(Fr.).
A French Baroque stage work that combined spoken, or later sung, comédie and ballet.
As Molière stressed in his preface to Les fâcheux (1661), his artistic aim was for a more integrated spectacle, one in which vocal music and dance complemented the principal intrigue conveyed through the spoken dialogue. In partnership with Lully (from 1663 to 1670), he created the most enduring examples of the genre. In the course of this period there was a gradual breaking down of the compartmentalization of intermède and dialogue in favour of a more flexible structure: music was increasingly assigned a more prominent role. The subject of the last of their collaborations, Le bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), a rich bourgeois and his efforts to become a cultivated gentleman, provided ample scope for Lully (in scenes where the titled character seeks to be a patron or student of the arts with comic results) – so much so that the critic of the Gazette de Paris found the intrigue of the comédie too accessory. After falling out with Lully, Molière turned to Marc-Antoine Charpentier, whose Le malade imaginaire (1673), revised three times to avoid legal entanglements with Lully, achieved a notable success.
In the 18th century few works of this type were called comédies-ballets (Voltaire’s La princesse de Navarre with music by Rameau, 1745, is a hybrid between tragédie and comédie-ballet, though termed the latter; see Paris, fig.17); nonetheless, the model of Molière and his musicians was an important legacy. Incidental music (instrumental and vocal) supporting elements of the plot and characterization was a feature of French spoken theatre well into the 19th century.
While some scholars restrict the term comédie-ballet to works conforming to the Molière-Lully model, for 18th-century authors it also aptly designated a type of Opéra-ballet, with no spoken dialogue and in three or four acts with a prologue. Rather than being composed of separate entrées, it had principal characters that appeared in all the acts and a continuous, though dramatically slight, plot. A.C. Destouches’ Le Carnaval et la Folie (1703) was the most popular example. Another is Rameau’s Platée (1745). The humour was broader than in other opéras-ballets and, of course, in strong contrast to the dignity of tone sought in tragédies lyriques.
AnthonyFB
L. de Cahusac: ‘Comédie ballet’, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. D. Diderot and others (Paris,1751–80)
R.M. Isherwood: Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY,1973)
J.S. Powell: Music in the Theater of Molière (diss., U. of Washington, 1982)
S.H. Fleck: Molière’s Comedy-Ballets: a Dramatic and Musical Analysis (diss., U. of California, Davis, 1993)
M. Franko: Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge, 1993)
C. Mazouer: Molière et ses comédies-ballets (Paris, 1993),
S.H. Fleck: Music, Dance, and Laughter: Comic Creation in Molière’s Comedy-Ballets (Paris, 1995)
G.E. Smith: Molière’s Comédies-Ballets: Political Theatre for the Court of Louis XIV (diss., Indiana U., 1995)
M. ELIZABETH C. BARTLET