The Triumph of Pleasure

by Cowart, Georgia J.

• ISBN13: 9780226116389
• ISBN10: 0226116387
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Prominent components of Louis XIV's propaganda, the arts of spectacle also became sources of a potent resistance to the monarchy in late seventeenth-century France. With a particular focus on the court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet, Georgia Cowart tells the long-neglected story of how the festive arts deployed an intricate network of subversive satire to undermine the rhetoric of sovereign authority. With bold revisionist strokes, Cowart traces this strain of artistic dissent through the comedy-ballets of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Moliere, the late operatic works of Lully and the operas of his sons, the opera-ballets of Andre Campra and his contemporaries, and the related imagery of Antoine Watteau's well-known paintingThe Pilgrimage to Cythera. She contends that through a variety of means, including the parody of old-fashioned court entertainments, these works reclaimed traditional allegories for new ideological aims, setting the tone for the Enlightenment. Looking at all these festive arts from the perspective of spectacle as it emerged from the court into the Parisian public sphere, Cowart ultimately situates the ballet and related genres as the missing link between an imagery of propaganda and an imagery of political protest.

Author Biography

Georgia J. Cowart is professor of music at Case Western University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction: The Allure of Spectacle and the Prerogative of Pleasure	p. xv
Muses of Pleasure: Louis XIV's Early Court Ballet, 1651-1660	p. 1
Muses of Memory: Louis XIV's Late Court Ballet, 1661-1669	p. 41
Muses of Satire: Le bourgeois gentilhomme & the Utopia of Spectacle	p. 84
Tragic Interlude: Reversals at the Paris Opera, 1671-1697	p. 120
Sappho, Cythera & the Triumph of Love: The Ballet at the Paris Opera, 1700-1713	p. 161
Carnival, Commedia dell'arte & the Triumph of Folly: The Ballet at the Paris Opera, 1699-1718	p. 191
Watteau's Cythera, the Opera-Ballet & the Staging of Pleasure	p. 222
Bibliography	p. 253
Index	p. 281
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