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Updated: June 17, 2025
Only the man was needed who should sweep the mass of insincerity from the stage and replace it by the purer ideal which had been the guiding spirit of Peri and Monteverde. The death of Lulli left French opera established upon a sure foundation.
In the general construction of his opera Purcell followed the French model, but his treatment of recitative is bolder and more various than that of Lulli, while as a melodist he is incomparably superior. Purcell never repeated the experiment of 'Dido and Æneas. Musical taste in England was presumably not cultivated enough to appreciate a work of so advanced a style.
One of the young princes visited him a few days after, when he seemed a little better. "What, Baptiste," the former said, "have you burned your opera? You were a fool for giving such credit to a gloomy confessor and burning good music." "Hush, hush!" whispered Lulli with a satirical smile on his lip. "I cheated the good father. I only burned a copy."
Oh! that every one of those "flourishers" had a stout old Jomelli at his elbow to rouse him out of his craziness by a good sound box on the ear as Jomelli actually did when Giardini, in his presence, spoilt a glorious passage of melody by jumps, trills, and "mordenti." Lulli, too, conducts himself in a preposterous way. He is one of your damnable perpetrators of jumps.
Howsoever they may pretend, under the specious names of Geber, Arnold, Lulli, or bombast of Hohenheim, to commit miracles in art, and treason against nature! As if the title of philosopher, that creature of glory, were to be fetched out of a furnace!
There was Lulli in music; Beauchamp in ballets; Corneille and Racine in tragedy; Moliere in comedy; La Chamelle and La Beauval, actresses; and Baron, Lafleur, Toriliere, and Guerin, actors. Each of these persons was excellent in his way.
At the age of twenty Corelli followed that natural bent which carried him to Paris, then, as now, a great art capital; and we are told, on the authority of Fetis, that the composer Lulli became so jealous of his extraordinary skill that he obtained a royal mandate ordering Corelli to quit Paris, on pain of the Bastille.
Lulli is said to have been very avaricious, and his wealth included four houses, all in the best quarters of Paris, together with securities and appointments worth about $70,000. His death, in 1687, was caused by a peculiar accident. While conducting a performance of his orchestra he struck his foot with the cane which he used for marking the time.
If a man with the eminent faculties which Lulli otherwise appeared to have possessed really laid down the rules of such an art, all he intended by it must have been to satirize the gravity with which the learned doctors of his time carried on their grave disputations in mood and figure, having regard only to the severity of the rule by which they debated, and holding themselves totally indifferent whether they made any real advances in the discovery of truth.
He showed an early propensity for the violin, and studied under Bassani, a man of extensive knowledge and capabilities, while Mattei Simonelli was his instructor in counterpoint. Corelli at one time sought fame away from home, and he is said to have visited Paris, where Lulli, the chief violinist of that city, exhibited such jealousy and violence that the mild-tempered Corelli withdrew.
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