Jean-Baptiste Lully Quotes
Italian-born French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully served the French court as a composer, dancer, conductor, and performing musician. He composed operas, ballets, and sacred music lived a colorful bisexual lifestyle, and died a freak death due to a conducting accident.
The Abbe Prevost wrote: “Some critics, however, accuse him (Handle) of having borrowed many beautiful things from Lully, especially from our French cantatas, which he has the skill, so we say, to disguise in the Italian style. But the crime would be venial, were it certain.”
-Abbe Prevost
“Lully inserted episodes for a trio of wind instruments in some of the dances of his operas.”
-Donald Jay Grout
“Having mastered the stylistic elements of French ballet music, Lully became the foremost composer of the royal ballets of the 1660s. In collaboration with renowned writer Isaac de Benserade, Lully presented his first important Ballet (Ballet de l’impatience) at the Louvre in February 1660 for two queens, foreign ambassadors, and the court.”
-Robert M. Isherwood
“God, who had given him a greater gift of music than any other man of his century, gave him also, in return for the inimitable chants he composed in his Paris, a truly Christian patience in the sharp pain of the illness of which he died… after having received sacraments with resignation and edifying piety.”
-Author unknown. From the monument erected to honor Jean-Baptiste Lully
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