In 1989, William Christie’s ten-year-old Paris-based baroque troupe, Les Arts Florissants, brought a staged production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the first time, Lully’s Atys.
Cybèle: Anna Reinhold; Sangaride: Emmanuelle de Negri; Mélisse: Ingrid Perruche; Atys: Ed Lyon; Célénus: Nicolas Rivenq; Dieu du Sommeil: Paul Agnew; Le Temps, le fleuve Sangar: Bernard Deletré. Les Arts Florissants, conducted by William Christie. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performance of September 23.
I would say his “little known” Atys, but all of Lully’s operas were little known back then. The production was beyond elegant, somewhere in the supernal realms where the goddess Cybèle may dwell when she’s at home. It would have knocked Louis XIV’s satin knee-breeches off, never mind his gold-clocked silk stockings.
Atys knocked New York for a loop as well. The hitherto obscure (State-side) company became a must-see on their roughly annual returns to town among the baroque opera cognoscenti, with Atys again in 1992, and for Charpentier’s Medée (which cemented Lorraine Hunt’s hold on the public ear and eye), Monterverdi’s Ritorno di Ulisse, Rameau’s Les Boréades, Handel’s Hercules and Purcell’s The Faerie Queene, to mention but a few. This year, Atys returned (as from the realm of the august dead), as regal as ever. Lully’s masterpiece, four long hours of it, completely sold out the beaux-arts BAM opera house for five performances. That’s rather more than ten thousand tickets, and they went quickly. We happy few New York cognoscenti!
Christie’s group, with their scenic splendor, their sublime musicianship and choreography (choreographed singers no less!), their attention to detail, their international casts and tours are one of the reasons opera is once again a headline art form. My date thought they should be declared a UNESCO cultural landmark, like the Parthenon or Machu Picchu, protected from desecration by international law, but they’ve been such a success everywhere that hardly seems necessary. In another hundred years perhaps, should their popularity wane.
Atys, premiering in 1676, was Lully’s fifth opera and Louis XIV’s favorite. As with most of the others, the story is taken from classical mythology, with whimsical alterations. Philippe Quinault’s libretto is a triumph of sensibilité, the refinement of subtle gradations of emotion that had become chic in France (in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine and the novels of Madame de Lafayette) and was to linger there for centuries and influence everybody. Quinault’s verses for Lully’s Armide et Renaud were perfectly suitable for Gluck to create his Armide one hundred years later using the same libretto, and the subtle discussions of this or that degree of being in love are familiar to readers of Laclos, Stendhal and Proust. Even modern and outrageous French writers, such as Genet or Houellebecq, have delighted in constructing their shockers on these traditional expectations.
But in their Atys, Les Arts Florissants, whatever modern extremes it has gone to on other occasions, has attempted a staging, within the parameters of modern opera theater, in the high baroque style, the style of the then brand-new chateau of Versailles. The set is a square box of faux black marble with a Rorschach of white flaws on each wall. The doors are deep set, so that (in the spectacular ritualistic conclusion of the first act) we behold a procession of handmaidens of the goddess, costumed as baroque nuns in fur-trimmed white surplices, each holding a sprig of pine (the symbol of Cybèle), appearing and proceeding through distant halls with the rhythm of the stately music (while much action occurs in the foreground), and (we are led to imagine) winding through the halls of the palace to enter at last stage left, one after another, heralding the arrival (“La déesse déscende!” cry each of the characters in turn, throughout the act), just before the curtain falls, of the Queen of the Gods of ancient Phrygia, where the tale is set.
Even before Act I, we have been introduced to a little pageant in which Time (blue-faced, purple-stockinged, scythe at the ready), Flora (“If I wait until Spring, there is hardly any time for flowers before it’s over!”—the opera premiered in January) and Melpomene, the arrogant Muse of Tragedy, bicker over the nature of the piece to be presented in a tradition reminiscent of the operas of Monterverdi and Cavalli, Lully’s predecessors—and parodied endlessly, as late as Prokofiev. Act I introduces the conflict: The river Sangarius (grand old Bernard Deletré, ruddy-faced and hollow-voiced to imply drunkenness) has given his lovely daughter Sangaride (Emmanuelle de Negri, of the wistful soprano) to Célénus (Nicolas Rivenq, a most imposing baritone), who is the King of Phrygia, as his armored costume and plumed hat make plain. Sangaride, however, is in love with delicate Atys (Ed Lyon, as stiff and morose in this role as he was hilarious playing Rameau’s Actéon the last time Les Arts were in town). Atys feigns indifference to the emotions of the heart, but in fact he is secretly obsessed—with Sangaride! It takes several confidantes several scenes to straighten all this out, but even French courtiers break down and confess the truth eventually. Happy ending to a short opera, right?
Wrong. The goddess Cybèle (Anna Reinhold, a fine, dignified soprano but a bit youthful for this—she lacks the maturity, the emotional intensity of voice one desires such a role), great mother of Asia (roughly what is now known as Turkey) and queen of the gods, has descended to name a new high priest. She has chosen Atys, who therefore spends the rest of the opera in the long buttoned cassock of a court monsignor. Her real reason for doing so is that she has fallen, hard, for this mere mortal. Bored with prayers, rituals, human sacrifices, she wants love, and sends an act-full of dreams to explain this to neurotic Atys, and threaten dire consequences if he does not return her affections. But as we already know, Atys loves Sangaride. Does this plot remind you of Roberto Devereux, Maria Tudor and other operas of unrequited power ladies? It cannot end well.
Into this short, sharp story, Lully (once he had got his king and dancing partner’s attention) threw every instrument in his arsenal: violins and theorbos, recorders of every shape and kind, solos and chorales, court dances and folk dances and ritual processions and commedia dell’arte mime, and every variety of instrumentation and vocalization 1675 had to offer. From a less inspired composer or a less inspired company it would have been too much. Keeping the lights on and playing cards or sipping champagne during the entire performance no doubt helped back then. These particular traditions have not been maintained.
Jean-Marie Villégier’s production, aimed oh-so-graciously at us (we enact Le Roy Soleil for the duration), lures us into a forgotten world of supreme majesty. Carlo Tommasi’s scenery and Patrice Cauchetier’s costumes—so much black and gray and silver in so many different patterns and textures, and then blazing colors when at last they arrive in the dream sequence—are clearly inspired by the sumptuous paintings of France’s most golden age. Francine Lancelot and Béatrice Massin have created hours of divertissement in the dances, the charades, the mime episodes, the twirls of the chorus and the soloists in the dainty, high-heeled dance styles of the era. In such an elaborate banquet of delights, each new course is a marvel, teasing yet another unsuspected receptor on our visual and aural taste buds. It goes on and on until one thinks one is beyond surprise—and then out come the Italian or Spanish dances, or the onstage instrumental ensembles in full costume, or the vengeful goddess in volatile transformation. Lully’s invention never flags—why should our attention?
Lully’s operas, like Monteverdi’s and Cavalli’s and such imitators of Lully as Conradi and Rameau, do not clearly break the musical fabric into “numbers” and “dialogue.” This problem, which has been basic to opera from the very beginning and is susceptible of any number of solutions, produced, in the seventeenth century a more melodious declamation with perhaps fewer tuneful interruptions, the arias and concerted passages that occur to us when we think of opera. There are fewer “buttons” for concentration-breaking applause. This makes the presentation of Lully a more focused, more complete, more, well, Wagnerian occasion.
Therefore, Lully’s stock is rising. Les Arts Florissants, who have materially led this restoration, revisit their own past, but their achievements and the leadership of William Christie have not paused to take a breath. We may expect more glory; they have given us every reason to do so.