The ballet de cour is a type of composite theatre performance, made up of instrumental and vocal music, texts declaimed in verse and prose, stage design, scenic accessories, costumes, masks and, not least, dance. Its “potentially chaotic” structure includes a series of successive entries, variable in number and type, divided into acts and culminating in a final grand ballet. The term “ballet” is used, therefore, to indicate both the whole piece as an entity as well as the danced portions of it. The definition ballet de cour was coined only in the nineteenth-century historiography in order to legitimate – although that was not explicitly expressed – classical ballet by associating it with the noble context in which it had allegedly been born.

The ballet de cour was born and developed at the French court in the last decades of the sixteenth century and lasted – with a variety of ups and downs, among which was a crisis of popularity during the regency of Anne of Austria – right to the end of the seventeenth century. Its evolution tracked the parallel consolidation of the French monarchy from the first Valois king, Henry III, through the Bourbons Henry IV and Louis XIII. It reached its apogee at the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV (1638–1715) in the years after 1643 when he became king. Louis, who until 1670 regularly danced leading roles himself, attracted the attention of his courtiers, both French and those from foreign courts, to the ballet de cour. The progressive decline of the form began when the king retired from active performance but also as a consequence of altered conditions in court politics and in the relations between the crown and society as a whole.