¹ The production did not, however, use as many stage musicians as the 1676 livret indicated, omitting, most notably, the two viol players. Villégier explained some of his views regarding the staging of Atys in the programme booklet for performances of the opera at the Salle Favart in Paris in 1987 (‘Un rêve noir habité par un soleil’): ‘We defined the main outlines of our performance by listening to Atys – to the words and music that Quinault and Lully joined so well – and by refusing to read the stage directions furnished by the livret. Instead of the six sets, the scene changes in full view of the audience, and the stage machines required by the livret, we have substituted a single, stripped-down location. The multiple roles embodied by the chorus are reduced to two aspects: diurnal and nocturnal.’

² Because almost no records survive from the Paris Opéra during Lolly's tenure as director and because the scores of his operas indicate orchestration only partially, historians have investigated the information about on-stage musicians as a means of learning more about Lolly's orchestra. See in particular Gorce, Jérôme de La, ‘Some Notes on Lolly's Orchestra’, Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honour of James R Anthony, ed. Heyer, John Hajdu (Cambridge, 1989), 99–112.Google Scholar

³ Although the list in the Ballet de l'Impatience (shown in Fig. 2) breaks down by family of instruments, many lists do not. In such cases it is only possible to deduce instrumentation by comparing players’ names with personnel records for the king's musical establishment. This documentation may be found in Benoit's, MarcelleMusiques de cour: Chapelle, chambre, écurie 1661–1733 (Paris, 1971).Google Scholar

⁴ The most thorough study to date of Lolly's orchestration is Eppelsheim, Jürgen, Das Orchester in den Werken Jean-Baptiste Lullys (Tutting, 1961).Google Scholar Clef usage and the range of the individual parts offer some help where instrumental designations are lacking. Regarding representative problems in the ballets, see Harris-Warrick, Rebecca, ‘From Score into Sound: Questions of Scoring in Lolly's Ballets’, Early Music, 21 (1993), 354–62.Google Scholar

⁵ A vivid illustration of this last problem may be seen in Gorce, La, ‘Some Notes’, 101 and 102Google Scholar, where costume designs by Jean Berain for the ‘flutists’ on stage in Thésée and Isis show the musicians holding oboes.

⁶ Given the paucity of documentation, it is not clear whether Lolly's use of stage musicians was the same in public performances in Paris as in court performances at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. However, enough Parisian livrets refer unambiguously to stage musicians to show that the practice was not confined to the court.

⁷ In his book Opera. The Extravagant Art (Ithaca, 1984)Google Scholar, Herbert Lindenberger points out the extent to which opera incorporates ‘literal’ music, frequently structured (as is often the case with Lully) as characters performing for other characters. See especially 139–42.

⁸ Regarding Mazarin's efforts, see Zaslaw, Neal, ‘The First Opera in Paris: A Study in the Politics of Art’, Jean-Baptiste Lully, 7–23.Google Scholar Following a few unsustained efforts, French opera finally became institutionalised in 1672 with Lolly's first tragédie en musique, Cadmus et Hermione.

⁹ These ideas are fully developed in Kintzler's book, Poétique de l'opéra français de Corneille à Rousseau (Paris, 1991).Google Scholar A brief discussion of some of the central issues may be found in her article, ‘La tragédie lyrique et le double défi d'un théâtre classique’, La tragédie lyrique, from the collection ‘Carnets du Théâtre des Champs-Elysées’ (Paris, 1991), 51–63.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Zoppelli, Luca, ‘“Stage Music” in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera’, this journal 2/1 (1990), 29–39Google Scholar; see especially 31–7.

¹¹ In his Mémoires (1787)Google Scholar, Carlo Goldoni reported the impression French opera made on him the first time he attended the Académie Royale de Musique: ‘I waited for the aria … The dancers appeared: I thought the act was over, not an aria. I spoke of this to my neighbour who scoffed at me and assured me that there had been six arias in the different scenes which I had just heard. How could this be? I am not deaf; the voice was always accompanied by instruments … but I assumed it was all recitative.’ Cited in Anthony, James R., French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeutx to Rameau, rev. edn (New York, 1978), 84.Google Scholar

¹² See Silin, Charles I., Benserade and His Ballets de Cour (Baltimore, 1940Google Scholar; rpt. New York, 1978) and Christout, Marie-Françoise, Le Ballet de cour de Louis XIV 1643–1672 (Paris, 1967).Google Scholar

¹³ Regarding the politics of Lully's works, see Isherwood, Robert M., Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, 1973)Google Scholar and Couvreur, Manuel, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Musique et dramatugie au service du prince (Brussels, 1992).Google Scholar For a more general treatment of the political ends to which various types of spectacles were put during the Renaissance and early Baroque, see Strong, Roy, Art and Power. Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1984).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Given the preponderance of wind instruments in Lully's stage ensembles and their emblematic use, one wonders if in his early operas the pit musicians might not have consisted entirely of strings and continuo instruments, with the winds reserved for on-stage appearances, where their presence and sonority was demanded by the dramatic situation. Perhaps even the oboes – later a staple of the French orchestral sound – came into the pit only gradually. The manuscript scores of Lully's early operas (the printed scores of the same works postdate Lully's death and may reflect later practices) have yet to be thoroughly studied.

¹⁵ Le Carnaval (Paris: Ballard, 1668), 3.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Regarding Benserade's mastery of the double entendre, see Couvreur, , Musique et dramaturgie, 111–15.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The score and dance notations for this work are preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, Rés. F. 534^a–b. A facsimile of the entire manuscript plus a discussion of the work and its unique system of dance notation may be found in Harris-Warrick, Rebecca and Marsh, Carol G., Musical Theatre at the Court of Louis XIV ‘Le Mariage de la Grosse Cathos (Cambridge, 1994).Google Scholar This is the only known Baroque entertainment for which all the choreography survives.

¹⁸ Even cast lists make this division of labour explicit by defining characters as, say, ‘shepherds who dance’ and ‘shepherds who sing’. See also Rosow, Lois, ‘Performing a Choral Dialogue by Lully’, Early Music, 15 (1987), 325–35, especially 329–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ See, for example, is Rosow, , ‘Lully, Jean-Baptiste’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, III (London, 1992), especially 87–9Google Scholar, and Schneider, Herbert, ‘Strukturen der Szenen und Akte in Lullys Opern’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Actes du Colloque/Kongreβbericht, Saint-Germain-en-Laye-Heidelberg 1987, ed. Gorce, Jérôme de La and Schneider, Herbert (Laaber, 1990), 77–98.Google Scholar