Lyric Tragedy

The lyric tragedy (or Tragedy in music) is a specifically French Musical genre, of use during, mainly represented on the scene of the royal Académie of music of Paris, then diffused in the other French and foreign cities.

Definition

Is the term of opera inappropriate to indicate this kind whose creator, Jean-Baptiste Lully, precisely wanted to dissociate Italian opera then sails about it in the remainder of the Europe, in spite (or because?) of its own Italian origins. The tragedy in music is the result of a fusion of the elements of the Ballet of court, the pastoral one, “part with machines” and comedy and tragedy-ballet. Its creators - Lully and Quinault - ambitionnaient to make a kind as prestigious of it as the traditional tragedy of Corneille and Racine: the latter following the example of, the tragedy comprises five acts.

The Italian opera (in three acts) tends to emphasize the music, and especially the song soloist (the “Bel canto”) whereas the lyric tragedy is conceived as a complete spectacle which wants to put on an equal footing the whole of its components: the text (in worms), decorations, costumes, music, dance, “machines”, lights, etc

The intrigue of the lyric tragedy generally calls with mythology and the legend (especially graeco-latin, but one exploits also the poems epic of the Rebirth in the vein of the furious Roland , the Jerusalem delivered etc). The unhappy love affairs or opposed are the goodwills usual of the librettists. The “marvellous one” is an basic element, allowing, the greatest benefit of the spectacle if not probability, to multiply the effects of machineries to put in natural scene gods and heroes, monsters and phenomena (descent of the Jupiter skies, falls of Phaéton, descent into Hell, earthquakes, etc). This brings it closer to the contemporary Italian opera; but with the difference in this last, the intrigue must also hold a broad place with the Danse, by scenes of festivals and rejoicings laid out by the way.

The lyric tragedy generally includes/understands:

  • a solemn opening instrumental
  • a Prolog bringing the action by a allegorical Allusion to the merits and important facts of the sovereign: this prolog with the same structure as the principal acts; it disappears in last works from Branch
  • five acts mixing instrumental airs soloists, choruses, récitatifs and interludes with dances. This still distinguishes it from the Italian opera, generally in three acts.
  • a conclusive instrumental air, Chaconne or Passacaille or several short dances, connected one after the other.

In some works, a passacaille of great proportions is inserted in one of the acts, according to possibililtés of the booklet. It is the case of the passacaille of Armide (Lully), considered in its time as the masterpiece of the kind with its extraordinary succession of instrumental variations or choral societies.

The vocal music of the tragedy in music differs deeply from that of the contemporary Italian opera:

  • importance given to the choruses, consisted the supporting characters
  • relative scarcity of the airs of soloists, who make the share much more reduced with virtuosity and the effects: the text must be included/understood by the récitatif spectator
  • more singing.

Indeed the Prosodie of the French language leads the récitatif one to be distinguished from the “recitativo secco” almost spoken about the Italian opera. The melody is marked, giving to the lyric tragedy a certain continuity which one said that it precedes the melody continues Wagnerian opera .

The principal interpreters were to know to sing and dance.

Principal type-setters

This kind was practiced by many Compositeur S French, inter alia:

Marc-Antoine Charpentier

  • Médée (1693)

Andre Campra

  • Hésione (1700)
  • Tancrède (1702)
  • Alcine (1705)
  • Idoménée (1712)

Jean-Joseph Mouret

  • ARIANE and Thésée (1717)
  • Pirithoüs (1723)

Andre-Cardinal Destouches

  • Amadis of Greece (1699)
  • Marthésie, queen of Amazones (1699)
  • Omphale (1701)
  • Callirhoé (1712)
  • Télémaque and Calypso (1714)
  • Sémiramis (1718)

Marin Marais

  • Alcide (1693) in collaboration with Louis Lully
  • ARIANE and Bacchus (1696)
  • Alcyone (1706)
  • Sole (1709)

Henry Desmarest

  • Didon (1693)
  • Circé (1694)
  • Théagène and Chariclée (1695)
  • Venus and Adonis (1697)
  • Iphigénie in Tauride (1704)
  • Renaud or the continuation of Armide (1722)

Elisabeth Jacquet of the War

Pascal Stuck

  • Achilles and Polyxène , with Lully (1688)
  • Thétis and Pelée (1689)
  • Énée and Lavinie (1691)
  • Astrée (1691)
  • Jason or the Golden Fleece (1696)
  • Canente (1700)
  • Polyxène and Pirrhus (1706)

Jean-Féry Rebel

  • Ulysses (1703)

Jean-Baptiste Matho

  • Arion (1714)

Jean-Marie Leclair

  • Scylla and Glaucus (1746)

Lully and Rameau

But the two Masters of the lyric tragedy are:

Jean-Baptiste Lully

the creator of the kind, with:

Jean-Philippe Branch

the last to illustrate it:

Branch, if it preserves the elements introduced by Lully, renews the musical style completely: he, paradoxically, is thus criticized at the same time by those of his contemporaries who regard the lyric tragedy as an exceeded kind, and by those which reproach him the too great modernity of its musical language. The confrontation of the lyric tragedy with the Opera-puffs out will be the departure of the “Querelle of the Buffoons” of which it will be one of the main characters.

Quotations

In the Encyclopedia , Louis de Jaucourt defines the opera thus:
“ dramatic species of poëme made to be put in music, & sung on the Theater with the symphony, & all kinds of decorations out of machines & clothes. the Heather says that the opera must hold the spirit, the ears & the eyes in a species of enchantment: & Saint-Evremont calls the opera a chimerical assembly of poetry & of music, in which the poëte & the musician give themselves torture mutually”.

dramatic Dictionary of 1776:

“ the poet who makes a lyric tragedy, sticks more to make illusion with the directions that with the spirit; he rather seeks to produce a spectacle enchanter, that an action where probability is observed exactly. He frees himself from the rigorous laws of the tragedy; and if it has some regard to the unit of interest and action, it violates without scruple the units of time and place, sacrificing them to the charms of the variety and the marvellous one. Its heroes are larger than natural; they are Gods, or men trades about it with them, and which take part of their power. They cross the barriers of Olympe; they penetrate the abysses of the Hell. With their voice, Nature shakes, Élémens obey, the Universe their is subjected. The poet tends to recall vast subjects and sublimes; the musician joint with him to return them still more sublimes. One and the other join together the efforts of their art and their genius to remove and enchant the astonished spectator, to sometimes transport it in the magic palates of Armide, sometimes in Olympe, sometimes in the Hells, or among the fortunate Shades of the Elysium. But some effect that produce on the directions the pompeux apparatus, and the diversity of decorations, the poet must even more attempt to bear, in the spectators, the interest of the feeling ”.

Fate of the tragedy in music

After Cadmus and Hermione in 1673, Lully composes a lyric tragedy each year, until its death (it leaves Achille and Polyxène unfinished).

With the favor of the king and, after that, the kind disappearance Superintendent of many type-setters at the end of the 17th century and at the beginning of 18th. There remains nevertheless exclusively French even if some of its components found echo abroad - and in particular famous “the Ouverture to the Frenchwoman” adopted by Purcell, Haendel, Bach and others.

The death of Louis XIV tends to make the kind a little null and void: the Régence sees flowering of the enjouées forms, less solemn, empesées: opera ballet, pastoral…

It is already out of date when Rameau, genius late and solitary, gives again gloss to him whereas confrontation with the Italian opera prepares whose Querelle of the Buffoons will be the tangible demonstration. The fashion is with more simplicity, of naturalness. The exceptional quality of the music composed by Rameau cannot prevent the lyric tragedy from falling in disuse, even if its last work, Boréades , is with the repetitions when occurs, in September 1764, the death of the large type-setter. This song of the swan will not be finally represented and the tragedy in music, complete spectacle and the most completed form and more the symbolic system of the French music, becomes simply a subject of study for the historians of the music, disappearing from the repertory for two centuries without whoever being able to provide that it left one day this purgatory.

In a history of the music published in 1969 and reprinted in 1985, Lucien Rebatet, prophet badly inspired, written: is

“ Which really the musical value of this tragedy lullyste? We can hardly judge it but on reading, or mental restitutions starting from the known fragments. It hardly any more has of chances to reappear with the repertory which it left since so a long time, and one honoured it in France with no phonographic edition, like the English did it for works of Purcell of which the scenic representation is not less impossible ”.

However, since the Years 1970, not only some of these works were presented in concert, were recorded, represented with the favor of the movement for the old Musique, but they meet one big hit. The five tragedies of Branch were recorded (on CD) one or more time. And nine among those of Lully, more stereotyped undoubtedly, already were it also. It is the same for other type-setters (Leclair, Charpentier, Mouret).

See too

External bonds

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