70904 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics

this amazing Italian found time to become
(as biographer W. F. Apthorp has pointed
out), “not only the true founder of French
Opera, but to adapt, with surpassing cleverness
and insight into the French character,
what was essentially Italian opera to
the French taste.” From 1658 to 1671, he
wrote about thirty ballets and divertissements,
and between 1672 and 1696,
twenty operas, in addition to instrumental
and church music. He was a master of various
styles, from tragedy to burlesque. He
turned upside down the traditions of the
court ballet. He knew the theatre backwards
and forwards. His sense of stage
effect was keen and intuitive; and he knew
a subtler and deeper secret: how to make
music speak with dramatic veracity and
point.
At the end this buffon odieux (as
Boileau called him) – this rake, knave,
intriguer, who had lifted himself out of
Jean Baptiste Lully
the obscurity of his Italian origin into a
position where he talked back to a King, – died of an abscess of the toe. His estate consisted
of fifty-eight sacks of louis d’or and Spanish doubloons, diamonds, and silver plate, worth in
all about seven million francs.
To the very last he was cheerfully unscrupulous, for (according to a story told immediately
after his death) he cheated to attain Heaven. His confessor, so runs the familiar tale,
required as a condition that Lully should burn all that he had written of his new opera,
Achille et Polyxène. Lully gave the abhorred score to the confessor, who triumphantly threw
it in the fire. “What, Baptiste!” remonstrated a prince who visited Lully soon after, “you have
destroyed your opera?” “Gently, Sir,” whispered the expiring rascal: “I have another copy.”
So he died, radiant, corrupt, and unashamed, a poet and a genius; and his epitaph in the
– 3 –