(Fr.).
An instrumental musical form whose programmatic element honoured a dead musician, usually Lully. In an apothéose the favoured dead are welcomed by Apollo (representing Louis XIV) on to Mount Parnassus.
Surviving apothéoses are few, and the earliest survive as satirical scenarios. The anonymous Le triomphe de Lulli aux Champs Elysées (F-Pn 6542, no.173, f.260) dates from 1687, the year of Lully’s death. In it Lully, defended by Polyhymnia, is subjected to a trial – examining musical and moral charges brought against him by French musicians – before being honoured by Apollo and the heroes of his operas. The following year François de Callières included an account of Lully’s reception on Parnassus in his Histoire poétique de la guerre nouvellement déclamée entre les anciens et les modernes (1688), in which an Italian musician tries to thwart Lully’s arrival by reporting Lully’s sharp practices in the theatre to Orpheus (who can also be taken as representing the king); the ever-confident Lully brushes aside the charges and invites Orpheus to join him in creating ‘an opera that will be worth money to us’, a proposal Orpheus firmly rejects.
The two finest musical examples of apothéoses are both trio sonatas published by François Couperin, which make strong musical reference to the dead composers’ styles: Le Parnasse ou L’Apothéose de Corelli: Grande sonade en Trio (1724, as part of Les goûts réünis) and Concert instrumental sous le titre d’Apothéose, composé à la mémoire immortelle de l’incomparable Monsieur de Lully (1725). The latter, the more substantial work, depicts both Lully and Corelli in Elysium. Their decision to agree that French and Italian musical styles are equally good leads to an Essai en forme d’ouverture, combining elements of both national styles, closed by a section entitled ‘La paix du Parnasse’.
There is nothing sombre about these memorial compositions. Couperin obviously intended to entertain his audience: references to stylistic polarities between Italian and French music had direct relevance for his faction-ridden audience, as did the ‘rumeur souteraine, causée par les auteurs contemporains de Lulli’ and the subsequent ‘plainte des mêmes’, a reference to the unpopular control exercised by Lully over royal music. Couperin’s preface to the Lully apothéose also gives detailed instructions for playing these trios (and many others) as pieces for two harpsichords, with each player taking a melody line and both playing the bass. Each movement is preceded by a short description which, at least in modern performances, is read out by one of the musicians (or, occasionally, by a narrator). Corelli and Lully both appeared in another work in apothéose manner, also from 1725, Le triomphe des Mélophilètes, an ‘idyll in music’ with text by Pierre Bouret; it is not known who composed and arranged the music.
H. Prunières: ‘Le triomphe de Lully aux Champs-Elysées’, ReM, vi/3 (1925), 92–105
K. Gilbert and D. Moroney: preface to the revised edition of Oeuvres complètes de François Couperin, iv (Monaco, 1992), 7–10
DAVITT MORONEY/JULIE ANNE SADIE