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Updated: June 17, 2025
Though Rameau enjoyed supremacy over the serious opera, a great excitement was created in Paris by the arrival of an Italian company, who in 1752 obtained permission to perform Italian burlettas and intermezzi at the opera-house. The partisans of the French school took alarm, and the admirers of Lulli and Rameau forgot their bickerings to join forces against the foreign intruders.
The efforts of Lulli and Rameau had been turned in another direction. The former had done little more than set courtly pageants to music, though he had done this with great skill and tact, enriching them with a variety of concerted and orchestral pieces, and showing much fertility in the invention alike of pathetic and lively melodies.
The Abbé Doumergue, of Aramon, who flourished at about the same period, is alive because of his "March of the Kings": that has come ringing down through the ages set to Lulli's magnificent "March of Turenne"; and it is interesting to note that Lulli is said to have found his noble motive in a Provençal air.
The play was given in that great yellow saloon, opening off from the grand staircase, where Molière first gave Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and where Lulli jumped from the stage into the orchestra to amuse Louis le Grand when he was bored with Pourceaugnac. Monsieur Voltaire was, I am sure, much harder to please than Louis le Grand, and Madame du Châtelet was harder to please than Monsieur Voltaire.
"Indeed we will, Don Francesco," replied the Duchess, who loved to be ruled in matters of this kind. At this moment, the performer rose from the piano with unexpected suddenness remarking SOTTO VOCE that if he had known he was to play on a spinet he would have brought some Lulli with him.
His treatise on the "Admirable Power of Art and Nature in the Production of the Philosopher's Stone" was translated into French by Girard de Tormes, and published at Lyons in 1557. His "Mirror of Alchymy" was also published in French in the same year, and in Paris in 1612, with some additions from the works of Raymond Lulli.
'Lulli being the first modern composer who caught the French ear, was the means, to a great extent, of forming the modern French taste. No. 30. Wednesday, April 4, 1711. Steele. 'Si, Mimnermus uti censet, sine amore Focisque Nil est Jucundum; vivas in amore Jocisque. Hor. One common Calamity makes Men extremely affect each other, tho' they differ in every other Particular.
Up to that date no opera of Lulli's seems to have been produced, but he was none the less a master of music, and he could hand on what he had learnt of Carissimi's technique. Humphries, highly gifted, swift, returned to England knowing all Lulli could teach him.
The group of Lulli and the Musicians of the French Court, which was purchased for the National Gallery in 1906 is not by him, and it is difficult to understand why the public money should have been wasted on it, or at least on the inscription attributing it to him. Nicolas de Largillière was three years older than Rigaud and survived him by another three.
He lived the rest of his eighty-seven years as a widower, and joined the pathetic line of musicians who have gone deaf. French opera, which was reformed by the Austrian Gluck, had been created by the Italian Signor Lulli, who later, as Monsieur Lully, became most French of the French.
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