Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 2 – Ballet music for Cavalli’s “Xerse” by Giovanni Battista Lulli

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 2 – Ballet music for Cavalli’s “Xerse” by Giovanni Battista Lulli

 

When Wagner took the opportunity to have his opera Tannhauser staged in Paris in 1861, he knew he would have to bite the bullet and make a concession that he wasn’t crazy about.  But the opportunity was too valuable to pass up.  By this time the composer of the The Ring of the Nibelungen and Tristan and Isolde had fought long and hard to be recognized for the genius that he was.  And now his labors were finally paying off, but maybe he could never have anything quite on his own terms.  The Bayreuth Festival, which would premiere 15 years after the Paris version of Tannhauser, while representing the ultimate realization of Wagner’s vision, was never entirely free from financial or logistical complications in his lifetime (see this post).  And even though Wagner was invited to stage Tannhauser in Paris, a city whose adulation he had worked so hard to win decades earlier, by Napoleon III no less, this was subject to conventions the French expected, conventions that Wagner, the champion of “total artwork”, which eschewed any trace of artifice or contrivance, would have considered trite, stiff, and synthetic.  But in this case the usually iconoclastic Wagner knew it would be foolish to stand too firmly on principle – even a personality of his strength could not win against centuries of firmly-rooted convention – and so he composed a ballet for Tannhauser (among a large handful of other changes which changed the structure of the opera), thus making it acceptable for the ultra tradition-minded French.  

He still managed to make it somewhat on his own terms though.  Whereas it had been the standard practice to insert the ballet in the second act, Wagner chose instead to place it immediately after the overture, as sort of a prelude to the first act.  Ever concerned with dramatic integrity (he had, after all, completed the first music dramas which would seal his legacy by this time), he simply couldn’t justify tarnishing the flow of the drama any more than necessary simply for the sake of silly traditions.  Whereas French writers had been accustomed to placing ample opportunities within their opera libretti for almost 200 years (see this post to see how that all started), Wagner, one of the first opera composers to write all of his own libretti, was simply not working from that sensibility.  As far as he could see, the ballet would serve Tannhauser best by extending the sensuous orgy implied at the very beginning of the opera, which finds the title character ensnared within the hedonistic delights continuously transpiring within the realm of the goddess Venus.  Sirens, nymphs, naiads, Bacchantes, all of the most Dionysian supporting characters of mythology make an appearance here.  Wagner extended this first scene into a stunning bacchanale, effectively injecting an opulent style of writing informed by his mature operas into this earlier one:

 

I have to figure that a 25 year-old Camille Saint-Saens, already a supporter of Wagner at this age, even if he was not himself a Wagnerian, attended this performance and channeled the inspiration he experienced from the ballet into the famous bacchanale of his own opera, Samson and Delilah, which bears some similarities to Wagner’s, sixteen years later:

 

Wagner couldn’t escape the gravity of France’s considerable operatic tradition.  It had been that way for centuries.  From the beginning of French opera, namely those composed by Lully, ballet had been an inextricable gene , completely integrated within its organic structure.  The newly naturalized Lully (he was actually Italian) began to generate his mature French operas in the 1670s, with Cadmus and Hermione premiering in 1673, but an incident a decade prior to that, and almost exactly two centuries prior to Wagner’s Parisian Tannhauser substantially foreshadowed the features that would be present in fully-developed French opera.

The new music dramatic form now called opera was invented around the year 1600 and rose to prominence, due in large part to its masterful treatment by a masterful musician, Claudio Monteverdi (see this post and this one).  Without Monteverdi’s very imaginative and practical essays in the genre, which demonstrated to European audiences its great potential for both entertainment and political promotion, opera would have remained a good idea and quickly died.  All the best early operas come from his imagination.  His death in the 1640s left the artform in the hands of his successors, including Italian musicians like Antonio Cesti and his student Francesco Cavalli.  Both Cavalli and Cesti were instrumental in exporting the very Italian art of opera beyond the borders of its homeland.  Cesti’s greatest triumph was an opera called The Golden Apple, presented in Vienna (see this post).  In 1660 Cavalli was invited to Paris, a peculiar polyglot culture at the time.

Cardinal Mazarin, an Italian, was ruling by proxy as the young Louis XIV was not yet ready, and the native French did not always like him or his sensibilities.  But he did his best to acculturate the French with Italian art, hence his invitation to Cavalli.  At the same time, however, another Italian named Lulli was already working the Parisian scenes, and already doing as the Romans.  He had made friends with the young monarch; they both shared a strong taste for the lyrical dance which came to be known as ballet, with Lulli providing ample amounts of music for them to dance together in performance frequently.  As Cavalli entered the Parisian arena Lulli was poised to oppose him as a potential rival, and there is considerable speculation that he and his allies sabotaged Cavalli’s efforts through various machinations of court intrigue.  Cavalli was frustrated by much of his experience in Paris, but he did manage to stage one of his operas, called Xerse (for more about that, see this post).  Like Wagner’s Tannhauser two centuries hence, it was restructured in various ways to make it palatable to the French, including the addition of ballets.  Where Wagner composed his own ballet, however, the ballets for Xerse were composed by the soon-to-be naturalized Lulli.  The whole presentation was massive (accounts report anywhere between 6 and 9 hours, either way, beyond Wagnerian) and the French were bored and confused by the Italian opera, preferring Lulli’s episodes, danced by a troupe which included the young king.  It must have been a frustrating and humiliating experience for Cavalli.

Today, it is just a little more common to encounter the ballet music of Lulli than the Italian vocal music of Cavalli’s creation.  Lulli’s stately, elegant music is able to stand apart from the opera.  And it is colorful – Lulli included movements with instruments that are today exotic and forgotten, such as the tromba marina.  An odd one-stringed instrument, the player bows the single string and uses the fingers of his other hand to travel throughout the harmonic series of the fundamental, much like an unvalved brass instrument, hence its namesake.  The sound strikes us as rough, even harsh today, but it as an evocative sound:

 

The instrument’s inclusion in a sumptuous orchestral texture gives the dance of the sailors a raw earthiness that is more felt than heard on account of the thickness of the orchestra:

 

Cavalli felt the brutal force of a foreign culture; perhaps familiar with stories such as these, Wagner acquiesced and scored a much more graceful success.  Even over the course of 200 intervening years, little had changed in the way of French decorum and national taste; if anything, it had crystallized more.  In the decades following Cavalli’s unfortunate Parisian visit, Lulli, now Lully, had formulated a distinctive recipe for composing operas to serve to French audiences based on his considerable experience working in their midst.  The resulting tragedies lyrique were aimed precisely to their tastes, always featuring a generous helping of ballet dancing that was skillfully integrated into the plot by French librettists like Philippe Quinault, who supplied the libretti for most of Lully’s operas.  This tradition dominated France for centuries, and Wagner understood that when in Rome, he must please the Romans.  Cavalli’s earlier trouble perhaps stemmed from his failure to acknowledge that, although it could be argued that it was less clear to him what the Romans wanted anyway.  Still, the collaboration between Cavalli and Lulli, as tense as it may have been, is a fascinating story in cultures first clashing, and then synthesizing to form an alloy that endured.

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Odd and Tragic Deaths, Day 1 – Te Deum by Jean-Baptiste Lully

This week’s theme is…Odd and Tragic Deaths!  Death comes to us all.  And most of the time death is pretty routine, run-of-the-mill.  Not that death is ever easy, but usually it’s the result of “natural causes”, which is another way of saying “a chronic disease akin to that which most people die of, and not all that interesting”.  But sometimes death is traumatic, unexpected and tragic.  This week, we look at examples of composers who succumbed to causes such as these

Odd and Tragic Deaths, Day 1 – Te Deum by Jean-Baptiste Lully

 

My wife and I own a music school.  We take a lot of pride in the services that we offer to our students and families.  Owning a business has been an adventure and we have worked hard on making our school into an environment filled with people who make learning music fun.  And we take our students’ well-being very seriously, which is why we do everything within our power to make the school as safe as possible.  Still, you can’t predict everything that will ever happen, even if you do your due diligence and take all conceivable precautions.  But that’s why God made waivers.  If you enter into any kind of business relationship with an entity that could conceivably put you at risk, even in the smallest imaginable way, one of its representatives will probably ask you to sign one because, after all, stuff happens, and it’s almost always surprising and unpredictable when it does.

Our waiver is pretty boilerplate, not much you wouldn’t expect.  Usually when I’m doing a registration I don’t read it word for word because it’s such a downer.  More often I sum it up as a joke like “This is a standard injury waiver; music is a pretty low-contact sport so it’s never been an issue.”  That usually gets a smile out of the client and puts them at ease through what could otherwise be a rather stiff and dour legalistic paragraph filled with things most of us would rather not think about.  And truly, it’s never been an issue.  But if we offered a course in 17th Century French conducting, I might be tempted dwell just a little longer on that paragraph and spell it out in just a bit more detail.

To understand this story, it helps to know a little about conducting.  Conducting is simply the practice of acting as a leader on which all the musicians in an ensemble focus in order to coordinate their different parts through time.  That’s a kind of highfalutin’ way of saying that the conductor is the musician who helps all the other musicians stay together.  I think 99% of practicing musicians find themselves conducting at some point.  You just never know – anytime a few musicians could use a little help feeling the beat, a conductor is a good solution.  Every beginning musicianship student learns traditional conducting patterns…

… because they may need them someday, and also because it helps them to internalize the beat whenever they perform or listen.  And conducting is a leadership of service, just like leadership is supposed to be.  Ideally the conductor is not motivated by self-glorification, but rather by performing a service to the ensemble and its audience.

Conducting is as old as music in multiple parts, which is pretty old – at least a millennium.  Centuries ago, when monks began to sing Gregorian Chant in multiple parts, or maybe even just one part but with multiple singers, they probably found that it helped them to stay together if there was a focal person showing them when to create their musical events.  The art of conducting certainly evolved along with the art of Western music, with different conductors trying different techniques with varying degrees of success.  Eventually some of these techniques would have crystallized and become more common if they worked well.  Some ensembles are even able to play without a conductor, so intimate is their sense of community, or they may look to the first violinist as a functional conductor.  Either way, conducting has become a serious art form, and great conductors have achieved the status and personal magnetism of rock stars.

Another element of conducting that has evolved is the style of implement used to conduct.  The modern baton is a rather recent innovation, the culmination of a long history.  Conductors have used their hands, rolled up sheets of paper, violin bows, chopsticks, pencils, pretty much anything you can think of.  Really anything with a clear point will do, because it’s the point of the stick that shows the musicians following exactly where the beats are in the flow of time.  But there is one other implement that has been used for conducting, one that I find bizarre and difficult to imagine in context, a conducting staff.  A staff is not waved through the air like a baton.  Apparently it was standard practice in certain music cultures for the ensemble leader to mark time by tapping or even striking a long staff on the ground beside him at the tempo he desired.   This strikes me (so to speak) as odd because it seems that it would add what is essentially a metronome or click track to an otherwise clear and colorful musical texture, more or less turning every performance that included it into a percussive marching band.  But it must have worked, because in certain contexts this was used to great effect.  I can’t imagine a conducting staff working well in the direction of a gentle sarabande, so perhaps it was relegated to highly rhythmic, martial music, into which it probably would have blended quite well.

One particularly ill-fated performance found the great Florentine composer Giovanni Battista Lulli, naturalized French as Jean-Baptiste Lully, leading a performance of one of his grand motets, a Te Deum.  The year was 1687.  The Sun King, Louis XIV, had just recovered from a surgical operation to repair a fistula in his lower digestive tract (I’ll let the dear reader speculate as to how that might have gotten there – here’s a bit more reading about that if you are so inclined).  A wave of religious fervor had motivated his favorite composer and dancer, Lully, who had created a special brand of opera for France unlike any other (for more on that, see this post, this one, and this one) to turn his creative energies from secular to sacred, composing grand motets for devotional purposes.  The Te Deum, an example of this, was offered in thanksgiving and celebration of the Sun King’s recovery.  But one tragedy averted opened the door for another to come.  Was Lully distracted?  Was he preoccupied?  Was he disoriented from a brief fainting spell?  Was he just overzealous?  Whatever the reason, he miscalculated with his conducting staff and stabbed his toe.  Yeeeowch!  I’m sure he was paying attention after that.  Here’s a dramatic reenactment of the scene:

 

While the surgeons knew something should be removed (accounts vary as to whether it would have been a toe, a foot, or a whole leg), Lully forcefully resisted amputation so that his dancing capability would not be inhibited.  Alas, his dancing days were numbered, and he died of gangrene just a few months later.  I wonder if he regretted refusing the amputation, or whether he simply would have considered a life without dancing worth living at all.

Music is indeed usually a low contact sport.  Perhaps it was the story of Lully which prompted other conductors to retire the conducting staff, and search for the more elegant and less potentially traumatic options available to modern conductors (although I do remember hearing urban legends in high school orchestra about at least one conductor who drove his fiberglass baton through his palm by accident).  Their toes can breathe a sigh of relief and, best of all, we need not dwell too much on the waiver when registering for modern conducting classes.

You can listen to all of Lully’s splendid Te Deum here:

 

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Music About Snow, Day 2 – “L’hiver qui nous tourmente” from Isis by Jean-Baptiste Lully

This week’s theme is…Music About Snow!  Snow is one of those everyday miracles.  Not quite water, not quite ice, the enchanting and magical hybrid of water’s states of matter transforms many locales of privileged climate into the proverbial “winter wonderland” for several months out of each year.  Its imagery is powerful on many levels, from the blanket that coats the landscape to the stunning crystalline structure apparent upon more careful inspection.  It acts almost as a living creature with its own distinctive behaviors, interacting as it does with winter’s capricious wind and temperature changes.  Snow is a fresh, powerful and mysterious substance that has inspired musicians for centuries.  Survey the many ways musicians have effectively represented snow in their compositions.

Music About Snow, Day 2 – “L’hiver qui nous tourmente” from Isis by Jean-Baptiste Lully

Of all the monarchs to grace Europe’s thrones, there was probably none so careful about his image as France’s Louis XIV, also known as “The Sun King”.  A megalomaniac who was not at all shy about wielding the arts in the service of promoting his pristine and grandiose image, he kept his artists busy, be they visual, architectural or musical.  The now famous palace at Versailles was transformed under his monarchy from a modest hunting lodge to a fully-functioning and highly-decorated royal complex, and remains to this day one of the most stunning royal palaces in existence.  And Louis XIV helped to establish the first distinctively national music of France with the help of a very important collaborator, an Italian, who would lay the foundations for a style of music that would allow French composers for generations after to set their native language with grace and clarity.

According to stories I’ve heard, a Florentine by the name of Giovanni Battista Lulli was putting on a show in a public square which incorporated music, dance and comedy sometime in the 1640s and attracted the attention of a French aristocrat named Roger of Lorraine, who imported the young Lulli to France as an Italian language tutor for his niece.  Over the course of the next decades Lulli gallicized his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully (Handel performed a similar conversion from German to English, but more on that some other day), which is what most people call him today.  Lully was ambitious and talented; he eventually ingratiated himself with the new monarch, Louis XIV, 6 years his junior, and took every opportunity to work as a musician, composer and dancer in the young Sung King’s service.  They shared a taste for dance, and the French national passion for ballet is largely a result of their friendship and artistic collaboration.  Louis was most taken with Lully’s artistry and soon granted him a monopoly on French dramatic music, to the delight of Lully and to the frustration of so many other musicians working in France who found themselves forced to imitate his style and constantly appeal to the monarchical bureaucracy in order to have their works performed.

From all accounts Jean-Baptiste Lully was a complex man, and, like so many influential artists, difficult to judge with any kind of easy ethical verdict.  But his efforts established a stable and robust school of musical style in a nation that had not yet found a musical voice capable of competing in the cultural bazaar of artistic ideas.  In spite of his Italian origins, Lully truly created a distinctively French manner of music making, original on every structural level, that came to be greatly admired and deeply influential internationally.  The intellectual protection granted by his pocket monarch afforded him the opportunities and creative space to develop a number of artistic forms, all of which combined music, drama, dance, and comedy to various degrees.  Louis XIV appreciated Lully and had the patience to see his efforts eventually grow into the grandest and most distinguished form of French musical drama, the tragedie lyrique, the first of which came exactly 20 years after the two of them had first danced together in a ballet.

Lully began writing tragedies lyrique to libretti penned by the dramatist Philippe Quinault in 1673 and proceeded to produce these grand and dignified efforts at the rate of one per year until the composer’s death in 1687, for a total of 13 (his death interrupted the completion of what would have been the 14th).  The tragedies lyrique represent the ultimate solution in combining all of Louis XIV’s desires for what the music of his monarchy ought to be.  The stories, based mostly on Greek and Roman mythology, are high-minded and noble, concerned with the competing pursuits of love and immortal glory that would have consumed a great monarch.  Each act has a dance break called a divertissement, sort of a show-within-a-show that is cleverly incorporated into the libretto, and afforded the opportunity to mix ballet into the drama (foreign operas staged in France were required to undergo this kind of treatment for centuries after Lully, with ballets forcefully inserted into the drama whether they fit or not).  And in the tragedies lyrique Lully finally cracked the French text-setting nut.  French, a much different language than Italian, demanded a different manner of music in setting it; it was simply overwhelmed by Italian-style music.  In these grand dramatic works Lully invented a way of setting the French language to music that was beautiful and elegant.  This style would serve French dramatic music for centuries.

And one other notable characteristic of the tragedies-lyrique: they were pretty serious.  This is by design, and also in great contrast to much of the other music that Lully had written for his monarch.  For example, try this on for size:

 

That’s an example of a scene from a comedie-ballet, and it’s one of the genres in which Lully worked during the two decades between meeting Louis XIV and producing his first tragedie-lyrique.  Lully’s partner in creating the comedies-ballet was the great Moliere.  These works are spoken plays with ballets and other musical interludes stirred in.  And, as you should be able to tell from that last clip, they often included some ridiculously silly scenes.  That particular scene, from a comedy called Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, depicts a madcap consultation of three doctors.

As the tragedies-lyriques were meant to represent the Sun King in all his resplendent, austere glory, Lully and Quinault were encouraged to dispense with the comedy, and for the most part they did.  Eventually.  The critical aesthetic minds of Louis XIV’s court put pressure on the artists representing him to craft serious and humorless depictions of the Sun King’s preponderance.  But it may have snuck into a couple of Quinault and Lully’s earlier works, at which point the recent comedies-ballets would still have been a fresh memory.  Here’s an example from Isis of 1677, which follows the story of the goddess Io as she endures the sharpest point of a love triangle between herself, Jupiter, and Juno, eventually transforming at the end into the Egyptian goddess, Isis.  In the fourth act Io finds herself punished by Juno for her romantic entanglement with Jupiter, chased by the furies from one unbearable locale to another.  At the beginning of the act she finds herself in a desolate, snow-covered plain.  For the divertissement a chorus of fellow tortured souls sing, in a most convincing and almost comical manner, about how cold they are.  See if you can sense their anguish, and see is Lully’s musical clever musical depiction of their shivering doesn’t put a smile on your face:

 

French text L’hiver qui nous tourmente S’obstine à nous geler: Nous ne saurions parler Qu’avec une voix tremblante: La neige et les glaçons Nous donnent de mortels frissons. Les frimas se répandent Sur nos corps languissants: Le froid transit nos sens, Les plus durs rochers se fendent: La neige et les glaçons Nous donnent de mortels frissons.

English translation [Since] Winter, our tormenter, persists in freezing us we hardly know how to speak but in trembling accents: the snow and ice give us deadly chills. The frosts spread over our languishing bodies, our senses are numbed by a rock-splitting freeze: the snow and ice gives us deadly chills.

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