As official court composer of the Sun King, Louis XIV, Lully can be a bit pompous and fawning, lacking the sprightliness of Rameau, but a contemporary performance which treats certain old-fashioned elements with the necessary irony, and at the same time emphasizes the tragic moments, can still bring the lyrical heart of these ancient operas to vibrant life.
Rarely has a composer so dominated a cultural environment as Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-87) dominated the French court. Through his friendship with the king, he managed to achieve almost complete control of the musical life of Paris and Versailles. In 1673 he also became the director of the royal
opera, which performed in the Palais-Royal. Between 1673 and 1687, he
produced a new opera almost yearly and fiercely protected his monopoly
over that new genre. He was immensely talented and wrote sprightly and energetic dance music which exerted a strong influence on European orchestral music. Much of his more serious music, including his operas, possessed a powerful stateliness. The elaborate, often fantastical plots of his operas (usually taken from Greek myths or Renaissance epics of chivalry) were combined with the examination of moral issues in such a way as to pay flattering tribute to the sagacity of the king for whom they were written.
[Armida Discovers the Sleeping Rinaldo by Nicolas Poussin (1629).
Cupid restrains her from stabbing her enemy.]
Armide (1686) is a late work which stands as Lully's masterpiece. The libretto by Quinault, is based on a popular story from Jerusalem Delivered, the great chivalric poem by Torquato Tasso (1581), a largely mythified version of the First Crusade in which Christian knights, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, battle Muslims in order to take Jerusalem - subject matter which had a topical resonance to readers of the period when the Ottoman Empire was advancing through Eastern Europe. Sections from the story were used in works in other media all over Europe, especially in the period before the French Revolution and the Romantic movement, which provided alternative stories combining love, violence, and an exotic setting. One of the most characteristic literary devices in Tasso's poem is the emotional conundrum endured by characters torn between their heart and their duty; the depiction of love at odds with martial valor or honor is a central source of lyrical passion in the poem.
But back to Armide. The opera proper starts after a prologue in which Wisdom and Glory express their rivalry: in wartime Glory is supreme, but in peacetime (like now, under the Sun King) Wisdom rules. The female protagonist Armide (Armida) is a sorceress from Damascus (modeled amongst others on Circe in Homer) obsessed by the formidable Christian knight Renaud (Rinaldo), who seems resistant to her charms. Her uncle, Hidraoth, King of Damascus, begs that she turn from war to love, but she swears that she will only marry the conqueror of Renaud. In nearby countryside, Renaud is enchanted by demons sent by Armide and he sings about the beauty of his surroundings. She intends to kill him (and almost does so when she finds him sleeping) but she falls in love with him instead and takes
him away to a magical island where he becomes infatuated with her and
forgets the crusade. Recognizing that Renaud's love for her is reliant upon magic, and therefore not true love, Armide summons Hatred to help expunge her love, but then relents.
Two Christian knights and close companions of Renaud are sent to find their colleague. They are armed with magic weapons which enable them to resist spirits sent to seduce them. In Armide's enchanted palace Renaud and Armide sing of their love. Then the two knights arrive to find them in each other's arms, but with magical means they release him from her charms. Armide fruitlessly implores Renaud to stay with her - but he leaves to return to his duty and the war... The heartbroken Armide rages with mounting desperation before summoning demons who destroy her palace.
[Rinaldo and Armida in her garden, by François Boucher]
This is a plot similar to Purcell's Dido and Aeneas: a noble warrior is unmanned by love until duty prevails and the joys of the flesh are abandoned. That Lully turns this into such a compelling drama is a tribute to his flexible vocal writing, which generates a powerful dramatic momentum. His recitatives are never far away from the rhythms of normal speech and even the more elaborate airs do not stop the action in the manner of an Italian operatic aria. Lully's music is known for its power, liveliness in its fast movements and its deep emotional character in its slower movements. The influence of Lully's music produced a radical revolution in the
style of the dances of the court itself. In the place of the slow and
stately movements which had prevailed until then, he introduced lively
ballets of rapid rhythm, often based on well-known dance types such as
gavottes, menuets, and sarabandes.
Lully is entitled to the credit of having invented the French Overture in the 1650s. Handel has acknowledged that he modeled his overtures from those of Lully, and Purcell derived many valuable hints from his works. Lully created French-style opera as a musical genre (tragédie lyrique). Concluding that Italian-style opera was inappropriate for the French language, he and his librettist, Philippe Quinault, a respected playwright, employed the same poetics that dramatists used for verse tragedies: the 12-syllable "alexandrine" and the 10-syllable "heroic" poetic lines of the spoken theater were used for the recitative of Lully's operas and were perceived by their contemporaries as creating a very "natural" effect. Airs, especially if they were based on dances, were by contrast set to lines of less than 8 syllables. Lully also forsook the Italian method of dividing musical numbers into separate recitatives and arias, choosing instead to combine and intermingle the two for dramatic effect. He and Quinault also opted for quicker story development, which was more to the taste of the French public. The intrigue of the plot always culminated in a vast tableau. Lully wrote 14 operas between 1673 and 1687.
Libretto in French (PDF).
I have seen the performance by Les Arts Florissants directed by William Christie on DVD. It is difficult to stage this cumbersome piece for a modern audience,
but William Christie surely has found a way to do that, by modernizing
and updating the story - a group of tourists visits the palace in
Versailles and then one of them has a dream in which he experiences the
whole opera. In Christie's version especially the protagonist Armide,
sung by a splendid Stéphanie d'Oustrac, is impressive and depicted with deep
psychological realism.