In February of 1653 a thirteen-hour ballet entitled Le Ballet de Nuit was performed in Paris’s Salle du Petit Bourbon, the largest room of the Louvre, home to the royal Bourbon family. The costumed spectacle featured dancers, singers, acrobats, machinery and a fourteen-year-old Louis XIV dancing in five of the numbers. In the final piece, the young king appeared in the role of Apollo, the Sun King. Louis, of course, would foster the image, while his love of dance served to establish the foundations of classical ballet and proved a major influence on French musical life. The marathon ballet also featured a gifted musician and dancer, Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632–87), who had left his native Italy for France at the age of fourteen. Having since become an all-but-indispensable figure at court, Lulli was appointed royal composer of instrumental music less than a month later. In another eight years he would become a naturalized French citizen and change the spelling of his name to Jean-Baptiste Lully.

In 1669 Louis would establish the Academie Royale de Musique, the Royal Opera, of which Lully was also placed in charge and for which he would compose a new tragédie en musique nearly every year. Generally based on Greek mythological texts and featuring continuous music and large ballet numbers (thus playing into the Sun King’s love of dance), Lully’s tragédies mark the true beginnings of French opera, a genre he all but personally created and a monopoly he fiercely protected. Through sheer brilliance, political astuteness and generous favors from Louis, at least until the latter became repulsed by his music director’s lack of discretion and homosexuality, Lully moulded himself as the dominant and wealthiest composer in France.

Despite Lully’s impressive reputation and command of all matters musical at court, the Opera appears to have experienced its share of challenges. As a contemporary French visitor lamented, “How many times must we practice an opera before it’s fit to be performed; this man begins too soon, that too slow; one sings out of tune, another out of time; in the meanwhile the composer labors with hand and voice and screws his body into a thousand contortions and finds all little enough to his purpose.”