Customer Reviews

Jean Baptiste Lully

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... all the slurry of gossip about Jean-Baptiste Lully -- all the tales of his sexual antics, his venomous squabbles with other musicians, his extravagance and his financial trickery, his jealous repression of any musician who might rival him, his brutal treatment of Moliere and Moliere's widow -- there's no reason on Earth that you'd be interested in this book. The writer, RHF Scott, was quite obviously fascinated by Lully's homosexuality but seemingly had neither knowledge of nor interest in his music. He names a composition now and then, and he superciliously dismisses the likelihood of anyone playing or wanting to hear a Lully opera in our enlightened times. Scott's times were before 1973, when this little tattle-book was published, well before the operas and other works of Lully were being artfully revived and performed. Before Stone Wall, "gay pride" and the mass exodus from the closet too. The only other title I find credited to RHF Scott is "The Transvestite Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy".

Aside from the lack of any insight whatsoever into Lully's music, this volume has other deficiencies. It glosses over the most crucial years of Lully's career, the years when he consolidated his remarkable relationship with Louis XIV, that all-powerful solar hypocrite who was quite capable of condemning homosexuality and burning homosexuals at the stake but at the same same showering favors ad privileges on the most overtly decadent man of his Court. Lully must have been suave indeed, witty and charming and utterly sly. There is, of course, the possibility that Louis XIV truly recognized that Lully was the greatest musician of France during his entire endless reign.