In 1672, Jean-Baptiste Lully,
surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roy, acquired from Pierre Perrin the privilege of performing opera in Paris, which Louis XIV had granted him the year before. Through his good standing at the court, Lully obtained the royal support to reinforce and protege his privilege, which he defended fiercely until his death in 1687.
Born
Gian Battista Lulli in a miller's family in Florence, when he was 14 the young Lully was picked up by the French ambassador to Rome the Duc de Guise, who was returning to France, in order to help his sister, Mademoseille de Montpensier, to practise her Italian. A skillful courtier and intriguer, Lully managed to leave the service of Mademoseille de Montpensier when she was disgraced by her implication in the Fronde, and entered the service of the young king Louis XIV. Apart from a talented musician, Lully was an accomplished dancer, a passion he shared with the young king, and he danced with him in the
Ballet royal de la nuit, which put the foundations of Louis XIV's favoritism towards him. For the next two decades, Lully composed incessantly for the Sun King's increasingly extravagant court: ballets,
divertissements, masques, religious music and from 1661 he collaborated with another rising star in Louis XIV's favor: the playwright Molière. Between 1661 and 1672 Lully composed incidental music for many of Molière's plays, giving birth to the new genre of the
comédie-ballet.
But after his acquisition of the opera monopoly in 1672, Lully broke his collaboration with Molière and started the great project of creating a "national" form of French opera, different from the standard model of
opera seria that was becoming increasingly established in Italy. Lully called this new opera form
tragédie en musique or
tragédie lyrique, and it was indeed quite different from Italian
opera seria (see my post above about Jean-Philippe Rameau's
Hippolyte et Aricie for a short summary of these differences).
Lully would produce almost an opera each year between 1673 and 1686, and for all of them except one he chose as his librettist the famed and talented poet and playwright Philippe Quinault, in one of the most successful collaborations in the history of opera.
The first two
tragédies lyriques he composed,
Cadmus et Hermione (1673) and
Alceste (1675) weren't quite successful, as Lully still retained many comical elements from the time of his collaboration with Molière. His third opera,
Thesée, already shed all these comical remains, and he finally achieved a great success with his fourth tragédie lyrique,
Atys, premiered at the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye on January 10, 1676. Most importantly, Louis XIV was enraptured by
Atys, and ordered repeated performances in 1678 and 1682 to the point that it became known as
l'ópera du Roy.
The argument is quite simple, and Lully and Quinault based it on Ovid's
Fasti. The great innovation of the libretto though is that it's an absolute tragedy which ends in the death of the two main characters, Atys and the nymph Sangaride, something extremely rare in operas before the XIX century, and which Lully would not repeat in later operas. It follows Lully's classical structure with a prologue and five acts, which would become the standard of French
tragédies lyriques until the time of Rameau (who dropped the prologue). The prologue was actually quite an unnecessary addition in which Lully, always the skilled and tactful courtier, praised the Sun King with references to the political events of the time (in January 1676, France was at war with the Netherlands and Louis XIV was waiting for the spring time to renew his campaign against the Dutch). The real dramatic action happened in the five following acts.
I will post here three clips from a historical production. Originally, this production was put together in 1987 by William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants (the pioneers of historically informed perfomances in France) while the décor, costumes and scenography were designed by Jean-Marie Villégier, at Paris' Opéra Comique. The production created by Villégier is both lavish and baroque, while at the same time elegant and tasteful, evocating the Versailles of the late XVII century. It's not a historicist production, as it does not attempt to recreate how
Atys would have been scenified in 1676 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and later in Paris, but instead Villégier chose to set the action within Versailles itself, with the characters dressed as courtiers of Louis XIV's court, in a postmodern setting.
The production met with an enormous success and even crossed the Atlantic and was performed in New York, where the American millionare and philantropist Ronald P. Stanton was so impressed with it that in 2011 (five years before his death) he helped finance a second staging of Villégier's production, again at the Opéra Comique and again under the musical direction of William Christie; this 2011 production was lavishly filmed, and I will post the clips from it (there are clips from the original 1987 production, but they are of quite bad quality).
This first clip is the
scène des songes agréables (scene of the happy dreams) from Act III: Atys has fallen asleep, and he dreams of his secret and forbidden love for the nymph Sangaride:
The second clip follows immediately after the previous one. This is the
scène des songes funestes (scene of the foreboding dreams), in which the sleeping Atys is warned about the dire consequences of loving anybody else but the goddes Cybèle, by whom he has been chosen as her sacrificer/priest:
Entrée et danse des Zéphyrs, Act II, a moment of pure
divertissement, as Louis XIV loved dancing:
). About Friedrich the Great, the Grenadier's march. If only JUST before your 1870 mark 
