A powerful alloy of mystical theology, recondite magic, and classical rigor, the new Academy represented a distinct form of idealism: music and art could summon men to their highest capacities and goals. The key lay in turning spirituality and learning to concrete theatrical effect. And so the Academy proposed an encyclopedic course of inquiry, including natural philosophy, languages, mathematics, music, painting, and the military arts. The focus, as one adherent later explained, was to perfect man “both in mind and body.” Music—“the beautiful part of mathematics”—held a special place, with its celestial harmonies,Pythagorean logic, and penetrating emotional intensity seen as an unmatched suasion. “Songs,” it was said (following Plato), “are the spells for souls.” Or, as the statutes of the Academy put it, a bit more dryly, “Where music is disordered, there morals are also depraved, and where it is well ordered, there men are well disciplined morally.”2
So it was with dance. Indeed, the Academicians saw in ballet a chance to take man’s troublesome passions and physical desires and redirect them toward a transcendent love of God. The body had long been seen as pulling man down, sacrificing his higher spiritual powers to material needs. On the Great Chain of Being, ranking all living things from the lowliest vegetative and material creatures up to the angels who occupied the highest rungs near God, man was consigned to the middle rungs: suspended perilously between beasts and angels, his highest spiritual aspirations were forever constrained by his earthly ties and gross bodily functions.
But if he danced, so the men of the Academy believed, man might break some of these earthly ties and raise himself up, closer to the angels. The movements of the body, disciplined with poetic rhythm and meter and brought into accord with musical and mathematical principles, could tune him to celestial harmonies. Pontus de Tyard, a poet involved with the Academy, wrote of the logic justifying such claims in characteristically humanist terms: “The spread of the two arms and the extreme opening of the legs correspond to the height of the man: as does the length of the head multiplied eight or nine or ten times, according to different statues.” It was this sense of perfect mathematical proportion that led the Abbé Mersenne, in a moment of high inspiration in 1636, to refer to “the author of the Universe” as “the great Ballet-master.”3
To bring these lofty ideals to theatrical life the artists of the Academy labored to fit poetry and music to the meter of Greek verse. They scanned dance steps following a pattern of long and short syllables and notes, thus training gestures, walking, and skipping motions to the rhythms of music and poetry. Every Sunday the players performed for the king and other patrons. In sharp contrast to the lively social occasions of court performances, in which eating, drinking, and conversation were commonplace, the concerts at the Academy were given in absolute silence, and no one would be seated after the music and dances began. It was this devotional character that made subsequent generations of Catholic thinkers admire the Academicians as “Christian Orpheuses” who proved that with musical discipline “the whole of Gaul, in fact the whole world should ring to the greater glory of God and the hearts of all be inflamed with divine love.”4
In 1581 the researches of the Academy came to fruition in the Ballet comique de la Reine. This ballet was given in celebration of the marriage of the queen’s sister, Marguerite de Vaudémont, to the Duc de Joyeuse, himself an ardent supporter of the Academy. The Ballet comique was one of seventeen entertainments, including tournaments, a horse ballet, and fireworks, and the poets of the Academy prepared the celebrations in the ancient style, mixing sung verse, music, and dance. Performed in Paris in a large salle at the Petit-Bourbon to an audience of “persons of mark,” the spectacle nonetheless attracted crowds numbering in the thousands who pressed their way to the palace, eager to witness the event. As was not uncommon, the performance began at 10:00 P.M. and lasted nearly six hours, finishing deep in the night.5
It was a spectacular but intimate affair. Elevated platform stages did not yet exist, and the actors of the Ballet comique performed up close in the audience’s midst. The story they told was an allegorical tale of the enchantress Circe vanquished by the powerful gods Minerva and Jupiter. Like painters, ballet masters commonly worked with mythological manuals, thick reference books that detailed the allegorical and symbolic character of gods and goddesses. The story thus worked on many levels, which spectators at the time would have grasped: it was a tale of passions subjugated to reason and faith (a blunt reference to religious fanaticism), of the king and queen subduing their enemies, of discord resolved and the triumph of reconciliation and peace (the ballet was staged just nine years after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre). As the dancing master Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx himself wrote in the preface to the ballet, “And now, after so many unsettling events … the ballet will stand as a mark of the strength and solidity of your Kingdom.…The blush of color has returned to your France.”6
The dances were designed to prove the point. Created by Beaujoyeulx (celebrated by one contemporary as “a uniquely creative geometer”), they traced perfectly formed figures across the floor in tightly measured steps: circles, squares, and triangles, each demonstrating the ways that number, geometry, and reason ordered the universe and men’s souls. At the end of the performance Circe bowed down and presented her magic wand to the king, and a grand ballet unfolded with twelve naiads in white, four dryads in green, and the queen and princesses forming and re-forming chains and shapes. “So dexterously did each dancer keep her place and mark the cadence,” wrote Beaujoyeulx, “that the beholders thought that Archimedes himself had not a better understanding of geometrical proportions.” Those watching, he hoped, would be “filled with awe.”7
Many were. The Ballet comique de la Reine was lauded at the time and later engraved in French memory as the first of a new genre, the ballet de cour, which imposed what one scholar has called an “intense and exact classicism” on the heretofore freewheeling practices of medieval spectacle. Before the Ballet comique de la Reine, the dances in court performances were more like stylish walking than ballet. In the Ballet comique de la Reine, by contrast, there was a formal discipline and design, derived from the desire to make dance and music a measure of the order of the universe. It was the authors’ concrete precision—their preoccupation with mapping the length, duration, measure, and geometry of a step—combined with their expansive spiritual aspirations that laid the groundwork for classical dance technique as we now know it. This was the base upon which ballet masters nearly a century later would build when, under the reign of the French king Louis XIV, they would systematize and codify ballet’s steps according to a set of strict geometric principles.8
The Ballet comique de la Reine and the emergence of the ballet de cour thus marked an important departure from earlier practices: they invested dance with a serious, even religious purpose and joined it to French intellectual and political life. A strong idealistic strain derived from Renaissance humanism and amplified by the Catholic Counter-Reformation made cultivated men like those at the Academy believe that by welding dance, music, and poetry into a coherent spectacle they might actually begin to bridge the yawning gap between earthly passions and spiritual transcendence. It was a breathtaking ambition, and one that never really died in ballet, even if in more skeptical times it was sometimes forgotten or derided. The artists who created the Ballet comique de la Reine genuinely hoped to elevate man, to raise him up a rung on the Great Chain of Being and bring him closer to the angels and God.
Not everyone at the time, however, appreciated the significance of the Ballet comique de la Reine. If some spectators found themselves awed, others were angered: how could the king waste such vast resources on a lavish entertainment in a time of civil war and strife? Henri III had long been criticized for his obsession with the Academy. One critic nailed a notice to the chamber where its poets met with the king, charging, “While France, crushed everywhere by civil war, is falling into ruin, our King practices grammatical exercises.” He had a poin
t, and indeed the high-minded enthusiasms of the men of the Academy were soon swept away in the violence that marked and finally ended Henri’s ill-fated reign. Forced to flee Paris by the reactionary pro-Spanish Catholic League, which had designs on the throne, Henri had its leaders murdered only to be slain himself at the hand of a monk in 1589.9
The ideas first crystallized in the Ballet comique de la Reine, however, cast a long shadow. Well into the seventeenth century, distinguished scientists, poets, and writers looked back with admiration to the Academy’s experiments, especially as Europe faced the renewed violence of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). The Abbé Mersenne, whose home in the convent of Minimes at the Place Royal in Paris became a “post office” for the life of the mind in Europe in the first half of the century, wrote about the ballet de cour, and many of his friends and colleagues, including René Descartes, also discussed the art and in some cases even tried their hand at writing ballets. (Descartes offered the Ballet de la Naissance de la Paix to the queen of Sweden in 1649, just before his death.) At court, ballet remained central: the French queen Marie de Medici (Florentine by birth) held ballets in her apartments every Sunday and increased the number of performances at court. And her son King Louis XIII (1601–1643) became a fine dancer and avid performer.10
But it was not really the same. Under Louis XIII the lingering Neoplatonic ideals of the Academy faded in favor of a more instrumental raison d’état. As Louis and his formidable first minister, Cardinal de Richelieu, set about pulling the disparate and warring forces of France under the strengthening arm of the French state and making the king’s power over his realm absolute, the meaning and character of ballet changed—it had to. Louis and Richelieu were more concerned with power than God, and rather than revealing the order of the universe, the ballet de cour now magnified the grandeur of the king. Thus the intellectual seriousness of the Ballet comique de la Reine gave way to a more bombastic and flattering style. This too would be an enduring aspect of ballet.
Louis XIII wrote ballets, designed costumes, and often took the leading role in court productions: he liked to play the Sun and Apollo, portraying himself as a god on earth and father of his people. But ballets at Louis XIII’s court were never stuffy or pompous: they were spiced with burlesque, erotic, and acrobatic elements, including outlandish obscenities and sly references to court gossip, which only increased their popularity and effect. One spectator complained that some four thousand people tried to cram into the grande salle at the Louvre, and the king himself was known to find his passage blocked by throngs of people, all hoping to see him perform. Archers were routinely stationed on the floor to keep the spectators from pressing in, and the queen once stormed off in a state of high agitation when she could not make her way through the multitude.
Theaters as we know them today still did not yet exist, and ballets were traditionally performed in palaces, parks, and other large venues, with seating and scenery purpose-built for the occasion. There was no stage as such, nor were performers elevated or framed by a proscenium arch—they were part of a larger social event. Spectators commonly looked down on the ballet from seating arranged in tiers (like bleachers) to best view the divine figures and patterns traced by the performers on the dance floor. There were no stationary backdrops or wings; instead, carts carrying scenery were wheeled in and placed near or behind the actors. In the course of Louis XIII’s reign, however, this gradually changed. Under the influence of pioneering Italian set designers (many of them engineers), the stage was elevated several inches from the floor, and wings, curtains, trapdoors, backdrops, and machinery to hoist clouds and chariots into the “sky” were fixed in place. Richelieu, whose interest in spectacle included writing plays, built a theater in his own palace in 1641; refurbished in later years, it would become the home of the Paris Opera.
The idea behind these theatrical innovations was simple: illusion. It was now possible to create ever more spectacular and magical effects—effects that seemed to defy physical and human logic and above all to surround the performers, not least the king himself, in an aura of enchantment. This mattered enormously. Indeed, as Richelieu worked to increase the king’s authority, the image and body of the king became increasingly important. Political theorists had for some time argued that the French state existed only in the person of the king, whose body was both indivisible and sacred. The king’s body, it was thought, contained his realm—in the formulation of one prominent writer, the king was its head, the clergy its brain, the nobility its heart, and the third estate (the people) its liver. Nor was this merely a theoretical or metaphorical proposition: upon the death of a king, various body parts—heart, intestines—were customarily awarded to churches with close monarchical connections as relics. And in the course of the seventeenth century the idea that the monarchy was a blood rather than dynastic inheritance became even more pronounced, making the king’s body an object of increasingly intense political and religious adulation. He ruled, theorists claimed, by Divine Right: he was already, by blood and birth, closer to the angels and God.11
No monarch placed more emphasis on the veneration of the king’s body than Louis XIII’s son and heir, Louis XIV. Nor is it a coincidence that the younger Louis—more than any other king before or since— devoted himself so passionately to dancing. Making his debut in 1651 at age thirteen, Louis danced roles in some forty major productions until his final appearance eighteen years later in the Ballet de Flore of 1669. Endowed with an elegantly proportioned physique and fine golden hair, Louis had what his tutor once called “an almost divine appearance and carriage”—a mark of God some thought, but Louis (who shared this view) also worked hard to develop his natural physical talents. Every morning following the ceremonial lever, he retired to a large room where he practiced vaulting, fencing, and dancing. His training was directed by his personal ballet master, Pierre Beauchamps, who worked with the king daily for more than twenty years. Louis rehearsed long hours for his ballets, even returning on occasion to his practice in the evenings and exercising until midnight.12
Louis’s interest in ballet was not just a youthful fling; it was a matter of state. As he himself later reflected, these performances flattered his courtiers and captured the hearts and minds of his people, “perhaps more strongly, even, than gifts or good deeds.” At Carnival and in courtly entertainments he even overturned (and thus enhanced) his kingly stature by dancing burlesque and bouffon roles, such as a fury or a drunk. But it was in his elevated, noble dances that Louis fully articulated his supreme confidence and vast ambition: in the Ballet du Temps (1655), all time converged on his reign; in other performances he was War, or Europe, or the Sun, or most famously the god Apollo (clad in Roman dress and plumes, suggesting power and empire). When fevers and dizziness, presumed to be the result of overly strenuous exercise, forced him to stop performing, Louis’s attention to court spectacle did not flag. In the early months of 1681, for example, he attended no fewer than six rehearsals and twenty-nine performances of the expansive and richly attired theatrical display Le Triomphe de l’Amour.13
Why did Louis care so deeply about ballet? To describe the precise relationship—for there is one—between the full-blown absolutism of Louis’s reign and the emergence of classical ballet as a fully articulated theatrical art, we must turn to the early years of Louis’s life and to the very particular character of his court. Under Louis XIV, dance became much more than a blunt instrument with which to display royal opulence and power. He made it integral to life at court, a symbol and requirement of aristocratic identity so deeply ingrained and internalized that the art of ballet would be forever linked to his reign. It was at Louis’s court that the practices of royal spectacle and aristocratic social dance were distilled and refined; it was under his auspices that the rules and conventions governing the art of classical ballet were born.
As a child Louis had been subjected to the gross indignity of being forced to flee Paris during the violent disturbances of the Fronde (1648–53)
, in which princes and the ruling elite aggressively, and with considerable military presence, challenged the power of the increasingly absolutist French state. First Minister Jules Mazarin—despised by many as a foreigner (he was Italian) but prized by Louis as a loyal advisor—was also driven into temporary exile, one of his many purported crimes to have squandered precious state resources on importing his beloved Italian dancers, singers, and designers to the French capital.* The harrowing and humiliating events of this disorganized and unnerving rebellion were a harsh reminder that warring princes could still undermine the effective power of the king—that absolutism was not yet absolute.
When the Fronde died down and Mazarin returned to Paris in the early months of 1653, the first minister ordered a thirteen-hour-long ballet, with Louis (who was by then fifteen) in the starring role. It was a political and theatrical tour de force. Le Ballet de la Nuit—performed through the night—depicted disruption, nightmares, and darkness, but in the early hours of the morning, Louis appeared as the Sun. Dressed in gold, rubies, and pearls, with bright glittering rays of diamonds shooting from his head, wrists, elbows, and knees, and with rich ostrich plumes (a coveted symbol of nobility) piled high on his head, Louis vanquished the night. To emphasize the point, he repeated his performance for the court and in Paris eight times in the ensuing month.
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