Jean Baptiste Lully

The Sun King's Indispensable Tyrant

In January of 1687, the most powerful musician in all of Europe stood before his orchestra, ready to conduct a grand Te Deum celebrating the recovery of his king from a serious illness. This was Jean-Baptiste Lully, a man of volcanic energy and absolute authority. Dispensing with the small batons of a later age, he conducted as was his custom: by pounding the floor with a large, heavy staff to keep the rhythm for his musicians. Caught up in the passion of the performance, he missed his mark and struck his own foot with the pointed staff, piercing the skin. The wound quickly became infected, and gangrene set in. Doctors advised that the only way to save his life was to amputate his leg. Lully, who had begun his career as a dancer, refused out of pure vanity. He would not live as a cripple. The gangrene spread, and the man who had ruthlessly dominated French music for three decades died an agonizing death, a victim of his own forceful, tyrannical style.

From Florence to the French Court

He was born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence, Italy, the son of a humble miller. He received some basic education and guitar lessons from a local Franciscan friar, but his true ticket out of obscurity came in 1646. A French nobleman, Roger de Lorraine, was visiting Italy, seeking a young Italian to be a conversation partner for the king’s cousin, Mademoiselle de Montpensier. The clever and ambitious 14-year-old Lully was chosen.

He arrived in Paris not as a musician, but as a domestic servant and language tutor. However, his remarkable talents as a guitarist, violinist, and, above all, a dancer, quickly became apparent. His skill and charisma caught the eye of another young man who adored dance and the arts: the boy who would become King Louis XIV. The two found they were kindred spirits, and when Louis came of age, he began to shower Lully with favor, marking the beginning of one of the most fruitful and powerful artist-patron relationships in history.

The Sun King's Composer

Lully’s rise was meteoric. By 1661, he had been appointed Superintendent of the King's Music and Master of Music for the Royal Family. He became a naturalized French citizen, changing his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully. He and Louis XIV shared a vision of art as an expression of political power and national glory. Lully was the perfect man to realize this vision in music. He was a brilliant organizer and a ruthless disciplinarian. He took the king’s string orchestra, the Vingt-quatre Violons du Roi, which had a reputation for sloppy playing, and drilled them into a model of precision. He also created his own elite personal ensemble, the Petits Violons, which became famous throughout Europe for its discipline and virtuosity.

A crucial collaboration began in 1664 when Lully started working with France’s greatest playwright, Molière. Together, they created a new hybrid genre, the comédie-ballet, which perfectly integrated music, dance, and spoken drama. Masterpieces like Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Le Malade imaginaire were the result of this brilliant partnership, further cementing Lully’s position at the heart of French cultural life.

The Invention of French Opera

Lully’s ultimate ambition was to conquer the most prestigious and lucrative genre of all: opera. At the time, French audiences were skeptical of the Italian style of opera, which they found unnatural. Lully set out to create a distinctly French alternative. Through a series of cunning and ruthless business maneuvers, he managed to obtain a royal patent that gave him an absolute monopoly over all staged musical performances in Paris. No one could produce an opera without his permission.

With this power, he created the genre that would define his legacy: the tragédie en musique (or tragédie lyrique). Working with the librettist Philippe Quinault, Lully created a total of 13 such operas, including masterpieces like Alceste, Atys, and his final great work, Armide. French opera was perfectly tailored to the tastes of the court. It began with a grand "French Overture" (a slow, majestic section with dotted rhythms, followed by a fast, fugal section). The stories, drawn from classical mythology, were grand and heroic, always reflecting the glory of the king. Most importantly, Lully replaced the rapid-fire Italian recitative with a new, lyrical style of declamation that closely followed the cadences and rhythms of the French language. And, as a nod to the king’s great passion, each opera contained extended ballet sequences. It was a total spectacle of music, drama, poetry, and dance.

Power, Scandal, and Control

Lully was more than an artist; he was a brilliant and utterly ruthless courtier and businessman. He used his royal monopoly to become fabulously wealthy, controlling every aspect of the Paris Opéra from the box office to the stage machinery. He was a notorious libertine, and his numerous bisexual affairs were the subject of constant court gossip. While the king was amused by his composer's escapades for many years, Lully’s luck ran out. As Louis XIV aged and came under the influence of the more pious Madame de Maintenon, the king’s patience for Lully's public scandals wore thin. In 1685, Lully was involved in a scandalous affair with a young male page, and he finally lost the king’s personal favor, though he retained his official posts.

The Lullian Style

The musical style Lully created became the official sound of the French nation for nearly a century. The crisp, dotted rhythms and majestic sweep of his French Overture were copied by composers across Europe, including Purcell, Handel, and J.S. Bach. His grand motets, written for the royal chapel, possess a unique combination of drama and solemnity. Above all, his dance music—the minuets, gavottes, bourrées, and chaconnes that filled his operas and ballets—are models of grace, balance, and rhythmic vitality. He created a musical language that was quintessentially French: noble, clear, elegant, and always in service of the drama.

Lully’s life was one of incredible ambition and monumental achievement. An Italian immigrant of humble origins, he rose to become a wealthy nobleman, a friend of the king, and the absolute dictator of musical life in the most powerful nation in Europe. His work is the definitive sound of the age of absolutism and the splendor of Versailles.

Section 4: References and Further Reading

• La Gorce, Jérôme de. Jean-Baptiste Lully. Paris: Fayard, 2002.

• Rosow, Lois. "Lully, Jean-Baptiste." In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001.

• Isherwood, Robert M. Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973.

• Anthony, James R. French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau. Rev. ed. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997.