragédie en musique, a precursor of the political
stakes of opera seria, render the ‘myth of the clement prince’ compatible with the ‘myth of freedom’?87
In 1715, the abbé Terrasson stated, in any case, that
‘the opera [is] generally more useful to princes than
the tragedy’,88 and viewed this type of spectacle as a
vehicle for moral instruction.
Achilles and Polyxena, broken by their fatal destinies and vain sacrifices, could thus be seen as ‘tragic
pacifist heroes’. While emphasizing the Epicurean
happiness associated with the values of freedom,
this opera is characterized by its pessimism, or at
least a profound disillusion concerning the human
soul.89 However, in the Homeric tradition, which
Campistron faithfully observed, the Iliad leaves room
for hope, embodied by Aeneas, about whom Poseidon
predicts that the hero and his children’s children will
rule the Trojans (Iliad, 7.478; 20.306–8). Power having
been transferred to the junior branch of the Aeneads,
Ascanius would thus be the ‘second Trojan Dauphin’,
who, unlike Astyanax, will be saved. Aeneas, precisely,
was chosen by Fontenelle and Collasse as the hero of
their Énée et Lavinie, premiered at the Académie royale de musique on 16 December 1690.
Despite censorship, a spirit of critical reason and
ideological freedom are at work in this opera, reflecting the creative independence of its three authors.
Free at last from the yoke of Louis XIV, who had
lost interest in opera to the point of tolerating in it a
degree of subversion, they were also free of the yoke
of its model, regular tragedy, a genre that was even
being rejuvenated under the influence of operatic
poetry; and Collasse himself was also free of the yoke
of Lully, who had held on to his monopoly on tragédie en musique until his dying breath. Campistron,
reinterpreting the Iliad in a modern, highly efficient
way, and Collasse manifested their aesthetic freedom
by appropriating works, scenes and styles that served
above all the purposes of opera, without being inconvenienced or shackled by literary and operatic tradition or Neoclassical and Baroque conventions. In
this respect they were innovators.
We should not be surprised that the tragédie
en musique Thétis et Pélée (1689)90 by Bernard de
Fontenelle91 and Collasse was one of the greatest
triumphs in the repertory of the Académie royale
de musique, with numerous revivals, even beyond
1750,92 an opera that actually predicted the birth of
the hero Achilles (3.7–8). With their portrayal of
three Thessalian kings, Alceste, Achille et Polyxène
and Thétis et Pélée form a trilogy—a tetralogy with
Énée et Lavinie thrown in—particularly rich for the
future development of opera.
Translated by Vincent Giroud
Géraldine Gaudefroy-Demombynes is Associate Professor of Musicology, Musicology attached to laboratory ELLIADD (EA4661), University of Franche-Comté, and was Head of the Musicology Department
(2003–13), visiting scholar at CNRS/IRPMF (2010–11), and prize-winner of the ‘Fondation Marcelle et
Robert de Lacour pour la musique et la danse’ (1999). An expert on French opera and the Paris Opéra
in the Ancien Régime, she is attached to the Laboratório de Música Antiga da UFPR, and the Grupo de
Pesquisa ‘Música Antiga: Repertórios e desdobramentos teóricos e práticos’ (Curitiba, Brazil). Her critical
edition of Desmarest’s Didon was published by CMBV and Musica Gallica in 2003. In 2012, she established the first Catalogue of operatic works staged at the Académie royale de musique 1669–1791, with a
view to publishing a Dictionary of the Paris Opéra, which she initiated, and established a Catalogue of
the 62 librettos of tragédie en musique (1687–1732). gé[email protected]
This article is dedicated to Georgie
Durosoir.
For their help and advice, thanks are
due to John S. Powell, Silvana Scarinci,
Michel Noiray, Buford Norman, Gérard
Geay, Philippe Brunet, François Cam,
Michel Savaric, Vincent Giroud,
Jonathan Raymond, Hélène GaudefroyDemombynes and Sofia Alexandra.
1 Lettres sur l’Opéra à l’abbé Dubos,
ed. J. de La Gorce (Paris, 1993), pp.37
and 29.
2 See M. Couvreur, Jean-Baptiste
Lully: Musique et dramaturgie au
service du prince (Brussels, 1992),
pp.52–63.
3 See D. A. Thomas, Aesthetics of
opera in the ancien régime: 1647–1785
(Cambridge, 2002), p.66.
4 Thomas, Aesthetics of opera, p.67.
5 On Collasse, see C. Wood, Music
and drama in the tragédie en
musique, 1673–1715: Jean-Baptiste
Lully and his successors (New
York, 1996); see also L. Naudeix,
Dramaturgie de la tragédie en
musique (1673–1764) (Paris, 2004).
6 Cited from the Partition générale
imprimée (Paris, 1687).
7 See J. de La Gorce, L’Opéra à Paris
au temps de Louis XIV (Paris, 1992),
pp.84–6.
8 Translator of the Iliad (1711) and the
Odyssey (1716).
9 See his Dissertation critique sur
l’Iliade d’Homère, 2 vols. (Paris, 1715).
10 See W. Heller, ‘Reforming Achilles:
gender, opera seria and the rhetoric
of the enlightened hero’, Early Music,
xxvi/4 (1998), pp.562–81; see also
A. Wygant, ‘The ghost of Alcestis’,
in Ancient drama in music for the
modern stage, ed. P. Brown and
S. Ograjensek (Oxford, 2010), p.189;
and R. C. Ketterer, Ancient Rome in
early opera (Urbana, 2009), p.158.
11 L. Rosow, ‘Lully’s Armide at the
Paris Opéra: a performance history,
1686–1766’ (PhD diss., Brandeis
University, 1981), vol.i.
12 M. Woronoff, ‘Les survivants
de Troie’, in Reconstruire Troie:
permanence et renaissance d’une
cité emblématique, ed. M. Fartzoff,
M. Faudot, É. Geny and M.-R.
Guelfucci (Besançon, 2009), p.25.
13 Wygant, ‘The ghost of Alcestis’, p.102.
14 See W. D. Howarth (ed.), French
theatre in the neo-classical era,
1550–1789 (Cambridge, 1997).
15 C. Kintzler, Poétique de l’opéra
français de Corneille à Rousseau
(Paris, 1991).
16 See G. Cowart, The triumph of
pleasure: Louis XIV and the politics of
spectacle (Chicago, 2008), pp.xv, xvii.
17 See R. Duchêne and P. Ronzeaud
(eds.), Ordre et contestation au temps
des classiques (Paris, Seattle and
Tübingen, 1992).
18 Cowart, The triumph of pleasure,
p.143.
19 See ‘La désaffection du roi Louis
XIV’, in J. de La Gorce, Jean-Baptiste
Lully (Paris, 2002), p.347.
Early Music AUGUST 2015 4 13
20 See D. F. Jones, ‘Jean de
Campistron: a study of his life and
work’ (University of Missouri, 1979),
pp.88–102.
21 J.-Ph. Grosperrin, introduction,
Littératures Classiques, lii (2004), p.14;
special issue Campistron & consorts:
tragédie et opéra en France (1680–1733).
22 See B. Sergent, Homosexuality in
Greek myth, trans. A. Goldhammer
(Boston, 1986).
23 See Cowart, The triumph of
pleasure, pp.xviii, 139–40. See also
‘Lettre du 26 février 1695’, in Lettres sur
l’Opéra, p.45 n.156.
24 Heller, Music in the Baroque,
pp.202–3.
25 J. Rohou, ‘1667–1678: douze
années d’ordre entre deux principes de
subversion’, in Ordre et constestation,
p.129. See also G. Spielmann, ‘La
tragédie, et après? Autopsie d’un
recentrage générique à la fin du Grand
Siècle’, in Campistron & consorts,
p.282.
26 G. Sadler, ‘Tragédie en musique’,
New Grove II.
27 G. Gaudefroy-Demombynes,
‘Achille et Polyxène (1687):
l’inauguration du cycle troyen à
l’Académie royale de musique’, in
Reconstruire Troie, pp.331–69.
28 See D. Pralon, ‘La Polyxène de
Sophocle’, in Reconstruire Troie,
pp.187–208.
29 See M.-T. Hipp, ‘Plaisir du théâtre:
du théâtre humaniste à la tragédie en
musique’, in La tragédie lyrique, ed.
P. F. Van Dieren and A. Durel (Paris,
1991), pp.23–49.
30 See Histoire de l’Académie royale
de musique depuis son établissement,
1645, jusqu’à 1709, composée et
écrite par un des secrétaires de
Lully [Jacques Bernard Durey de
Noinville] (Paris, n.d.), pp.177–8,
F-Po/B 230; see also La Gorce, J.-B.
Lully, p.705.
31 De Paris, le 28 novembre 1687.
32 That was also the case of Collasse’s
Jason, which Kusser arranged to fit the
taste of Stuttgart audiences in 1698;
see J. Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Les
jugements allemands sur la musique
française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1941),
p.89 n.1; J. Sittard, Zur Geschichte der
Musik am Wurttembergischen Hofe.
33 Cowart, The triumph of pleasure,
p.xvii.
34 See Quinault, Livrets d’opéra, ed.
B. Norman (Toulouse, 1999).
35 B. Norman, ‘Le héros contestataire
dans les livrets de Quinault:
politique ou esthétique?’, in Ordre et
contestation, p.289.
36 R. Harris-Warrick, ‘Reading
Roland’, Journal of SeventeenthCentury Music, xvi/1 (2010), 9.3.
37 See J. Pesqué, ‘La carrière de six
ouvrages lyriques tirés de la Jérusalem
délivrée à l’Opéra de Paris (1686–1913):
Lully, Campra, Desmarest, Gluck,
Sacchini et Persuis’, in Le répertoire de
l’Opéra de Paris, ed. M. Noiray and
S. Serre, p.65. See also M. Couvreur,
‘Les masques de Louis’, in J.-B Lully,
pp.383–96.
38 See J.-Ph. Grosperrin, ‘La faiblesse
et la gloire: sur la représentation du
héros moderne dans les opéras français
imités de La Jérusalem délivrée
(1686–1722)’, in Formes modernes de
la poésie épique: nouvelles approches,
ed. J. Labarthe (Brussels, 2004); see
also J.-N. Laurenti, Valeurs morales et
religieuses sur la scène de l’Académie
Royale de Musique (1669–1737)
(Geneva, 2002).
39 Couvreur, J.-B. Lully, pp.394–5.
40 See Barbafieri, ‘D’une prétendue
mollesse’, pp.167–8.
41 R. C. Ketterer, ‘Arminius and the
problem of Rome’, in Ancient Rome
in early opera, pp.136, 143. A. Salvi’s
libretto (1703) exalted ‘Germanic
patriotism and bravery in the face of
oppression’ through the character of
Arminius, ‘this relentless defender of
liberty’.
42 A. Rowland-Jones, ‘Lully’s use of
recorder symbolism’, Early Music,
xxxvii/2 (2009), p.242.
43 Examples: A(a)mour(s)/aimer/
amant(s)/aimables (85 occurrences),
cœur(s) (35), doux/douceur (32)
(including 10 ‘doux repos’), plaire/
plaisirs (24), charmer/charmes/
charmants (21), heureux/bienheureux
(20), beauté/beau (12), jeux (11),
amitié(s)/ami (8), bonheur (8), hymen
(8), vertu (7), généreux (6), bonté (6),
414 Early Music AUGUST 2015
espérance/espoir (6), juste/justice (3),
durable (2), abondance (2), noblesse
(2), sagesse (2), trêve (1).
44 Examples: Mort(e)/mortel(s)/
mortelles/mourir (35), victoire/
vainqueur (25), gloire/glorieux
(20), sang/ sanglant(e) (15), tristes/
tristesse (15), courroux/colère (14),
guerre/guerrier (14), cruel(s) (14),
combat (s)/ combattre (13), V(v)
engeance/venger (13), larmes/
pleurer (13), valeur (13 dont 1 ‘valeur
barbare’), malheureux(se)/malheur
(13), douleur(s) (12), triomphes/
triompher (11), H(h)aine/haïr
(10), funeste (10), puissance/
puissant (10), exploits (7), armes
(7), pouvoir (7), jaloux/jalousie
(6). And regarding the specific
vocabulary of oppression: terreur/
terrible (11), soumis (8), victime
(6), injuste/injustice (5), mépris (5),
condamné/condamner (4), accabler
(3), craindre/crainte (3), barbare (2),
obéir (2), ordres [cruels] (1), abuser
(1), asservir (1), bannis (1).
45 See M.-C. Canova-Green,
‘Représentations de l’ordre et du
désordre dans le ballet de cour
(1651–1670)’, in Ordre et contestation,
pp.314, 316.
46 Andromache, the embodiment
of classical verisimilitude, is opposed
to her sister’s marriage, and talks to
Polyxena in terms of ‘hatred’ and
‘vengeance’: ‘Tout ton sang te trahit
pour plaire à ton vainqueur’ (‘All your
blood is betraying you to please your
conqueror’, 4.2).
47 See P. Grimal, ‘Achilles’,
Dictionnaire de la mythologie grecque
et romaine (Paris, 1951).
48 N. Tessin le Jeune, cited by La
Gorce, J.-B. Lully, p.703. See also
C. Wood and G. Sadler, French
Baroque opera: a reader (Farnham,
2000), pp.123–4, 126.
49 There is a mistake in the Ballard
score (‘scène 5’).
50 See L. Rosow, ‘Lully’s musical
architecture: Act IV of Persée’, Journal
of Seventeenth-Century Music, x/1
(2004), Le Théâtre de sa Gloire: essays
on ‘Persée’, tragédie en musique by
Quinault and Lully, www.sscm-jscm.
org/v10/no1/rosow.html.
51 Arcas reassures the Trojans (scene
3): 5 lines, 23 bars; entrance of Priam
and trio (scene 4): 6 lines, 42 bars;
confrontation with Achilles (scene 5):
59 lines, 181 bars.
52 Cited by La Gorce, J.-B. Lully, p.703.
53 See Rowland-Jones, ‘Lully’s use of
recorder symbolism’, p.219.
54 Rowland-Jones, ‘Lully’s use of
recorder symbolism’, pp.243–4.
55 J. S. Powell, ‘Psyché: the stakes
of collaboration’, in Reverberations:
staging relations in French since
1500: a festschrift in honour of C. E.
J. Caldicott, ed. P. Gaffney, M. Brophy
and M. Gallagher (Dublin, 2008),
pp.1–25, at 8–9.
56 See ‘Récitatif ’, Dictionnaire de
musique (Paris, 1703; facs. Geneva,
1992).
57 ‘The stage shows the Greek camp in
front of Troy. This superb city can be
seen in the background.’
58 ‘As the divinities emerge from
Hell, the entire stage [that is, Achilles’s
quarters] is plunged into darkness.’
59 See Thomas, Aesthetics of
opera, p.56; see also W. Heller, ‘The
‘iconography of sovereignty’, in Music
in the Baroque (New York, 2013), p.122.
60 See Thomas, Aesthetics of opera,
pp.62, 98.
61 See Cowart, The triumph of pleasure,
p.xix; see also P. Burke, The fabrication
of Louis XIV (New Haven, 1992).
62 See the marche entitled ‘Premier air
pour l’entrée triomphante de Thésée’.
‘He is surrounded by the people of
Athens, who rejoice during the ensuing
divertissement’, L. Rosow, ‘Making
connections: thoughts on Lully’s
entr’actes’, Early Music, xxi/2 (1993),
p.234.
63 See R. Harris-Warrick, ‘Recovering
the Lullian divertissement’, in Studies
in Seventeenth-Century Opera,
ed. B. L. Glixon (Farnham, 2010),
pp.333–58.
64 Wood, ‘The four-part male chorus’,
in Jean-Baptiste Lully, p.138.
65 R. A. Pruiksma, ‘Music, sex, and
ethnicity: signification in Lully’s
theatrical chaconnes’, in Gender,
sexuality, and early music, ed.
T. Borgerding (New York, 2002),
pp.227–40.
66 See G. 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 & interpretations (London,
1998), pp.81–104.
67 ‘Collasse and Campra use
instrumental sections more freely than
Destouches’ (Wood, Jean-Baptiste
Lully, p.146).
68 ‘ses’: sic in the 1687 score and
libretto.
69 See Harris-Warrick, ‘Reading
Roland’, 6.3, 6.8, 6.9. 6.10.
70 See Wood, Jean-Baptiste Lully,
pp.88–9.
71 See J. de Romilly, La tragédie
grecque (Paris, 1994), pp.137–40.
72 ‘Briseis, chorus of Greeks exiting
the temple of Apollo in disorderly
fashion, Arcas.’
73 See C. Delmas (ed.), Didon à
la scène: ‘Didon’ de Scudéry et ‘La
Vraye Didon ou la Didon chaste’ de
Boisrobert (Toulouse, 1992).
74 A. E. Duggan, ‘Women and
absolutism in French opera and fairy
tale’, The French Review, lxxviii/2
(2004), pp.313–14.
75 See N. Zaslaw, ‘Lully’s orchestra’,
in Quellenstudien zu J.-B. Lully,
ed. J. de La Gorce and H. Schneider
(Hildesheim, 1999), pp.539–79.
76 See O. Bloechl, ‘War, peace and the
ballet in Le Soir’, Early Music, xxxviii/1
(2010), pp.91–100. See also G. Cowart,
‘Sirènes et Muses: de l’éloge à la satire
dans la fête théâtrale, 1654–1703’, XVIIe
siècle, cclviii (2013), pp.23–33.
77 See ‘1667–1678: douze années
d’ordre’, in Ordre et contestation, p.131.
78 Cowart, The triumph of pleasure,
p.144.
79 See M. Armellini, ‘Opéra pour la
monarchie, opéra pour la république’,
in Le répertoire de l’Opéra de Paris,
p.31. See also L. Bianconi and T. Walker,
‘Production, consumption and political
function of seventeenth-century
opera’, Early Music History, iv (1984),
pp.209–96, at 257–74.
80 See P. Gros, Philippe Quinault, sa
vie et son œuvre (Paris, 1926), p.104.
81 See ‘Harangue au Roi, après la
prise de Cambray prononcée le 25
Avril 1678’, Recueil des harangues,
i, pp.548–9; see also Boileau, ‘Épître
au Roi’ (I, 1668), lines 93–4, and
N. Ferrier-Caverivière, L’image de
Louis XIV dans la littérature française
(Paris, 1981), p.56.
82 See J. Barchilon, ‘Charles Perrault
contestataire-polémiste’, in Ordre et
contestation, p.57.
83 See also Fénelon’s Examen de
conscience sur les devoirs de la royauté
(written c.1697, published in 1734 as an
appendix to Télémaque).
84 See Norman, Touched by the
graces, pp.186–9; B. Norman, Quinault,
librettiste de Lully: le poète des Grâces
(Wavre, 2009), pp.179–82, 207.
85 See Rohou, ‘1667–1678: douze
années d’ordre’, pp.131–2.
86 See Heller, Music in the Baroque,
pp.6–7.
87 See Ketterer, Ancient Rome in early
opera, p.167.
88 Jean Terrasson, Dissertation
critique sur l’Iliade d’Homère, i (Paris,
1715), pp.239–40.
89 See Rohou, ‘1667–1678: douze
années d’ordre’, p.128.
90 See Y. Giraud, ‘Une réécriture
originale: Thétis et Pélée, tragédie en
musique de Fontenelle’, in Les noces de
Pélée et de Thétis: Venise, 1639–Paris,
1654, ed. M.-T. Bouquet-Boyer (Bern,
2001), pp.83–98; see also J.-M. Bailbé,
‘Autour de Thétis et Pélée: Colasse et
Fontenelle’, in Fontenelle (Paris, 1989),
pp.219–33.
91 See B. Didier, ‘Fontenelle et la
poétique de l’opéra’, in Fontenelle,
pp.235–46.
92 See L. C. de la B. Le Blanc, duc de
La Vallière, Ballets, Opéra, et autres
ouvrages lyriques (Paris, 1760; facs.
London, 1967), pp.109–10.
Early Music AUGUST 2015 4 15