I tried to indicate the scenes of L’Impromptu de Versailles in a manner other than copying from the PDF version. It was not possible. The toutmolière.net site divides Molière’s plays into acts and scenes, but one must copy the text from the PDF version. The PDF versions, French and English, are paginated.
Also, Scene v was included in yesterday’s L’Impromptu de Versailles.2. It was removed without my noticing. I reinserted its skeletal version before retiring last night. It is short, but it completes the narrative. From Scene vi to Scene x, Molière is asked to go on stage and perform. In Scene xi, the King relieves him and asks that a play the comedians know well be performed.
Help, help…
How does one indent in the Block Editor and where are symbols and characters located? I have tried everything, but failed miserably.
Le Ballet comique de la Reine(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Molière (15 January 1622 – 17 February 1673), born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, spent several years performing outside Paris. His first troupe, l’Illustre Théâtre, established in 1643, went bankrupt and, in 1645, Molière was imprisoned. He had to leave for the provinces.
Les Précieuses ridicules, a one-act play which premièred on 18 November 1659, was Molière’s first Parisian success and he would produce several other plays, about thirty-four, eleven of which were comédies-ballets, ten with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully and one, with music by Charpentier. However, preceding the comédie-ballet, was the ballet de cour.
The first ballet, a ballet de cour, was Circé ou le Balet comique de la Royne (1581). It was commissioned by Catherine de’ Medici, and choreographed by Balthasar Beaujoyeulx, or Baldassarre da Belgioioso. As we have seen frequently, the Renaissance began in Italy and, consequently, many ‘French’ institutions find their origin in Italy. Dissemination was often due to marriages.
Louise was married to Henri III of France, a son a Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici, who was assassinated by Jacques Clément, a Catholic fanatic. As for Anne de Joyeuse (1561 – 1687), he perished at the hands of French Calvinist Protestants, called Huguenots, 800 of whom he had slaughtered. In fact, the French wars of religion are the backdrop to the creation of the ballet de cour.
Daniel Rabel: the “grotesque” in the ballet de cour
Daniel Rabel
the grotesque
Daniel Rabel (1578 – 3 January 1637) was a man of many talents. Wikipedia describes Rabel as “a Renaissance French painter, engraver, miniaturist, botanist and natural history illustrator.” As a painter, Rabel produced grotesque depictions of ballet, but beginning in 1617 until his death in 1637, Rabel was a set designer for theatres and for ballets de cour.
In our context the term grotesque (from grotto) is not pejorative. The ‘grotesque’ is an aesthetics as is the ‘baroque.’ Medieval gargoyles and misericords are acceptably ‘grotesques.’ Beverly Minster, a 12th-century cathedral, has a fine collection of grotesque misericords. In the 19th century, Hugo would revive the grotesque. His 1831 novel, Notre-Dame de Paris features Quasimodo, a hunchback. The “grotesque” is associated with the Middle Ages and the 19th century.
Le Roi danse
“Les Fées de la forêt de Saint-Germain” was danced at the Louvre in February 1625, with Louis XIII himself in the role of a “valiant fighter.” (See Daniel Rabel, Wikipedia.) Louis XIII also danced in the ballet he composed, the Ballet de la Merlaison.
You may remember that Louis XIII, the Sun-King’s father, wrote the Ballet de la Merlaison. Louis XIII was a composer and he composed a ballet. Consequently, the creation of ballet is associated with both Louis XIII and his son, Louis XIV. However, Louis XIII’s Ballet de la Merlaison is a ballet de cour as had been Circé ou le Balet Comique de la Royne. As noted above, Louis XIII performed in the ballet he composed.
Other ballets de cour were performed before 1661, when Molière created Les Fâcheux, (the Bores), to music byLully. King Louis XIII, the Sun-King’s father (Louis XIV), was a composer and, as noted above, he played a role in “Les Fées de la forêt de Saint-Germain.” Louis XIII composed the Ballet delaMerlaison, a ballet de cour.
Le Ballet de la Merlaison by Maurice Leloir, in Dumas père’s The Three Musketeers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: comédie ballet and “play-within-a-play”
Jean-Baptiste Lully
Molière
For a long time, little attention was given Molière’s contribution to ballet, and my book, if ever it is published, will not improve matters as I will discuss only one comédie-ballet: George Dandin (1668). However, one cannot ignore Le Bourgeois gentihomme (14 November 1670), where the ballet is both entertainment and a play-within-a play. Monsieur Jourdain is deceived into marrying his daughter Lucile to Cléonte who has disguised himself into the son of the Mufti, le grand Turc. This is a case of comedy rescuing comedy.
Molière wrote the text of his comédies-ballets, and the text may be read independently of the divertissements, for which he also wrote the text. However, these ballets inject laughter into Molière’s comedies several of which are somber works. The ballets are, to a large extent, part of the comic text.
Except for The Imaginary Invalid (1673), the music of Molière’s comédies-ballets was composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, born Giovanni Battista Lulli. Pierre Beauchamp (30 October 1631 – February 1705) was Molière’s choreographer.
All three, Molière (playwright), Lully (composer and dancer) and Pierre Beauchamp (choreographer), are major figures in their respective profession and Molière’s comédie-ballet a significant step in the creation of ballet. Lully was named director of AcadémieRoyale deMusique in 1669 and worked with Philippe Quinault, his librettist. The AcadémieRoyale de Musique developed into the Paris Opéra and the smaller Opéra Garnier. Since 1989, performances have been held at the 2700-seat theatre Opéra Bastille.
Several ballets de cour and the related comédies-ballets were staged. It would seem that VoltaireLa Princesse de Navarre (1745) is that last comédie-ballet. It was performed to music by Jean-Philippe Rameau (25 September 1683 – 12 September 1764). (See Comédie-ballet, Wikipedia.)
We close with Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, which was not an opera but a turning-point in the history of ballet in the galant style. Specialists were now developing ballet.
Conclusion
Les Fâcheux (The Bores) the first comédie-ballet (1661)
Vaux-le-Vicomte
Molière wrote eleven comédies-ballets, the first of which was Les Fâcheux (The Bores), created by Molière and Lully and performed at Vaux-le-Vicomte, Nicolas Fouquet’s magnificent castle. Fouquet invited a newly-crowned king Louis XIV to a lavish feast at Vaux, which took place on 17 August 1661, but Louis grew jealous. We have read that story. Louis XIV used ballets to cultivate the image of the Sun-King. Therefore, to a certain extent, ballet was put into the service of absolutism.
Royal Ballet of the Dowager of Bilbao’s Grand Ball (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Rabel’s “grotesque” Art & the botanical artist
Daniel Rabel (Paris1578 – 1637), was the son of Jean Rabel (1545 – 1603), the official artist at the court of Henri III who was acquainted to Jean Dorat, the most prominent Hellenist, or Greek scholar, of his days.
Daniel Rabel, Jean’s son, was therefore brought up in the best of French intellectual circles, but he did not become a Hellenist, a Greek scholar. Nor did he become a poet. He chose instead to walk in his father’s footsteps, but, as we will see, not entirely. He was a painter, an engraver, a miniaturist and a decorator. As well, following once more in his father’s footsteps, Daniel Rabel was a court artist.
But he was different from his father, because he was:
and because he is associated with the Grotesque art of early seventeenth-century France, an aesthetic.
* His botanical art will not be discussed in this blog.
Much of Daniel Rabel’s artwork can be viewed at Google Images.
Daniel Rabel as Court Artist
Until the invention of photography, artists were often asked to make a miniature painting or drawing of a fiancée, a daughter, a wife, a husband. Among other miniatures, Daniel was commissioned to make a miniature portrait of Henri III’s fiancée, Anne of Austria (1601 – 1660), which benefitted his career. In 1612, he became the official artist of the duc de Nevers,Charles de Gonzague.
Between 1631 and 1632, he was also official artist to Gaston d’Orléans, Henri IV‘s third son. In 1633, scientist Peiresc (Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc), an astronomer among other pursuits, wrote letters to Rabel to commission paintings of privately-owned antique vases. These letters are still extant and are housed in the Carpentras library.
Daniel Rabel also painted landscapes (oil paintings) and hunting scenes. However, on the sole merit of his two paintings of the Ballet de la douairière de Bilbao, housed in theLouvre Museum, Rabel would be considered an important artist influenced by the Grotesque fashion which has its counterpart in French poetry.
However, by 1618, Daniel Rabel had settled in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he painted his Suite de fleurs (1624). Rabel works, including his plates, are housed in the print room, the Cabinet des estampes, of the National Library of France, laBNF (Bibliothèque nationale de France.) The two paintings (shown above) of the Ballet de la douairière de Bilbao are kept in the Louvre.
In other words, as of 1617 until his death, Rabel was a designer for theatres and for ballets de cour. He was engaged in stagecraft.[i] He designed costumes for ballets (costumes de ballet). Two of these ballets are:
Les Fées de la forêt de Saint-Germain
Grand Ballet de la douairière de Billebahaut (Bilbao) 1626.
I am including two related blogs, but posts dealing with the flamenco are not listed. The picture at the head of this post shows a bal masqué, a masquerade bal. It is an example of the “grotesque” style.
We have therefore introduced a new element, the grotesque and, in particular, Daniel Rabel’s grotesque depictions of the bal or the ballet. When Daniel Rabel was designing costumes and involved in stagecraft, there were several “grotesque” poets. However, 17th-century grotesque was a brief phenomenon. The “grotesque” is usually associated with the 19th century and the Middle Ages.
Victor Hugo
A good example of the grotesque is Victor Hugo‘s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame of (Notre-Dame de Paris), published in 1831. Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885)wanted to challenge a restrictice notion of beauty and created Quasimodo, a character most would consider repulsive. Esmeralda loves the hunchback despite his looks. Remember that, in Beauty and the Beast, Beauty accepts to marry Beast when he is still Beast. She can see beneath the surface.
Other writers of the nineteenth century in France also felt there were different forms of beauty. For instance, when Charles Baudelaire (9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) published his Fleurs du Mal(The Flowers of Evil) in 1857, he was also questioning a narrow perception of beauty.
After writing about the Duc de Joyeuse who slaughtered Huguenots, it may be a good idea to look at absolutism. In France, absolutism meant: one king, one language, one religion. It was achieved at a cost that makes absolutism a Pyrrhic victory. Chasing away the Huguenots deprived France and New France of citizens who, by and large, were an asset to their community and would be asset to the countries to which they fled.
Yet, as the Wars of Religion took their toll, courtiers danced. Jean-Baptiste Lully composed ballets de cour, but composers also wroteSuites, mostly dances. JS Bach‘s English Suites, French Suites and his Partitas (for the keyboard) are a good example of the union of rythme and melody, but his suites were not the galant music composed by his sons, the eldest, Wilhelm Friedemann and Johann Christian.
The image at the top of this post features a grotesque ballet de cour. The grotesque flourished in the late years of the 16th century and the early years of the 17th century in France, showing a distorted form of beauty perhaps consistent with the pity of the wars of religions. The gargoyles of medieval cathedrals reflect a related duality.
Daniel Rabel was a 16th-century French court artist during the French religious wars. For several years he was a set and costume designer for nascent ballets de cour which he somehow ridiculed through grotesque depictions that can be associated with comedy.
But let us listen to a menuet by Luigi Boccherini. The menuet, or minuet, is a triple–meter dance (1–2–3 ; 1–2–3), perfect for a bal at court. The Waltz also has a triple meter: 1–2–3. As we know, Louis XIII wrote a ballet de cour, the Ballet de Merlaison, dance music. I do not know if Louis XIII’s music has already been entered into one of the official periods of music. I would surmise it is Baroque music. However, the Ballet de la Merlaison has been revived and was performed in May 2012, in Compiègne. But let us discuss Boccherini, whose music is delightful.
Wedding of 
The Royal Ballet of the Dowager of Bilbao’s Grand Ball by Daniel Rabel
