I know I should be more sympathetic, but Lully’s demise is kind of funny.
Imagine getting killed by the baton you’re using for conducting (well, their batons at that time was different from the ones we have now…).Okay, he wasn’t killed the way Harry Potter’s parents were (which was with a death spell), and Voldemort wasn’t alive during Lully’s time (besides, He-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named is just a fictional character, scary but not real).
But Jean Baptiste Lully was definitely killed by his conducting baton, in a way you couldn’t have thought about…
Before getting into how he died, let’s learn a little more about Lully-chan, who he was, what he did, where he was from, those kind of stuff.
Though, let me tell you in advance, classical composers are not boring people.
They led interesting lives, had wacky stories, weird personalities (not all of the time), and created excellent music. And a lot of them had dramatic romances!Wait till you hear about how Berlioz composed a symphonic poem for the person he had a crush on, though the story that went with the music was gruesome…
But really, classical musicians are interesting! Some books just make them sound staid and predictable even when they’re not.
Though his name sounded French, Jean Baptiste Lully was not born as Jean Baptiste Lully. His parents named him Giovanni Battista Lulli, and he was from Italy, the land of pizza and the leaning tower of Pisa.
Not much is known about his early years, like if maybe he didn’t like his homeland’s food which might have made him go to France? Just kidding, he was brought to the land of garlic by a French duke.
In the royal court of France, he rose in fame after he got the support of Louis XIV, who gave the composer a lot of French titles, like Maitre de la musique de la famille royale (it sounds long and very prestigious, but it only means ‘Master of the Music of the Royal Family). After about a year, the king made him a French citizen and changed his name.
Since he had the king’s support, Lully became a musical tyrant. He controlled it to the point that almost all art music had to have his permission before it could be performed for the French court. Tsk, tsk, he was like a French version of North Korea’s head of state.
Despite Lully being rather ‘protective’ about what kind of music could be played or not, he did help in the growth of French opera, and actually brought a new version of it called the tragedie lyrique, which was a fusion of French tragedy and ballet. Unlike Italian operas wherein singers moved like actors, the French version was more of dancing with singing (West Side Story???).
Lully’s best known work for the tragedie lyrique is 'Armide', a story about a sorceress who falls in love with a heroic knight, casts a love spell on him, gets him for a time, but still gets rejected in the end when the guy chooses duty over her ‘fake’ love (huh, even back then love affairs were full of drama…).
Now, you’d think that if someone died, it would at least be while doing something stupid, or criminal, or something like that. But Lully died while conducting his religious work Te Deum. King Louis became religious in his old age, so he wanted works of such kind, and Lully being the big boss of music, created music for that type.
As I mentioned earlier, Lully died in a weird way…It happened when he was conducting his work,Te Deum, in a Parisian church.
At his time, instead of the small conducting batons that you normally see conductors use, they had this staff that was more like the one that sorcerers use. Kind of like a longer walking stick. And instead of using it to make figures of time signatures and tempos in the air, it was thumped on the floor on the beat the conductor wanted.
Well, while conducting, Lully accidentally stabbed his own foot with walking stick, err, I mean baton. His wounded became infected and ended up with gangrene, and because of that died about two months later…Doctors weren’t that good back in those days, I think they were using leeches and all kinds of scary stuff to heal people, he probably had no chance at all with their medical knowledge in that time period.
(Time machines aren’t an option, since they aren’t real, I think?)
What was ironic was that the piece that Lully was conducting was supposed to be performed for the king of France as a kind of thanks for him getting well (since he was sick).
Such a sad fate for a musical tyrant…
After his death, the musical scene in the French court changed as the succeeding musicians became influenced with Italian music. The end. (Not really, just the end for Jean-Baptiste Lully).
I should have written about Hector Berlioz and his Symphonie Fantastique (this music was definitely fantastic, in a truly gruesome sort of way) when Valentines came around.
Lully's photo comes from Wikimedia Commons.