Jean-Baptiste Lully – the creator of French opera – had much more in common with the King of France, Louis XIV, than just the relationship of subject and ruler. Although they were in two completely different areas of the country’s social life, both of them concentrated power in their hands which was, as the theorist of absolutism Cardin Le Bret wrote at that time, “as indivisible as a point in geometry.” The monarch, of course, exercised political leadership in the state; the composer and dancer from Florence, Italy, was an absolute ruler in the domain of musical culture on the Loire in the second half of the 17th century.

Lully owed his position in the royal court to both his talent and his ambition, his unrivaled cunning and, of course, luck. He began his career in France at the age of fourteen in the service of Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, as valet de chambre and Italian teacher. When, as a supporter of the defeated anti-absolutist front, the aristocrat had to leave Paris in 1652, Lully obtained permission from her to return to the capital and already in February the following year he danced for the first time at the side of the young monarch Louis XIV, and in March he obtained the royal title of compositeur de la musique instrumentale. Two decades later, he faced competition from the Académie d'Opéra founded by Pierre Perrin – Lully took advantage of the situation when his rival was imprisoned for debts and bought the privilege from him, leading to the closure of the institution created by Perrin. When he received a patent from the king to create his own Académie Royale de Musique, along with the permission Lully obtained a guarantee that no music could be performed in French theaters without his consent. Although the Italian artist’s position and the wealth he had accumulated aroused envy, he – like a cat – always landed on all fours.

During the concert of the Royal Baroque Ensemble, accompanied by dancers of the Cracovia Danza Court Ballet, ballets de cour will be represented by the fragments of Le Triomphe de l’Amour and a piece written by the composer in honor of Queen Maria Theresa, entitled Ballet des Arts. The topics of subsequent entrées are various fields of art, which, in ancient fashion, included crafts. We will also hear fragments of three tragédies lyriques. The libretto of Alceste, ou Le Triomphe d'Alcide by Philippe Quinault, composed shortly after the creation of the Académie Royale de Musique, is based on the drama Alcestis by Euripides. The story Achille et Polyxène by Jean Galbert de Campistron (a student of Racine himself) uses themes from the myth of the Trojan War. The story of Phaëton was based by Lully’s librettist, Philippe Quinault, on the themes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The most outstanding playwright with whom Lully collaborated was Molière himself – at the Forum Musicum we will hear interludes to his comédie-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.