Magnificence in motion
Stage musicians in Lully's ballets and operas
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9325745 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Harris‐Warrick (corresponding author), Rebecca Harris-Warrick |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 189-203 |
| Publication date | 1994-11-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cambridge Opera Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0954-5867 • E-ISSN: 1474-0621 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0954586700004298 |
| OpenAlex | W2134667000 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 10 |
Those fortunate enough to have seen the recent production of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Atys mounted by Les Arts Florissants will remember the sumptuously staged realm of sleep in Act III, during which costumed lute and recorder players appeared alongside the singers and dancers. Although conductor William Christie and director Jean-Marie Villégier made no attempt to reproduce the original seventeenth-century staging, they did adhere to Quinault's instructions for this scene to the extent of making musicians prominently visible. Atys is not exceptional in calling for stage musicians: Lully regularly included instrumentalists among the dramatis personae of his tragédies en musique , the genre on which he lavished most of his creative energies after 1672, and the practice is even more evident in the thirty or so ballets he composed for Louis XIV's court during the preceding two decades. The phenomenon of on-stage instrumentalists – much more extensive than the use of the banda in nineteenth-century Italian opera – has been studied only for the information it affords about the development of Lolly's orchestra or the iconography of French Baroque opera. This article is concerned rather with why instrumentalists appeared on stage at all, what they represented, how they functioned as characters, and the impact they had on the visual spectacle
Art · Art history · Baroque · Iconography · Literature · Opera · Performing arts · Spectacle · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,2 |
| Citation span | 2016 - 2023 (8) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |