Jean-Baptiste-Maurice Quinault News
French actor and composer
Commemorations 2025 (Death: Jean-Baptiste-Maurice Quinault)
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2024-04-25
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2023-10-31 12:20:00
Engaging & involving: Christophe Rousset & Les Talens Lyriques release Thésée as their 12th Lully opera album
Lully: Thésée; Mathias Vidal, Karine Deshayes, Deborah Cachet, Philippe Estephe, Benedicte Tauran, Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset; Aparté One of Quinault's finest librettos and some of Lully's most varied and imaginative music in a performance that is wonderfully responsive and stylish, with a natural flow and elegance to the dramaLully and Quinault's Thésée was the third of their tragédie en musique, and it has particular significance in that it was the first such to be supported by King Louis XIV. Thésée was presented as part of the Carnival celebrations at court in 1675, its premiere delayed so that it could also be a celebration of the French victory at Turckheim in the war with the Dutch Republic. Following the premiere, at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, it went on to have 18 more performances before being given in Paris in April 1675 and there were regular performances during the later 1670s with revivals continuing […]
2021-09-27 06:47:57
From Rinaldo to Amadigi di Gaula: a look at Handel's highly experimental early London period
[…] he had scores of French operas in his library. And his approach to the incorporation of dance into his operas seems to owe something to the French tradition. Both Teseo and Amadigi di Gaula had some sort of dance content, though as the complete autograph scores do not survive were are somewhat frustrated in this matter. Teseo seems to have been an attempt to marry French and Italian styles. Nicola Haym's libretto is based on that which Philippe Quinault's wrote for Lully's Thésée, which premiered in 1675. Teseo is Handel's only opera to have five acts, in the French fashion, and the placement of the arias owes something to the French original. Whereas Italian opera was focused on the large-scale da capo exit aria (sung just before the character left the stage), French opera was more flexible with shorter arias dotted around the work. In Teseo there are five examples of where the same […]
2021-03-01 08:24:05
To delight the eyes and ears without the risk of sinning against reason or common sense: the creation of Reform Opera
[…] and 1770, and the preface to their Alceste (1767) included a manifesto to Reform. But other composers were just as interested in experimenting, combining the French and the Italian, trying to produce a new type of opera.Back in 1713, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) had been in London for three years. His third opera there, following Rinaldo and Il pastor fido, was Teseo. This, rather intriguingly, sets an Italian version of a French libretto by Philippe Quinault (1635-1688) originally written for Jean-Baptiste Lully(1632-1687), the tragédie en musique Thésée which originally premiered in 1675. The result is Handel's only opera in five acts, and one which treads wholesale over another opera seria convention, the exit aria whereby a singer's major arias signalled their departure from the stage. In Teseo, Medea has long sequences on stage, with aria following aria; this was something common in France, but not in opera seria. Handel would […]
2021-02-08 08:26:40
Exploring Antonio Salieri's early inspirations with Les Talens Lyriques' recording of his first opera seria, Armida
[…] of Salieri's commission for Armida remain somewhat obscure and it is by no means obvious why the 21-year-old composer, with only one opera (a comic one) under his belt, should get such a high profile commission. Marina Mayrhofer in her booklet article unpicks things admirably, involving masonic links and probable background manoeuvring by Gluck. Another intriguing link is that in 1777, Gluck himself would turn to the subject of Armida and Rinaldo by setting Philippe Quinault's libretto (originally written for Lully) for his fourth opera for the Paris Opera. Whilst the importance of French opera to the Viennese opera scene is brought out by the fact that Quinault's libretto for Armide was the inspiration for the Italian text of a one-act opera written by Tommaso Traetta for an Imperial marriage in Vienna in 1762 (one of only three occasions when this French-inspired Reform-minded Italian composer worked in the city). For […]
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