Georgia J. Cowart . The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. xxiii, 299. $55.00.

Abstract

Musicologist Georgia J. Cowart's book is a masterful history of the performing arts in France during the reign of Louis XIV. Anchored in a series of close readings of ballets performed at the king's court, this compelling study explores the thematic links between music and theater at Versailles as well as at the emerging public theaters in Paris. Cowart is particularly interested in revealing the extent to which artists and musicians constrained by royal patronage were nevertheless able to articulate an anti‐militarist utopian vision in their works. In contrast to the triumph of war found in court ballets, artists from Jean‐Baptiste Poquelin Molière and Jean‐Baptiste Lully to André Campra and even Antoine Watteau instead celebrated the triumph of love and pleasure in their creations. For historians interested in why Louis XIV performed in court ballets and why he turned away from the arts after the 1670s, Cowart's volume has much to offer. This exquisitely written analysis of libretti, choreography, and music during the last decades of the seventeenth century evokes a world of aristocratic gallantry and shows the degree to which genres that modern viewers might consider distinct—opera, ballet, tragedy, and comedy—were still fluid during the grand siècle. Authors and musicians borrowed liberally from one another and over time translated what had been the exclusive genre of the court ballet for the somewhat more open and socially inclusive audiences of the Parisian theaters.. Cowart explores how the youthful Louis XIV's active participation in burlesque ballets that celebrated the theme of noble leisure confirmed his place in the traditional aristocratic hierarchy and confirmed its values. By the late 1660s, however, when his penchant for war led him to engage in a series of long and increasingly costly military conflicts, court ballets shifted to more militaristic music and a more overtly propagandist portrayal of Louis XIV as glorious victor. Yet, as Louis grew older and his marriage to the devout Madame de Maintenon led him away from frivolous entertainments, artists found some leeway to return to the depiction of love and pleasure on the stage. During the 1690s, plays that borrowed heavily from earlier court performances reversed the hierarchy of militarism over love. In the 1696 La naissance de Vénus, Jupiter (representing Louis) is presented as a tyrant whose abuse of power drives Venus to retreat to a pastoral island where peace among the nations reigns under her loving example. Given that these plays were performed at a time when Louis's armies were facing the rest of Europe in what was commonly perceived to be a fruitless military venture, Cowart's claim that these pastoral plays had a wider political resonance is easy to accept. Artists drawn to the burgeoning libertine culture of Paris and to the patronage circle around the Dauphin expressed their ambivalence with war by portraying on the stage a world of pastoral beauty and harmony. On the stage at least, pleasure triumphed.