L’Air italien sur la scène des théâtres parisiens (1687–1715) Barbara Nestola

Abstract

Soon after the start of his personal reign in 1661, Louis XIV began a campaign to foster a distinctive national cultural identity with the aim of ensuring French artistic hegemony. In the sphere of music this strategy was spearheaded by two genres, the tragédie en musique and the motet à grand chœur, both of which differed radically from anything composed abroad. The success of Louis’s policy depended to a high degree on keeping the influence of Italy at bay, which helps explain why Italian opera, increasingly dominant elsewhere, never gained a foothold in France during or, indeed, well beyond the grand siècle. For much of Louis’s reign this policy had the support of a broad sector of the French musical public, who regarded many aspects of Italian music as over-complex, ostentatious, or otherwise in poor taste. But in the 1690s—a watershed decade—the king’s increasing austerity and his detachment from court entertainments provoked a reaction on the part of the so-called ‘cabale du Dauphin’, made up of certain younger members of the royal family. Among the shifts in attitude they effected was a new openness to Italian music, leading in turn to a proliferation of Italian musical manuscripts in France and an increasing exposure to a range of imported vocal and instrumental genres.