The Influence of the Précieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault's and Lully's Tragédies...

The Influence of the Précieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault's and Lully's TragédiesLyriquesAuthor(s): Patricia HowardSource: Acta Musicologica, Vol. 63, Fasc. 1 (Jan. - Apr., 1991), pp. 57-72Published by: International Musicological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/932887 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 05:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

International Musicological Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toActa Musicologica.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.223 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 05:58:51 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=inmuso

http://www.jstor.org/stable/932887?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


57

The Influence of the Pricieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault's and Lully's Tragedies Lyriques

PATRICIA HOWARD (GUILDFORD, SURREY)

In a pamphlet published in 1923, Francis Baumal described the rise of 'feminism in the age of Molibre,' and argued that women in mid-seventeenth-century France laid claim to personal freedoms, many of which they had still not achieved 250 years later.' Baumal identified specific questions which were

burning issues in the seventeenth century: parental authority, marriage, birth control and divorce, also the themes of promiscuity and celibacy.2 Such social

questions, in the Grand Siecle, were discussed in terms of the arcane arguments of mediaeval theology, and the question des dames involved an inquiry into woman's essential nature. Creation theories were re-interpreted to 'prove' that woman was innately inferior to man. The theologian Valladier made a detailed

comparison between woman and the devil, and found they had much in common.3 Then women entered the debate and undertook their own defence. Many male writers seconded their claims." Neither the social problems nor the theo- logical debates were resolved in that century, but they were aired, in conversation and in literature, and the forum for discussion was the 'precieux' movement. In this paper I aim to establish some of the attitudes which characterize the Precieuses, and to show both how far the poet Philippe Quinault responded to their influence, and where, in the librettos he supplied for Jean-Baptiste Lully's tragddies lyriques, he subverted their construction of woman's nature.6

I

Who were the Pr&cieuses? Twentieth-century scholars disagree over dating the movement. Brunot claimed the high point to be 1605; Faguet dates it between 1630 and 1660,7 and Mongredien, while postulating two generations of Precieu- ses, before and after the Fronde, suggests also that preciosity might be 'une tendance permanente' of the French character." There seems good reason to concur with Adam in associating the term 'pr&cieux' exclusively with the salon

'F. BAUMAL, Le Fiminisme au temps de Molibre (Paris 1923). 2 See for example, M. DE PURE, Histoire d'Eulalie, Histoire d 'Aracie, in his La Pricieuse (1656-60), ed. E. Magne (Paris 1938-9), t. 1, p. 276-287, 312-329. La Pricieuse purports to record actual conversation between Pr6cieuses. ' A. VALLADIER, La Sainte philosophie de l'dme (Paris 1614), p. 813-814.

STout ce qu'il y a de plus fort dans le corps de l'homme est employ6 pour former celui de la femme.' M. BUFFET, Nouvelles observations sur la langue franqaise (Paris 1668), p. 200.

5 For example, P. LE MOYNE, Gallerie des femmes fortes (Paris 1647), which explores questions such as, 'S'il faut plus de force et plus de courage pour faire un homme vaillant, que pour faire une femme chaste?' (p. 273). 6This paper was originally read at the annual conference of the American Musicological Society, Baltimore, 1988. Pr6cieux attitudes to the representation of women, and seventeenth-century proto-feminism, are explored in more detail in my chapter Quinault, Lully and the Pricieuses: images of women in seventeenth-century France, in: Cecilia: Feminist Perspectives on Women and Music, ed. S. Cook and J. Tsou, forthcoming. 7 W. ZIMMER, Die literarische Kritik am Prezi6sentum (Meisenheim am Glan 1978), p. 3. 8 G. MONGREDIEN, La Vie litteraire au XVII sidcle (Paris 1947), p.220.



58 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully

movement in the second half of the century.9 The first metaphorical application of the adjective to a literary patron of formidable powers of taste and judge- ment has been traced to 1654.01 It was immediately taken up to identify a group of aristocratic literary women, but the term quickly became pejorative. From the moment when Moliere's Les Precieuses ridicules appeared in 1659, affectation rather than refinement became the predominant contemporary usage."

There seems at first glance to be a mismatch between the gravity of the social problems and the often trivial literary level on which they were debated. The seventeenth century was an age of revolutions: political, scientific, social, and philosophical. The Precieuses wanted to be involved in all these move- ments, but their experience and education were too narrow for them to be able to contribute to more than a small corner of them. The Fronde had given some aristocratic women a taste for power,"2 but it was difficult to sustain this ambition in the post-Fronde era. Women unwisely aped the scientific revolution

by trying to apply scientific principles to the only area in which they had ex-

pertise, the phases and refinements of the passions. They participated to more

purpose in the social revolution by extending membership of their originally aristocratic salons to the bourgeoisie. Their most extensive contribution was to creative literature and literary criticism, but even here their scope was limited. Love was their sphere; they literally mapped it, with their 'Cartes du Pays de

Tendre,' and categorised it, with their eight degrees of love, twenty kinds of

sigh, forty categories of smile.'" To evaluate their achievements, we have to dis- card a good deal of the undoubted silliness of the movement, trenchantly lam-

pooned by Moliere and Boileau, and search out their revolutionary understand-

ing of woman's nature. For if in French theatre in the second half of the century, women's roles are preeminent, it was the pr&cieux movement which made them SO.

Quinault began his literary career under precieux patronage: his first play, the

comddie Les Rivales, was given in 1653 at the HOtel de Bourgogne, where for

the next seventeen years he produced a series of comedies, tragi-comidies and tra-

gidies, conforming to many of the Pr&cieuses' requirements in his treatment of the 'Pays de Tendre.' His early success soon bred a jealous reaction. He was ac-

cused by his contemporaries of both literary and social ambition, and a caustic

account in Somaize's gossipy Grand dictionnaire des Precieuses attributes his rapid rise to fame to his skilful plagiarism of other pr6cieux poets, and to his ability to

please the literary women with his 'amorous disposition' and 'galant manners.'"

Throughout his life, however, Quinault had to pay for his early submission to

precieux values. His critics searched his work for the effete heroes and affected heroines who populate precieux fiction - and found them. Boileau, in his third

9 A. ADAM, La Preciositd, in: Cahiers de l'association internationale des etudes franqaises 1 (1951), p.35-55. 'o ZIMMER, op.cit., p.51. " J.-B. POQUELIN, dit MOLIERE, Les Pricieuses ridicules (Paris 1659).

12 For example, during the Fronde, Mademoiselle de Montpensier (Lully's first patron) raised an army against the

throne, and rode at its head, capturing the city of Orleans for the rebel cause.

13 D. A. L. BACKER, Precious Women (New York 1974), p.163, 195.

14 A.-B. DE SOMAIZE, Le Grand Dictionnaire des Pricieuses (1661), ed. Livet (Paris 1856), t. 1, p. 203-204 (s.v.

'Quirinus').



Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Precieuses on Quinault and Lully 59

Satire, ridiculed Quinault's theatre of love, in which heroes spoke like shep- herds, and where 'jusqu'a je vous ha's, tout s'y dit tendrement."" Where Quinault was praised, it was for the same characteristics: 'I1l conjugue Amo galamment.'' And when in 1657, Quinault abandoned the salons for the court, he seems to have taken with him the reputation of being an expert in preciosity: a few years later we find him playing on behalf of the king in a fashionable precieux parlour game.

It is worth spending a moment examining this game, samples of which were

published as Questions or Maximes d'amour,17 for the content of the questions suggests that when Quinault eventually turned from the legitimate theatre to the operatic stage, he continued to demonstrate his allegiance to pr&cieux values. In this game, someone would propose a question involving a delicate dilemma of the heart: replies in verse or prose would then be forthcoming and their various merits debated by the company. Contemporary novels record many such debates, imagined and actual. One particular batch of Questions, posed by Charlotte de Bregy and replied to by Quinault at the king's command, asked what one should do when one's heart dictated one course of action and one's reason another, whether there was more joy to be had in the presence of a loved one than pain caused by evidence of their indifference, whether one should hate someone who does not return one's proffered love, and whether it makes for greater happiness to love in vain someone who is indifferent to love rather than someone who loves a rival.l8 The relevance of this apparently trivial pursuit for Quinault's later work becomes clear when we realise that the questions summarized above outline the predicaments of many of his characters, and his librettos, as much as his spoken dramas, act out the game with concrete examples of each dilemma.",

'La crainte devant l'amour et le mariage ... est l'essence de la preciosit&.'20The Questions d'amour were predicated upon the precieux belief that love was a voluntary emotion, subject to reason. But in real life, seventeenth-century women had little control over such intimate areas of their life. The game concealed a

isN. BOILEAU-DESPREAUX, Satire III, 1. 188. See also Satire II, 1. 19-20: 'Si je pense exprimer un Auteur sans defaut, I La raison dit Virgile, et la rime Quinault.'

16 E. BOURSAULT, Lettre ? la Reine, in: Lettres de respect, d'obligation et d amour (Paris 1669), p. 25-26: 'C'est un Auteur doux, agrdable, I A qui la Schne est redevable; I Il ecrit toujours tendrement; I Il conjugue Amo galamment; I Jamais Auteur hors-mis lui-mame, I N'a tant de fois dit, je vous aime; I Et de plus, selon le gofit mien, I On ne l'a jamais dit si bien. 17 For example, COUNT DE BUSSY RABUTIN, Maximes d 'amour, in his Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (Paris 1856-75), t. 1, p. 347-398. The Questions had a distant ancestry in the twelfth-century Provencal poetic genre known as the joc- partit (jeu-parti), which discussed such topics as, 'is it better to be a wife or a mistress?' The Pr6cieuses' Questions may also have been a deliberately bathetic copy of more elevated moral debate, in texts such as LE MOYNE, op. cit. '"C. DE SAUMAIZE DE BREGY, Cinq questions d'amour, in her Lettres et Poesies (Paris 1666), p. 97-100. 9 For example, the head/heart dilemma is experienced by Sangaride: 'Revenez, ma raison, revenez pour jamais; I Joignez-vous au d6pit pour 6touffer ma flame.' (Atys IV.2.) Alcide weighs up the pleasure of being in Alceste's company against the pain of seeing her wed Admhte: 'Que je vais payer chbrement I Le plaisir de la voir encore!' (Alceste I.1.) Phinde sees his love turn to hate: 'L'Amour meurt dans mon coeur; la rage lui succhde: I J'aime mieux voir un monstre affreux I Devorer I'ingrate Andromide, I Que la voir dans le bras de mon rival heureux.' (Persde IV.3.) Mercure consoles Chris with the argument that she need not attribute Jupiter's neglect to infidelity: 'Mais un amant charg6 d'un grand empire, I N'a pas toujours le temps de bien aimer.' (Proserpine 1.2.) 20 A. ADAM, Histoire de la littiraturefranqaise au XVII siecle (Paris 1951), t. 2, p. 23.



60 Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully

crisis for them: how to maintain a degree of emotional and physical indepen- dence, and how to prolong the period of courtship in order to defer the biologi- cally enforced servitude which marriage and childbearing imposed on the ma-

jority of women. No wonder the women who reigned in the salons of the first half of the century encouraged a return to the mediaeval ideal of courtly love, which kept the lover firmly on his knees and at a safe distance. Later in the

century the Precieuses led a crusade against marriage. They offered their sisters alternative roles: the 'Pr&cieuse prude' and the 'Pr&cieuse coquette.' The former advocated celibacy, the 'refus d'amour,' and took as her model the severely in- tellectual novelist, Madeleine de Scudery. The latter admitted many admirers, but imposed a long and arduous courtship on them, and, inspired by the 13-

year-long engagement of another celebrated Precieuse, Julie d'Angennes, claimed the right to defer submission almost indefinitely.

In his librettos, Quinault gives a voice both to the 'prude' and to the

coquette.' The character of the prude interested him greatly. Many of his female characters aspire to celibacy, which they associate with 'innocence,' 'paix,' and 'libert&.' Mdde' describes the celibate state as a 'Doux repos, innocente

paix' (Thesee, II.1); Proserpine develops at length the proposition that, 'Le vrai bonheur I Est de garder son coeur' (11.8); Lybie, in

Phai'ton, sings: 'Heureuse une ame indifferente' (I.1); and Armide fears the consequences if she were to lose control over her emotions: 'Ah! si la liberte me doit tre ravie!' (III.1). But in the working out of his plots, Quinault subverts this pr&cieux aspiration. He shows the failure of women to remain celibate - the often tragic failure, as in the cases of Mdde and Armide, who struggle in vain against their own nature to

preserve their roles as 'inhumaines.' This word betrays a male view of the celibate woman, and in these characterizations Quinault endorses the view, that

celibacy is unnatural, a dehumanizing state. That this was a common male re-

sponse to the 'Precieuses prudes' is suggested by Moliere's satire on the

position of Armande in Les Femmes savantes.21

For those who briefly succeed in living independently of men, an even more

poignant fate is prepared. It is unusual in Quinault's librettos to find an episode of intense drama tucked away in a divertissement. However, one of these episodes is worth detaching from its uneven dramatic context to be given a

hearing on its own merits. The fable of Pan and Syrinx in Act III of Isis deals with an archetypal celibate. The episode emerges from a discussion between Hierax and Argus, in which Argus urges his brother to give up his doomed attachment to the nymph lo, who is being alternately wooed by Jupiter and

punished by Junon. Argus, advocating a hedonist creed of non-involvement,

sings, 'Libert&!', a cry which is immediately taken up by the would-be celibate

Syrinx and her nymphs in a chorus which recurs throughout the episode. The word

'LibertY' is heard 95 times in a sequence of scenes containing just 33 lines.

The episode shows Quinault and Lully collaborating to emphasize a key word in pr&cieux dogma. An abundance of male and female pr&cieux writers confirm its significance: 'L'honneur et la chastet6 des Dames font leur veritable

21 MOLItRE, Les Femmes savantes (Paris 1672).




libert&. La Dame qui a consenti s'est rendue esclave.'22 'LibertY' is the theme of the Abbe de Pure's seminal novel, La Pricieuse, in which De Pure consistently associates the term with an all-female social environment: it is the absence of men which confers 'libert&.' He also invokes the word to represent escape from the 'Ipouvantable servitude' of marriage.23 Likewise, Somaize, who not only de- fines marriage as 'l'amour fini,' and 'l'abime de la libertY,' but also writes of the state of 'libert&' as being 'necessaire aux Precieuses.'24

The episode of Pan and Syrinx, then, seems deliberately designed to act out the doctrine of the 'Pr&cieuse prude,' and it emphasises a significant contemporary term to express Syrinx's aspirations. Moreover, the divertissement mirrors in miniature the action of the main drama: the flight of a nymph from a god. But Syrinx is a more authentic would-be celibate than the heroine of the main drama - lo comes late to a realisation that death is preferable to suffering under the consequences of love and jealousy - and her fate is more powerfully represented than lo's, since Quinault allows Syrinx to be metamorphosed into a bed of reeds, but, in conformity with 'la bienseance,' draws the line at changing Io into a cow.

A number of major and minor characters in Quinault's operas could well declare with Syrinx, 'Je declare a l'Amour une guerre immortelle' (III.6), but that is only one side of the complex precieux response to love. Jean-Michel Pe- lous identifies a rebellion, dating from around 1660, among male lovers, which was a reaction to the perfect submission of the chivalric lover of the first half of the century.25 Contending that in the second half of the century it became in- admissible for a man of fashion to be unhappy in his suit for long, he traces the growth of a hedonist code of behaviour, summed-up ironically by Moliere's Don Juan as, 'Toutes les belles ont droit de nous charmer' (I.2).26 Pelous argues that some women, at least, chose to attempt to regain their former dominance by adopting the corresponding role of 'coquette.' The aspiration of the coquette is expressed by Berelise in De Scudery's novel Cldlie as, 'D'etre fort aim&e, et de n'aimer point, ou de n'aimer guere.'27

The role of the prude is to refuse, of the coquette to choose. The coquette does not experience passion, and is fully in control of her emotions. Quinault's librettos contain many examples of the 'precieuse coquette': Dorine in Thiste warns that, 'I1l est dangereux d'aimer tant' (II.5). Charite in Cadmus divides love from the suffering with which it had been synonymous in past decades: 'L'Amour n'est plaisant, des qu'il n'est plus un jeux' (II.1). Cephise in Alceste keeps two suitors dangling throughout the opera only to reject them both in the last act. In question was a power struggle between the sexes, in which both hedonist and coquette viewed with cynicism the disregard of genuine feelings

22 J. DU BOSC, La Femme hiroique, ou les hiroines comparies avec les hWros en toute sorte de vertus (Paris 1645), t. 2, p.684. 23 'Je veux travailler ... A la libert6 de mon sexe ... et a la destruction de cette 6pouvantable servitude.' DE PURE, op.cit., t.2, p.269. 24 SOMAIZE, op.cit., t.1, p.51, 172-173. 25 J.-M. PELOUS, Amour pricieux. Amour galant (1654-1675) (Paris 1980), p.195-224. 26 MOLIERE, Dom Juan (Paris 1665). 27 M. DE SCUDERY, Clelie (Paris 1654-61, reprint Geneva 1973), t.5, l.iii, p.1188.




displayed in the way in which women were bought and sold in marriage. The

pr&cieux bid for emancipation, whether through celibacy or Don Juanism, involved denying the power of love, and the sexes competed to claim the right to

reject an unwanted lover, and sought to defend themselves from the plight of

being themselves rejected. All Quinault's hedonists are gods and all his coquettes are servants. He nev-

er attempted to represent a heroine as coquette: he subverted the pr&cieux bid for emancipation by refusing his heroines the power to choose. It is in this area that Quinault's representation of women differs crucially from the Precieuses' self-image; for the Pr&cieuses the issues were social, for Quinault, biological. The Precieuses believed their unhappiness stemmed from the nature of the so-

ciety in which they lived, but Quinault portrayed them unhappy as the result of their innate nature. The Pr&cieuses prided themselves on the freedom achieved

by their 'refus d'amour,' but Quinault represented them as powerless to refuse, invariably depicting sexual passion in women as a physical force which re- moves mental autonomy; we notice the recurrent formula, 'malgre moi,' with which they excuse their capitulation.

The concept of the woman whose physical nature makes her unable to control her emotions or her actions had been current in the Renaissance, deriving from the attribution of cold and moist humours, which were considered to ren- der women more imaginative and more implacable than men. This interpreta- tion was discarded in the middle of seventeenth-century France, when for a brief period, associated with the regency of Anne of Austria (1643-52), the

image of heroic woman, the 'femme forte,' was constructed.28 Quinault negates the idea of the heroic woman by denying his heroines a capacity for disinter- ested action. His portrayal of women borrows from the physical energy of the heroic image, but denies its moral strength, and replaces virtuous zeal with

disabling sexual passion. Quinault selected material from the stock of subject matter common to all

seventeenth-century librettists in order to provide a context for this interpreta- tion. After his first opera, Cadmus (1673), he rejected the male-centred myths and legends popular in Italian opera - the stories of Jason, Hercules, Achilles,

Ulysses, and, notably, the widely-set myth of Orpheus. He chose instead stories which focus on women. But instead of representing the strong, independent women the Pr&cieuses aspired to be, he portrayed women who either submit to male domination or who are destroyed by their own passions.29 Furthermore, he often modified the male and female roles represented in earlier literature by replacing the totally subservient male with a more spirited model.

As a result, he removed the woman's power to initiate action. When, for ex-

ample, in the mediaeval romance, Amadis de Gaule - a popular work with the

28 The heroic woman is analysed in LE MOYNE, op.cit. 29 For a more detailed structural analysis of Quinault's heroines, see my paper The Positioning of Women in Quinault's World Picture, in: J.-B. Lully: Actes du Colloque St-Germain-en-Laye - Heidelberg 1987, eds. J. de la Gorce - H. Schneider

(Laaber 1990), p.193-199, in which I trace three possible roles for women characters, the goddess-victim, the heroine-

pawn and the servant-coquette. I argue that Quinault's heroines offered a 'school for royal mistresses,' and were

perceived as such by contemporary audiences.




Pr&cieuses - the knight Amadis believes his mistress Oriane to be unfaithful, he still remains enslaved: he declares that he loves even her hatred of him.30

Quinault found this implausible. He made his Amadis reject Oriane when he believes her to be unfaithful, allowing Amadis to pursue military glory, while Oriane is forced into waiting on events to restore her reputation. Quinault deviated from a more recent model when he adapted the story of Perseus from Corneille's machine play, Andromede (1650); Quinault added a new character, Merope, who is passed over by Persee in favour of Andromede, and who perfectly exemplifies the suffering female victim of unrequited love.31 Quinault's heroines are often passive characters, who experience mental turmoil in a state of physical inaction. We can appropriately borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes's study of Racine, in whose works he found that 'le verbe aimer soit par nature intransitif,' and apply it to Quinault's heroines, for Quinault, like Racine, represented the state of being in love by concentrating on the subject of the emotion to the exclusion of any object at all.32

II

To explore the uneasy conjunction of violent emotions and social restraint, Quinault devised a dramatic monologue which sets out the tensions of the heroine's role. Typically in three sections, with a short, heartfelt aspiration or desire, a middle paragraph which either explains the wish, or explains why it cannot be granted, and a return to the initial aspiration, it focusses exclusively on states of mind. For example in the opera Thesee, Medde's first monologue opens with a desire, typical of the Precieuse prude, for

Doux repos, innocente paix, Heureux, heureux un coeur qui ne vous perd jamais!

But Quinault subsequently makes her articulate an anti-precieux position in this exposition of womanly susceptibility:

L'impitoyable Amour m'a toujours poursuivie. N'etait-ce point assez des maux qu'il m'avait faits? Pourquoi ce Dieu cruel, avec de nouveaux traits, Vient-il encor troubler le reste de ma vie?

The opening couplet then returns with reinforced tragic meaning, since both we and Medde understand that she will be unable to regain her state of fancy-free 'liberte'. What, at the beginning of the monologue, had been an expression of hope, is now repeated in despair.

30 G. RODRIGUEZ DE MONTALVO, attr., N. DE HERBERAY, tr., Amadis de Gaule (Paris 1540, 7th ed. 1577). 31 Compare, P. CORNEILLE, Andrombde (Paris 1650). 32 R. BARTHES, Sur Racine (Paris 1963), p. 58.




Music example 1

leg, d. , L.. ,,, -,,,,r , 4.~.

ACTE SECOND. Le Thir re Reprefente le Palas d'&gere Roy dJA enes.

tkec Prnucre'.

Oft, 6 7 -

I - x I I I ---,Ir-..




?Ne-no motz p,

a .

c , Jfeiucs,

/_,.ruEr

u pW

C4

-

Ak m

-I ,.,bO?~ l .Dt 1I

•DI~r.PS

II IF W

&6 T 6

t-L'ALUJPCAB

ematS'.RnOe Co dI ymer, reprenem L'/ip'... rane.

I, I - I I I.

Its X- !a l f 1 1"-+

64

Thisbe, act II, scene 1. (2nd edition, Paris 1711, engraved by H. de Baussen.)




Quinault's varied scheme of versification probably derives from the stances, popular in the French theatre between 1630 and 1660.33 Stances were mono-

logues, formed by a sequence of self-contained strophes, using shorter lines than the standard alexandrine, and with various constraints on the relationship of content to form. In spoken drama, monologues, whether in regular alexan- drines or in the shorter-lined verse forms of stances, already showed some

kinship with the aria: they were almost always given over to effusions of emotion, dwelling on a state of mind rather than furthering the narration, and

they were favoured as opportunities for virtuoso delivery by actors who used a wide range of pitch and emphasis to enhance the meaning. Not surprisingly, we find some of the same complaints against such opportunism as are heard in the eighteenth century against singers' excesses in the da capo aria.34 The

delivery of the stances used another musical resource: actors took advantage of the rhythmic freedom implicit in the irregular lines, and exploited caesuras and cadences to suggest the pauses and hesitations of impromptu meditation - this

despite the dictum of one critic who advocated that stances should only be used in a dramatic context in which they might realistically have been prepared or rehearsed.31

As with the stances, there is no fixed verse form for Quinault's monologues. He tends to make the first line a short one of eight syllables:

Doux repos, innocente paix (Thisde, II.1) A qui pourrai-j'avoir recours? (Amadis, IV.2) Vaine fiert&, faible rigueur (Proserpine, 1.4)

Shorter lines are also possible:

O rigoureux martyre (Phafton, V.3)

Only rarely does a monologue open with a full alexandrine:

O mort! venez finir mon destin deplorable! (Persde, V.1)

The middle lines are almost always longer, usually the conventional alexandrine:

Ah! faut-il me venger En perdant ce que j'aime?

Que fais-tu, ma fureur, oiN vas-tu m'engager? Punir ce coeur ingrat, c'est me punir moi-meme ... (Thisee, V.1)

33 I am grateful to Patricia Ranum for first drawing my attention to the correspondence between Quinault's

monologues and Corneille's stances.

34 'Les monologues sont trop longs et trop frequents ... les comediens les souhaitaient, et croyaient y paraitre avec

plus d'avantage.' P. CORNEILLE, L 'Examen de Clitandre (Paris 1660). 35 F. HEDELIN (ABBE D'AUBIGNAC), La Pratique du thadtre (Paris 1657), p.343-348.




Quinault's monologues have a characteristic distribution of lines between the aspiration and the middle part. The aspiration is always shorter, typically very much so. In 'Doux repos,' the text pattern was two lines, four lines, two lines, which the musical setting renders as four bars, nine bars, four bars. Many monologues have greater contrast between the two components, for example the line pattern of 3-12-3 for Andromede's monologue 'Dieux qui me destinez une mort si cruelle' in Persde, IV.5. Sometimes the aspiration occurs three times. This can give the short opening lines a particularly brooding, obsessive effect:

Espoir si cher et si doux, Ah! pourquoi me trompez-vous?

Des supremes grandeurs vous m'avez fait descendre; Mille coeurs m'adoraient, je les neglige tous: Je n'en demande qu'un, il a peine a se rendre: Je ne sens que chagrins et que soupcons jaloux. Est-ce le sort charmant que je devais attendre?


Helas! par tant d'attraits fallait-il me surprendre! Heureuse si toujours j'avais pu me defendre! L'Amour qui me flattait me cachait son courroux. C'est donc pour me frapper des plus funestes coups, Que le cruel Amour m'a fait un coeur si tendre!


(Atys, 111.8)

Corneille defined the subject matter of his stances as avoiding the most violent emotions, but dealing rather with 'les deplaisirs, les irresolutions, les inqui6- tudes, les douces reveries, et g6neralement tout ce qui peut souffrir a un acteur de prendre haleine, et de penser a ce qu'il doit dire.'36 Quinault goes beyond this and invests his monologues with the most extreme passions expressed anywhere in his librettos - though even at his most violent, Quinault never touches the ferocity of Corneille's and Racine's alexandrine monologues. Some of Quinault's strophes, however, reach a mood of desperate fatalism. For example, in M6rope's first monologue in Persde, 1.3, the initial aspiration expresses, as usual, the desire of a would-be Precieuse prude:

Ah! je garderai bien mon coeur, Si je puis le reprendre.

In the next four lines she demands to be released from her consuming passion and for peace to be restored. The two opening lines are then repeated. Then follows a little piece of psychology particularly typical of Quinault: the next

36 P. CORNEILLE, L 'Examen d'Andrombde (Paris 1660).




four lines begin with a sigh:

H61as! mon coeur soupire, et ce soupir trop tendre Va, malgr6 mon d6pit, rappeler ma langueur: L'Amour est toujours mon vainqueur, Et je veux en vain m'en d6fendre.

The sigh reveals to M6rope that she can't help herself, and that love has con-

quered her once more. The final couplet tellingly alters the aspiration to:

Ah! j'ai trop engage mon coeur; Je ne puis le reprendre.

Lully collaborates with Quinault in subverting the Pr&cieuses' self-image. His settings reinforce and intensify the psychology of Quinault's monologues. He matches Quinault's structure of aspiration-explanation-aspiration with a form which uses measured, free, and a return to measured style. The aspirations contain some of Lully's most powerful inventions. He often fuses the an-

guished exclamation in Quinault's opening line with a memorable musical

phrase, arising out of the declamation of the words.

Music example 2 2/ i Oriane

A qui pour - rai-j'a- voir re - cours? C'est de vous, jus - te Ciel, que j'at - tends du se - cours.

2/ ii Ar6thuse

Vai - ne fier - t6, fai - ble ri - gueur, Quevous a - vez peu de puis-san - ce! 2/ iii M6rope A A M

0 Mort! Ve-nez fi - nir mon des-tin d6 - plo - ra - ble, C

_

Z

Z_ _ dik '1

I I '

Mort! Ve-nez fi - nir mon des - tin d6 - plo - ra- - - ble.

2/ iv Cybele

Es - poir si cher et si doux, Ah! ah! pourquoi me trom - pez - vous?

Ah! je gar - de - rai bien mon coeur, si je puis le re - pren - - - dre!

i: Amadis, act IV, scene 2; ii: Proserpine, act I, scene 4; iii: Persde, act V, scene 1; iv:

Atys, act III, scene 8; v: Persde, act I, scene 3.



Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully 69

We can draw some generalisations from these incipits, noticing the use of reticent, self-deprecating, predominantly conjunct melodic lines, in a restricted

register, in which the singer reveals her self-knowledge of her own weakness: 'Vaine fierte, faible rigueur,' 'Venez finir mon destin d6plorable,' 'Espoir si cher et si doux,' - the settings articulate the accents of despair. In contrast, the forth- right leaps for 'Ah!' or 'O' give clues to that strength of passion which Quinault diagnoses as his heroines' downfall. As declamatory settings of French seven-

teenth-century verse, these opening lines are exemplary. The middle episode is usually cast in recitatif simple. The bass line loses its

rhythmic drive, while the voice part propels the music through a series of mod- ulations in a style melodically less structured than the head phrase. Although invariably syllabic, the episode relies less heavily on the reiterated anapaest than does the recitative in Lully's dialogue scenes. The aspiration gains in dramatic force from the juxtaposition of styles, and it is often further underlined by a ritournelle, which may introduce the same material, and, exceptionally, return within the movement. The mixture of measured and free setting is, of course, typical of Lully's style throughout the operas, but it is nowhere used more logi- cally than in this genre, where it represents the dichotomy between head and heart.

But what genre is it? I have tentatively suggested the term 'reprise mono-

logue' to identify it, but, as with so many aspects of Lully's genres, there can be no straightforward definition. The telling recurrence of brief, measured phrases is a widespread device in Lully's operas, and the resulting structures vary from short, lyrical rondeaux with a single reprise (for example, Hymen's 'Venez, Dieu des festins', Cadmus, V.3) to whole recitative scenes which are given some unity and much dramatic impact by the recurrence of a single line (Alcide's 'Je partirai trop tard,' Alceste, 1.1). Between these extremes falls the reprise monologue, which differs from a passage of recitative by the fact that it is clearly identifiable as a closed form, and is distinguishable from Lully's airs by its declamatory style. It is usually - not always - a soliloquy, and most often opens scenes. It is generally accompanied by the continuo alone, though two examples in Armide are accompanied by five-part strings. The reprise monologue is es- sentially female rhetoric: of some 30 reprise monologues I have identified in Lully's operas, only five are sung by men.

The distinction between the reprise monologue and the rondeau air is sometimes fragile. In Medee's 'Ah! Ah! faut-il me venger,' quoted above, Lully departs from the poetic form Quinault devised for him. The librettist presented Lully with a five-section monologue, with three statements of the aspiration. Lully chose to set the first three sections as a lyrical rondeau air, breaking into recitative for the fourth section, and returning to a semblance of the measured opening for the final (altered) aspiration. In the context of Lully's general usage of air for relaxed episodes and recitative for moments of heightened emotion, the effect of this unconventional structure is to weight the conclusion, underlin- ing M~dde's destructive jealousy.




Music example 3

Ah! Ah! faut- ii me ven - ger En per - dant ce que I . '2. I

j'ai me? -me? Que fais - tu, ma fu - reur, of vas - tu m'en- ga -

- ger? Pu - nir ce coeur in - grat, c'est me pu - ir moi- m - - me. J'en mour-

- rai de - dou- leur, je trem - ble d'y son - ger. Ah! Ah! faut-

il me ven - ger, En per - dant ce que j'ai - - - me?

Ma ri - va- le i - omphe, et me

yol

ou- a - ger ls-s son a-

1j

Im, - our sans peine et sans dan - ger, Voir le spec- tacle a - freux de son bonheur ex -

- tr - me! Non, non, i faut me en-ger, En perdant ce quej'ai - - me.

Thise'e, act V, scene 1.

Like Quinault, Lully drew on a preexisting form for his new structure. James

Anthony has identified Italian models for Lully's 'extended-binary-form' airs,17 and the same is probably true for the reprise monologues. The lament, popular in Italian seventeenth-century music, is an obvious source. Lorenzo Bianconi

traces the evolution of two types of lament, the monologue scene, deriving from Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, and the ground-bass lament, from the

same composer's Lamento della Ninfa.38 Because of his ostensible role as instiga- tor and protector of a French national style, Lully would have been concerned to avoid overt reference to so Italian a style as the ground bass: ground basses

37 J. R. ANTHONY, Lully's Airs - French or Italian?, in: MT 128 (1987), p.126-129. 38 L. BIANCONI, Music in the Seventeenth Century, tr. D. Bryant (Cambridge 1987), p.209-219.



Patricia Howard: The Influence of the Pricieuses on Quinault and Lully 71

are rare in the operas (and often curiously concealed: for example 'Je me d&- fends,' Atys, 1.3.). His reprise monologues are closer in spirit to the less-stereo-

typed Italian monologue scene. As a source for Lully's Italianate binary airs, Anthony suggests Luigi Rossi's Orfeo, first performed in Paris in 1647; the same work also contains a possible prototype for the reprise monologue in the lament 'Uccidetemi, o pene' (111.3.).

Lully and Quinault took both structural and stylistic hints from such Italian laments, imitating the alternation of inner conflicts and the fluidity of style. But the French genre is altogether more compressed, reducing the often lavish sequence of emotions in the Italian lament to two, and organizing them more tightly, in reprise form. The particular miniaturized intensity of Lully's reprise monologues clearly springs directly from the content and structure of Quinault's verse, and in their juxtaposed sections, we can trace the tension between on the one hand, temperate precieux rationality, and on the other, a patriarchal perception of woman's susceptibility.

In the operas of Lully's French successors, notably Campra, Destouches and Rameau, the outer sections of the reprise monologue become longer, a change initially brought about by the composers, who use verbal repetition to extend the first line.39 Eventually both the musical and the textual proportions are reversed, so that the monologue takes on a form much closer to the Italian da capo aria, but without the virtuosity often associated with the da capo's French equivalent, the ariette; orchestral accompaniment becomes the norm, and this substantial structure is almost invariably introduced with a ritournelle.

III

In conclusion, we note that precieux roles and precieux attitudes are conspic- uously represented in Quinault's librettos: they dominate his characterization of women in the minor roles, and his operas as a whole give a new prominence to expressing female points of view which the women who made up a significant proportion of his audiences found irresistible.40 But in his heroines, he portrays a concept of women's roles, whose frank acknowledgement of the potentially tragic consequences of their sexuality the Pr&cieuses would have been reluctant to endorse. Curiously enough, his contemporaries seem to have overlooked the novelty of his heroines. The attitudes adopted in seventeenth-century criticism of Quinault were formed during his early years as a dramatist, which were also the years in which he was a model precieux pupil. His opponents took their tone from Boileau, who concentrated his virulent attack on the passive male roles in the plays and in the first two operas. By the time Quinault came to

39 See A. CAMPRA, 'Tristes appas,' Hippodamie (1708), IV.4.; the librettist supplied a verse form of 2-4-2-4-2, but Campra reversed the proportions, setting it as 13-8-13-9-13, with both an introductory and an interpolated ritournelle. 40 See, for example, the wide use of quotation from

and, allusion to Quinault's verses by Madame de S~vign6 and her

circle: L. HIBBERD, Mme. de Sivignd and the Operas of Lully, in: Essays in Musicology: A Birthday Offering for Willi Apel, ed. H. Tischler (Indiana 1968), p.153-163.




write his most effective librettos, critical attitudes, for and against his work, had become fixed, and his new dramatic hierarchy, built around tragic heroines, seems to have gone unmentioned by French critics.

But the fatality of love makes for good drama. Audiences applauded Quinault's images of womanly frailty, and a century on from Quinault, French

opera had become irreversibly woman-centred. Revivals of Lully's operas played a major role in the early eighteenth-century repertory and they were followed in the last quarter of the century by a remarkable spate of resettings of Quinault's librettos, of which the most famous is Gluck's version of Armide in 1777. Quinault's influence extended even later than this, with resettings of Atys by Piccinni and Persee by Philidor in 1780, of Thisee by Gossec in 1782, and, re-

markably, of Proserpine by Paisiello in 1803. By that date, Quinault's theatre of women had already entered the mainstream of European opera, perpetuating a tradition in which woman rather than man served as the hub of the action and the focus of psychological interest - an emphasis which would surely have sat- isfied precieux ambitions at last.



The Influence of the Précieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault's and Lully's Tragédies...

Documents

Transcript of The Influence of the Précieuses on Content and Structure in Quinault's and Lully's Tragédies...