LULLY Jean Baptiste de Recueil par extraits Des plus beaux endroits Des Opéra de M. de Lully suivant l’ordre.

J. de La Gorce, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Paris, 2002; P. Beaussant, Lully ou le musicien du soleil, Paris, 1992; H. Schneider. Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Werke von Jean-Baptiste Lally (LWV), Tutzing, H. Schneider, 1981 ; (OEuvres complètes (Musique imprimée). Jean-Baptiste Lully; éduées par l’Association Lully: dir, Jérôme de La Gorce et Herbert Schneider….., Zürich, New York, 2004; Schneider, Die Rezeption der Opern Lullys im Frankreich des Ancien Regime, Tutzing, 1982;  Baron R. Portalis, “Nicolas Jarry et la calligraphie au XVIIe siècle”, Bulletin du Bibliophile, 1897, pp. 423 ff.

Exquisite manuscript of Lully undoubtedly calligraphed and illuminated by Jean-Pierre Rousselet.

It contains the important Operas by Lully and shows the sets of the operas performed in the royal gardens of Versailles.

An illuminated tribute to the creator of French opera and to a work that had a considerable impact throughout Europe.

This court manuscript belonged to the personal collections of the booksellers Édouard Rahir, then Maurice Chamonal, and H.P. Kraus. it was part for some time of the famous manuscript collection of Peter and Irène Ludwig.

It is a testimony to the important link between king Louis XIV, his court, and the ingenious artist Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Original drawings : the manuscript is ornated with 19 superb head- and 16 tail-pieces in ink (black, grey, or brown, some with grey or black bodycolor) and illuminated in gold. The head-piece Triomphe de l’amour (f° 20 r) is elaborately executed in a variety of watercolours and is seemingly by another hand.

Contents: f. 1r : title, 2r : (1) La Grotte de Versailles 1670 [LWV 39], 2v : (2) Les Festes de l’amour & de Bachus 1671 [LWV 47], 3v : (3) Cadmus 1672 (sic) [LWV 49], 5r : (4) Alceste 1673 [LWV 50], 7r : (5) Thésée 1674 [LWV 51], 9v : (6) Atys 1675 [LWV 53], 12r : (7) Isis 1676 [LWV 54], 14r: (8) Psyché 1678 [LWV 56], 16r : (9) Bellérophon 1679 [LWV 57], 17v : (10) Proserpine 1680 [LWV 58], 20r : (11) Le Triomphe de l’amour [et de Bacchus] 1681 [LWV 59], 22r : (12) Persée 1682 [LWV 60], 24r : (13) Phaéton 1683 [LWV 61], 25v  : (14) Amadis 168 (sic) [LWV 63], 27v : (15) Roland 1685 [LWV 65], 29v : (16) Le Temple de la Paix 1685 [LWV 69], 30v : (17) Armide 1686 [LWV 71], 32v : (18) Acis et Galatée 1686 [LWV 73], 34r : (19) Achille 1687 [LWV 74], 35r : end. Some errors in the dates of the presentations of the operas.

All of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s famous fifteen tragédies lyriques are present in the manuscript. They follow the list given by Jérôme de La Gorce (op. cit., p. 853) who adds Les Festes de l’amour & de Bachus 1671 to the list given by Wikipedia. Not one of Lully’s great operas is missing – with the exception of the very first tragédie lyrique, which is not yet an opera, Les Folies d’Espagne of 1672. These fifteen operas are joined here by La Grotte de Versailles, Quinault and Lully’s first collaboration placed at the head of the collection, which has ‘the appearance of a small opera’ (http://sitelully.free.fr/grotte.htm), first performed in 1668. The eleventh piece in the collection, Le Triomphe de l’amour [et de Bacchus] 1681, and the sixteenth piece Le Temple de la Paix 1685 are not operas but court ballets. The eighteenth, Acis et Galatée 1686, is a heroic pastoral.

Two or three pages are devoted to each work. They summarise in one sentence the great arias of each piece, so that the important  patron  for whom this manuscript was written could keep it in his pocket and thus own a Recueil par extraits des plus beaux endroits des Opéras de Lullly suivant l’ordre, in chronological order and as a mnemonic of the performances as given at the court of Louis XIV. One of Lully’s great talents was to compose arias that delighted audiences would appropriate as refrains.

Each musical work opens with a cartouche and often closes with a cul-de-lampe, drawn in ink, wash and/or watercolour, representing the setting for the main act. These sets, treated with great freshness, imagination and verve, announce or evoke the work of Claude Gillot (1673-1722), who is known to have designed opera costumes. According to Dezallier d’Argenville, Gillot ‘had a great genius for grotesque figures, fauns, satyrs and opera scenes’ (Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, Paris, De Bure, 1745-1752, vol. 2, p. 421). As such, this manuscript also belongs to the bibliophilic genre of illustrating music created by Lully and Quinault and studied by Anthony Saudrais (see below).

In these drawings we find the staging effects typical of French opera under Louis XIV: fantastic animals, palaces falling into ruin, warriors emerging from the ground in Thésée. The singers are depicted in chariots of clouds or in green settings that accurately evoke the Versailles groves in which some of Lully’s works were performed.

The calligraphy, illumination, decoration and style of the manuscript are typical of the work of Jean-Pierre Rousselet, who worked for the King and his family, as well as for some of the greatest families of the Court, including the Richelieu, Beauvilliers and Pontchartrain families. This French master calligrapher and illuminator, originally from Liège, was active in Paris between 1677 and 1736. ‘Rousselet’s manuscripts are generally on paper. The calligraphy is good. An excellent draughtsman, he decorated them himself and his works are remarkable for the richness of their ornamentation, with pages surrounded by painted arabesques, and for the binding, often by Padeloup’ (see : Baron Portalis, op. cit., pp. 423-424). But most of Rousselet’s manuscripts are religious in character. Those with a purely secular subject can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Portalis cited only two, unaware of the existence of this one. It can thus be compared with the splendid Labyrinth of Versailles created by Rousselet and the painter Bailly for Louis XIV, and kept in the Dutuit collection at the Petit-Palais.

This Lully manuscript is also reminiscent of the Prières de la messe, signed by Rousselet and presented by Louis XV to Marie Leszczynska on 4 September 1725, the day of their first meeting (see Sotheby’s, 2 December 2004, lot 178; from the former Bancel La Roche Lacarelle Henri Bordes Robert Hoe and André Langlois collections).

This marvellous manuscript by Lully also remains a double enigma. The first enigma is that the numbers placed at the end of each aria, ranging from 1 to 18, seem to refer to another manuscript consisting of 18 volumes, no doubt logically due to Rousselet, and now considered lost by the musicologists we have been able to interview. These volumes must have contained the scores and lyrics of the same arias. The manuscript presented here was both a kind of summary and, above all, an illustrated and illuminated table. Mr Laurent Guillo, from the Centre de Musique baroque de Versailles, was kind enough to make the following comments.

“Les opéras de Lully ont souvent fait l’objet de “Recueil des plus beaux endroits”. Notamment l’éditeur-copiste Henri Foucault a diffusé de nombreux exemplaires de son “Recueil des plus beaux endroits des opéras de Mr de Lully, copié en deux volumes in-folio, avec un classement par opéra, dont il existe encore une quinzaine d’exemplaires. Je suppose donc qu’il a existé une collection calligraphiée de ce “Recueil”, faite par un maître écrivain non identifié, et divisée en environ 18 volumes.

Plusieurs choses peuvent expliquer que ce “Recueil” passe de deux volumes (chez Foucault) à environ 18 volumes ici: un tracé de la musique en calligraphie (qui nécessite plus de place), la présence probable d’illustrations et d’ornementations, l’usage d’un meilleur papier et le plus faible nombre de pages dans chaque volume. De fait, les chiffres semblent renvoyer aux numéros des volumes dans cette collection perdue… La logique de cette volumaison n’est pas intuitive pour autant. Elle ne correspond pas à la succession des opéras, ni à l’ordre alphabétique des incipits, ni à la tessiture des voix. Je suppose donc que les airs ont été copiés en désordre et que chaque volume portait sa table des airs propre. C’est peut-être ce désordre qui explique la mention inhabituelle “par extrait” sur le titre de la table générale. On peut imaginer que cette collection (au prix exorbitant) ait pu être copiée à l’usage d’un royal rejeton. On aimerait bien la retrouver, du reste… [le présent manuscrit] ne serait que la partie émergée de l’iceberg…”

The second enigma is that the very elegant monogram in canivets on the lower inner-cover, which looks Germanic and is surmounted by a marquis’s crown, could not be identified. This could be the key.

We are grateful to Nicolas Bucher and Laurent Guillo (Centre de Musique baroque de Versailles) for their help on the manuscript, and to our friend Roland Folter for the details about the Kraus provenance.

PROVENANCE : unkown before Édouard Rahir (1862-1924 ; book plate ; Paris, 1937, n° 1460, 20.000 FF, with color illustration), acquired at that sale by Chamonal against the expert of the sale Le François – collection Chamonal — acquired by H. P. Kraus (1907-1988) from  Maurice Chamonal in the 1950’s, then Catalogue H. P. Kraus, n° 100, 1962, item 34 (“price on request”) – Dr. Peter and Irène Ludwig (1925-1996), one of the great 20th century collectors of illuminated manuscripts as well as of contemporary art. Their collection was acquired en bloc by the Getty Museum in 1983. This Lully manuscript was purchased by Ludwig in 1963 from H.P. Kraus, and resold to the latter in 1969 — Catalogue H. P. Kraus, n° 159, 1981, item 21 (priced $ 65.000).

Two small abrasions of the illumnation in the title.