An Annotatedlivretof Lully'sRolandas a Source for Seventeenth-Century Declamation

Abstract

AbstractThe Houghton Library at Harvard University holds a copy of the 1685livretforRolandby Philippe Quinault and Jean-Baptiste Lully that has been marked up in three different seventeenth-century hands. The meanings of these markings cannot be conclusively deciphered until further corroborative sources come to light, but they seem to refer to declaimed performances of Quinault's text. The purpose of the current article is to propose possible interpretations of these annotations, guided by seventeenth-century theory of the oratorical pitches (tons) and eighteenth-century links between the Académie royale de musique and the Comédie française.