Ballet de cour

(Fr.).

A type of ballet popular at the French court during the reigns of Henry III, Henry IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. It borrowed elements from the earlier entremets (pantomimes accompanied by choruses and dances) in vogue at the courts of Burgundy, from the elaborate (though often chaotic) fêtes of the Valois kings and from the mascheratas and intermedi imported from Italy.

Its components were normally récits (see Récit), vers (rhymed verses found in the libretto), entrées (see Entrée) and a concluding grand ballet (a forerunner of the operatic finale) danced by the grands seigneurs and, at least once each year, by the king himself. All ballets resulted from the collaboration of a royal patron who determined the subject and the distribution of labour, poets for the vers and récits, at least two composers responsible for vocal and instrumental music and a machinist. Detailed descriptions of the mise en scène, the vers (often containing indiscreet references to royal dancers) and the identification of the dancers themselves were published in librettos (livrets) distributed to the spectators before the performance.

Early essays in the genre were the Paradis d’amour of 1572 (text by Ronsard) and the Ballet polonais of 1573 (commissioned from Balthasar de Beaujoyeux by Catherine de’ Medici to honour the Polish ambassadors; fig.1), which was described by Brantôme in his memoirs (Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, 1823) as ‘le plus beau ballet qui fust jamais faict au monde’. More important was Circé, ou le Balet comique de la Royne, performed at the Petit Bourbon palace on 15 October 1581 as part of the festivities celebrating the marriage of the Duke of Joyeuse and the queen’s sister, Marguerite de Vaudemont. This work has the distinction of being the first ballet de cour in which poetry (by La Chesnaye and possibly D’Aubigny), music (by Jacques Salmon and Lambert de Beaulieu), décor (by Jacques Patin) and dance combine to support a single dramatic action: the destruction of the power of the enchantress Circe in order to re-establish harmony, reason and order in the realm. Thus, at its inception, the ballet de cour was a political tool of the monarchy, a means of domesticating the nobility and of preserving the king’s centralized power and control.

By virtue of its dramatic unity, perhaps inspired by the humanistic precepts of Baïf’s Académie de Poésie et de Musique, Circé has long been considered the first French work to give ‘some idea of the musical theatre’ (d’Aquin de Château-Lyon). It stands first in the long list of precursors of the tragédie lyrique. Beaujoyeux, who had been chosen by Catherine de’ Medici to develop the ballet’s master plan, wrote in the preface to the Ballard score of 1582 that Circé was an ‘invention moderne’ in which the word ‘comique’ described a work with the dramatic unity of a comedy.

The structural significance of Circé apparently had little effect on the following generation of those responsible for the ballet de cour. Their works, based largely on ‘mascarades à l’italienne’, included unrelated entrées of colourful and grotesque characters. Titles such as Ballets des foux (1596), Ballet des barbiers (1598), Ballet des garçons de taverne (1603), Ballet des bouteilles et des dames (1607) and Ballet des paysans et des grenouilles (1607) show a preoccupation with burlesque elements at the turn of the century.

Not until 1609 with the Ballet de la reyne (vers by Malherbe) or 1610 with the Ballet d’Alcine was there a return to the unified dramatic action established 29 years before by Beaujoyeux. This type of ballet, labelled ‘ballet mélodramatique’, remained popular for about a decade. At its best in such works as the Ballet de la délivrance de Renaud (1617), the Ballet de l’aventure de Tancrède en la forêt enchantée (1619) and the Ballet de Psyché (1619), it was a convincing dramatic spectacle which could have led to French opera long before Lully’s Cadmus. About 1620 Michel Henry, a violinist of the Chambre du Roi, copied an important collection of ballet music. The music is not extant, but the list enumerates 117 ballets, 96 of which were performed between 1597 and 1618. M.-F. Christout (1992) has identified 392 court ballets performed between 1572 and 1671 by title, year, specific date and place, thereby documenting the popularity of the genre.

In 1621, with the death of the Duc de Luynes, Louis XIII’s favourite patron of the ballet, the ballet mélodramatique was superseded by the ballet à entrées which, under the aegis of the Duke of Nemours, was a choreographic spectacle of many parts, each with its own subject matter and characters, relating in only a general way to a collective idea expressed in the title. In the Grand bal de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626), for example, the four corners of the world each send delegates to the ball (fig.2); each has its own ballet preceded by récits and including several entrées.

Saint-Hubert classified ballets de cour by their length in La manière de composer et faire réussir les ballets (1641): a ‘ballet royal’ ordinarily contained 30 entrées, a ‘beau ballet’ had at least 20 entrées and a ‘petit ballet’ had 10 to 12 entrées. The vocal music included choruses and polyphonic airs, as well as solo récits. These airs were provided by the most important composers of the genre, including Pierre Guédron, Antoine Boësset and Etienne Moulinié. Boësset, for example, contributed more than 70 polyphonic airs and solo récits to 25 different ballets de cour (Durosoir, 240–49). From the late 16th century to the death of Lully in 1687, court ballets were performed in Paris at the Grande Salle of the Louvre, the Grand Salon of the Palais des Tuileries, the Palais Royal, the Hôtel de Ville, and, until its destruction in 1660, at the Salle du Petit Bourbon (between the church of St Germain-l’Auxerrois and the Louvre). Outside Paris, performances took place at the royal châteaux at Compiègne, Fontainebleau, Chantilly, Vincennes, Saint Germain-en-Laye and Chambord.

Louis XIV danced for the first time as a boy of 13 in the Ballet de Cassandre (1651), the ballet in which Isaac de Benserade made his début as a poet of superior literary talents. Two years later the young Florentine Lully found himself on stage dancing next to the king in the Ballet de la nuit. It was in the ballet de cour that Lully learnt to differentiate between the styles of his native and adopted lands. From 1654 to 1671 he provided music for 16 court ballets. His own private orchestra, the Petits Violons, made its first appearance in the Ballet de la galantérie du temps (1656, music lost). In 1657 Lully composed all the instrumental music for the Ballet de l’amour malade and in 1658 all the instrumental music and much of the vocal music for the Ballet d’Alcidiane. The overture to this ballet bears the classical stamp of all subsequent French overtures. In his dances Lully quickly assimilated the long heritage of French dances and introduced new dances (especially ‘airs de vitesse’). By degrees, purely musical features of the ballet began to usurp the position of the dance. The close liaison between the Ballet des muses (1666) and the later tragédie lyrique was recognized by Brossard, who wrote: ‘it is this ballet [Les muses] that gave the idea of composing operas in French’ (Catalogue des livres de musique, 1724). Brossard must have been referring here to the pre-eminence of vocal airs, ensembles and choruses in the Ballet des muses rather than to any organizational principle, because this ballet best illustrates the improvisatory nature of the ballet de cour. From its first performance on 2 December 1666 to its final one on 19 February 1667 it went through six stages of development. New material was constantly added, seemingly on a trial-and-error basis, to render this ballet ‘encore plus agréable’. By 14 February its boundaries had been stretched to include two of Molière’s comédies-ballets, La pastorale comique and Le Sicilien.

The ballet de cour afforded Lully a ten-year apprenticeship that helped prepare him for the creation of the tragédie en musique. According to Le Cerf de la Viéville, Lully modelled his operatic recitative on the intonation of Racine’s mistress, the actress Mme Champmeslé, who performed at the Hôtel de Bourgogne. Yet even before her earliest triumphs, Lully had introduced into his court ballets the predominantly anapaestic rhythmic organization and the division of the alexandrine into hemistichs that characterize French recitative (e.g. ‘Arreste malheureux’, Ballet des muses). Although many of the airs in Lully’s ballets are clearly modelled on the contemporaneous French airs de cour, Lully introduced a type of binary air that was to assume pride of place in the tragédie lyrique. This is the so-called extended binary air (ABB') of Italian origin, an early example of which is found in the Ballet des arts of 1662 (‘Bel art qui retardez’).

Lully, who had assimilated the long tradition of French dances, introduced many new ‘airs de vitesse’ into court ballets. Bourrées and minuets became the most widely used dances; courantes and galliards became rare. The ‘Chaconne des Maures’, which concludes the Ballet d’Alcidiane, already assumed the grand proportions and structural significance of the chaconnes that were to be found in Lully’s operas. The choral finale to the prologue of the Ballet des muses expresses the same sentiments found in later operatic prologues: ‘Rien n’est si doux que de vivre à la cour de Louis, le plus parfait des rois’. The pompous music that Lully wrote for this text consolidated a tradition and remained the supreme gesture of official adoration throughout the grand siècle.

The ballet de cour suffered an eclipse when Louis XIV ceased dancing (1670) and when Lully moved it closer to opera with his Triomphe de l’amour (1681; fig.3) and his Temple de la paix (1685). The Parfaict brothers were hard pressed to find a proper category for so mixed a genre as Le triomphe de l’amour. In their manuscript Histoire de l’Académie royale de musique (c1741), they wrote: ‘Properly speaking, it is neither an opera nor a ballet but a collection of entrées mixed with récits’. The 20 entrées, in fact, contain 16 récits, which exceeds by far the number in any other ballet de cour. The Ballet de la jeunesse (1686) and the Palais de Flore (1689), both by Lalande, synthesize opera and ballet and resemble the Lully ballets of the 1680s in this respect.

The ballet de cour enjoyed a brief revival in the early 18th century when the young Louis XV and his seigneurs danced at the Tuileries in L’inconnu (1720, music by Lalande), Les folies de Cardenio (1720, music by Lalande) and Les élémens (1721, music by Destouches and Lalande) – works that owe as much to opera as the ballet de cour. In 1729 the Ballet du Parnasse (fragments from Collin de Blamont, Lully, Campra, Destouches and Mouret) was danced at Versailles to celebrate the birth of the dauphin. By 1754, however, Cahusac stated that it was a ‘genre which no longer exists’ (La danse ancienne et moderne). At the Jesuit Collège Louis-le-Grand, its form was maintained up to 1761 (when the Jesuits were expelled from France) as part of the ceremony marking the end of each scholastic year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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JAMES R. ANTHONY