French lyrical tragedy of the 17th-18th centuries: typological features and semantics of the genre. Lyrical tragedy The founder of the French lyrical tragedy genre

Jean-Baptiste LULLY in his operas called “tragedie mise en musique” (literally “tragedy set to music”, “tragedy on music”; in Russian musicology the less precise but more euphonious term “lyrical tragedy” is often used), Lully sought to enhance dramatic effects with music and give fidelity to the declamation and dramatic meaning to the choir. Thanks to the brilliance of the production, the effectiveness of the ballet, the merits of the libretto and the music itself, Lully's operas enjoyed great fame in France and Europe and lasted on the stage for about 100 years, influencing the further development of the genre. Under Lully, opera singers began to perform without masks for the first time, women began to dance in ballet on a public stage; trumpets and oboes were introduced into the orchestra for the first time in history, and the overture, unlike the Italian one (allegro, adagio, allegro), took the form grave, allegro, grave. In addition to lyrical tragedies, Lully penned a large number of ballets (ballets de cour), symphonies, trios, violin arias, divertiments, overtures and motets.

There were not many musicians as truly French as this Italian; he alone in France maintained his popularity for a whole century.
R. Rolland

J. B. Lully is one of the largest opera composers of the 17th century, the founder of French musical theater. Lully entered the history of national opera both as the creator of a new genre - lyrical tragedy (as the great mythological opera was called in France), and as an outstanding theatrical figure - it was under his leadership that the Royal Academy of Music became the first and main opera house in France, which later gained worldwide fame called Grand Opera.

Lully was born into a miller's family. The teenager's musical abilities and acting temperament attracted the attention of the Duke of Guise, who c. 1646 took Lully to Paris, assigning him to serve the Princess of Montpensier (sister of King Louis XIV). Having not received a musical education in his homeland, and by the age of 14 he could only sing and play the guitar, Lully studied composition, singing, and took lessons in playing the harpsichord and his especially beloved violin in Paris. The young Italian, who achieved the favor of Louis XIV, made a brilliant career at his court. A talented virtuoso, about whom contemporaries said - “to play the violin like Baptiste”, he soon entered the famous orchestra “24 Violins of the King”, ca. 1656 organized and led his own small orchestra “16 Violins of the King”. In 1653, Lully received the position of "court composer of instrumental music", from 1662 he was already the superintendent of court music, and 10 years later - the owner of a patent for the right to found the Royal Academy of Music in Paris "with lifelong use of this right and its transfer by inheritance to whichever of his sons succeeds him as Superintendent of the King's Music." In 1681, Louis XIV awarded his favorite with letters of nobility and the title of royal advisor-secretary. Having died in Paris, Lully retained his position as the absolute ruler of the musical life of the French capital until the end of his days.

Lully's creativity developed primarily in those genres and forms that were developed and cultivated at the court of the “Sun King”. Before turning to opera, Lully, in the first decades of his service (1650-60), composed instrumental music (suites and divertimentos for string instruments, individual plays and marches for wind instruments, etc.), spiritual works, and music for ballet performances (“Sick Cupid”, “Alsidiana”, “Ballet of Ridicule”, etc.). Constantly participating in court ballets as a composer, director, actor and dancer, Lully mastered the traditions of French dance, its rhythmic intonation and stage features. Collaboration with J. B. Moliere helped the composer enter the world of French theater, feel the national originality of stage speech, acting, directing, etc. Lully writes music for Moliere's plays ("A Reluctant Marriage", "The Princess of Elis", "The Sicilian" , “Love the Healer”, etc.), plays the roles of Poursonnac in the comedy “Monsieur de Poursonnac” and Mufti in “The Bourgeois in the Nobility”. For a long time he remained an opponent of opera, believing that the French language was unsuitable for this genre, Lully in the early 1670s. radically changed my views. In the period 1672-86. He staged 13 lyrical tragedies at the Royal Academy of Music (including Cadmus and Hermione, Alceste, Theseus, Atys, Armida, Acis and Galatea). It was these works that laid the foundations of French musical theater and determined the type of national opera that dominated France for several decades. “Lully created a national French opera, in which both text and music are combined with national means of expression and tastes and which reflects both the shortcomings and the advantages of French art,” writes German researcher G. Kretschmer.

Lully's style of lyrical tragedy was formed in close connection with the traditions of the French theater of the classical era. The type of large five-act composition with a prologue, the manner of recitation and stage acting, plot sources (ancient Greek mythology, the history of Ancient Rome), ideas and moral problems (conflict between feelings and reason, passion and duty) bring Lully’s operas closer to the tragedies of P. Corneille and J. Racine . No less important is the connection between lyrical tragedy and the traditions of national ballet - large divertissements (dance numbers not related to the plot), solemn processions, processions, festivals, magical scenes, pastoral scenes enhanced the decorative and spectacular qualities of the opera performance. The tradition of introducing ballet that arose during Lully’s time turned out to be extremely stable and was preserved in French opera for several centuries. Lully's influence was felt in the orchestral suites of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. (G. Muffat, I. Fuchs, G. Telemann, etc.). Composed in the spirit of Lully's ballet divertissements, they included French dances and character pieces. Widespread in opera and instrumental music of the 18th century. received a special type of overture, which developed in Lully’s lyrical tragedy (the so-called “French” overture, consisting of a slow, solemn introduction and an energetic, moving main section).

In the second half of the 18th century. the lyrical tragedy of Lully and his followers (M. Charpentier, A. Campra, A. Detouches), and with it the entire style of court opera, becomes the object of heated discussions, parodies, and ridicule (“the war of the buffons,” “the war of the Gluckists and Piccinnists”) . The art that arose during the heyday of absolutism was perceived by the contemporaries of Diderot and Rousseau as dilapidated, lifeless, pompous and pompous. At the same time, Lully’s work, which played a certain role in the formation of a great heroic style in opera, attracted the attention of opera composers (J. F. Rameau, G. F. Handel, K. V. Gluck), who gravitated towards monumentality, pathos, strictly rational, orderly organization of the whole.

There were not many musicians as truly French as this Italian; he alone in France maintained his popularity for a whole century.
R. Rolland

Lully was born into a miller's family. The teenager's musical abilities and acting temperament attracted the attention of the Duke of Guise, who c. 1646 took Lully to Paris, assigning him to serve the Princess of Montpensier (sister of King Louis XIV). Having not received a musical education in his homeland, and by the age of 14 he could only sing and play the guitar, Lully studied composition, singing, and took lessons in playing the harpsichord and his especially beloved violin in Paris. The young Italian, who achieved the favor of Louis XIV, made a brilliant career at his court. A talented virtuoso, about whom contemporaries said - “to play the violin like Baptiste”, he soon entered the famous orchestra “24 Violins of the King”, ca. 1656 organized and led his own small orchestra “16 Violins of the King”. In 1653, Lully received the position of “court composer of instrumental music”, from 1662 he was already the superintendent of court music, and 10 years later he became the owner of a patent for the right to found the Royal Academy of Music in Paris “with lifelong use of this right and its transfer by inheritance to whichever of his sons succeeds him as Superintendent of the King's Music." In 1681, Louis XIV awarded his favorite with letters of nobility and the title of royal advisor-secretary. Having died in Paris, Lully retained his position as the absolute ruler of the musical life of the French capital until the end of his days.

Lully's creativity developed mainly in those genres and forms that were developed and cultivated at the court of the “Sun King”. Before turning to opera, Lully, in the first decades of his service (1650-60), composed instrumental music (suites and divertimentos for string instruments, individual plays and marches for wind instruments, etc.), spiritual works, and music for ballet performances (“Sick Cupid”, “Alsidiana”, “Ballet of Ridicule”, etc.). Constantly participating in court ballets as a composer, director, actor and dancer, Lully mastered the traditions of French dance, its rhythmic intonation and stage features. Collaboration with J. B. Moliere helped the composer enter the world of French theater, feel the national originality of stage speech, acting, directing, etc. Lully writes music for Moliere’s plays (“A Reluctant Marriage,” “The Princess of Elis,” “The Sicilian” , “Love the Healer”, etc.), plays the roles of Poursonnac in the comedy “Monsieur de Poursonnac” and Mufti in “The Bourgeois in the Nobility”. For a long time he remained an opponent of opera, believing that the French language was unsuitable for this genre, Lully in the early 1670s. radically changed my views. In the period 1672-86. He staged 13 lyrical tragedies at the Royal Academy of Music (including Cadmus and Hermione, Alceste, Theseus, Atys, Armida, Acis and Galatea). It was these works that laid the foundations of French musical theater and determined the type of national opera that dominated France for several decades. “Lully created a national French opera, in which both text and music are combined with national means of expression and tastes and which reflects both the shortcomings and the advantages of French art,” writes German researcher G. Kretschmer.

Lully's style of lyrical tragedy was formed in close connection with the traditions of the French theater of the classical era. The type of large five-act composition with a prologue, the manner of recitation and stage acting, plot sources (ancient Greek mythology, the history of Ancient Rome), ideas and moral problems (conflict between feelings and reason, passion and duty) bring Lully’s operas closer to the tragedies of P. Corneille and J. Racine . No less important is the connection between lyrical tragedy and the traditions of national ballet - large divertissements (dance numbers not related to the plot), solemn processions, processions, festivals, magical scenes, pastoral scenes enhanced the decorative and spectacular qualities of the opera performance. The tradition of introducing ballet that arose during Lully’s time turned out to be extremely stable and was preserved in French opera for several centuries. Lully's influence was felt in the orchestral suites of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. (G. Muffat, I. Fuchs, G. Telemann, etc.). Composed in the spirit of Lully's ballet divertissements, they included French dances and character pieces. Widespread in opera and instrumental music of the 18th century. received a special type of overture, which developed in the lyrical tragedy of Lully (the so-called “French” overture, consisting of a slow, solemn introduction and an energetic, moving main section).

The phrase “tragédie lyrique” itself would be more correctly translated into Russian as “musical tragedy”, which better conveys the meaning that the French of the 17th-18th centuries put into it. But since the term “lyrical tragedy” is established in Russian musicological literature, it is also used in this work.

The production of “Cadmus and Hermione” by Lully in 1673 definitely announced the birth of a second national opera school - the French one, which spun off from the hitherto only Italian one. It was the first example of lyrical tragedy, a genre that became fundamental to French opera. Before this, there had been occasional productions of six or seven Italian operas at the French court, but even such a talented author as Cavalli did not really convince the French public. To please her tastes, Cavalli's scores were supplemented with ballet music composed by Jean Baptiste Lully, a Florentine commoner who had a meteoric career at the court of Louis XIV. Despite his skepticism towards the attempts of Cambert and Perrin to create a French opera, a decade later Lully himself began to implement this idea, in which he was very successful.

He created his operas in collaboration with Philippe Kino, whose tragedies enjoyed success with the Parisian public for some time. Their joint works came under the special patronage of Louis XIV, largely thanks to the solemn allegorical prologue glorifying the monarch (this was absent in the classicist tragedy). Of course, this could not help but impress the “Sun King”. Gradually, the lyrical tragedy of Lully-Kino ousted Rassin’s tragedy from the royal stage, and Lully himself, skillfully catering to the whims of the monarch, received from him almost absolute power within the “Royal Academy of Music”, to which his literary co-author was also subordinate.

The Clever Florentine captured the main reason for the failure of Italian operas. No amount of musical merit could reconcile the French public, brought up on classicist tragedy, with their “incomprehensibility” - not only a foreign language, but, most importantly, with the baroque complexity of the plot and the absence of a “reasonable” beginning in the spirit of classicism. Realizing this, Lully decided to make his opera a drama based on the chanted theatrical declamation of Rassin’s theater, with its “exaggeratedly broad lines in both voice and gestures.” It is known that Lully diligently studied the manner of recitation of outstanding actors of his time, and, having drawn important intonation features from this source, he reformatively updated the structure of Italian recitative with them. He aptly combined the conventional elation of style with rational restraint of expression, thus pleasing “both the court and the city.” Two main types of solo vocal numbers were flexibly combined with this recitative: small melodic and declamatory airs, as generalizations during the recitative scenes, and graceful airs of a song and dance type, which were in close contact with modern everyday genres, which contributed to their wide popularity.

But in contrast to the staged asceticism of the classicist drama, Lully gave his lyrical tragedy the appearance of a spectacular, magnificent spectacle, replete with dances, processions, choirs, luxurious costumes and scenery, and “wonderful” machinery. It was these baroque effects in Italian operas that aroused the admiration of the French audience, which Lully took well into account. Also a very important spectacular component of lyrical tragedy was ballet, which was very well developed at the court of Louis XIV.

If in Italian opera the tendency to concentrate musical expression in solo arias and weaken the role of choral, instrumental and ballet numbers gradually triumphed, then in French opera the emphasis was placed on the verbal expression of dramatic action. Contrary to its name, the lyrical tragedy XVII did not give the actual musical expression of the images. All the more understandable is the furor created by the production of Hippolytus and Arisia, in which, according to Andre Campra, “there is enough music for ten operas.”

In any case, the combination of the classicist harmonious order of the whole, lush baroque effects, Kino’s heroic and gallant libretti and new musical solutions greatly impressed Lully’s contemporaries, and his opera formed a long and powerful tradition.

However, almost half a century passed between the premieres of the last lyrical tragedy and the true masterpiece of Lully-Cinema “Armide” and “Hippolyte and Arisia” by Rameau. After Lully's death, no worthy successor was found for him, and the genre of lyrical tragedy suffered an unenviable fate. The strict discipline established by the composer at the Opera soon became greatly weakened, and, as a result, the overall level of performance decreased significantly. Although many composers tried their hand at this genre, since it was the one that paid the highest fees, only a few productions had lasting success. Feeling their inadequacy in lyrical tragedy, the best creative forces turned to opera-ballet, a new genre with lighter drama and a preponderance of the gallant love component over everything else.

From this we can conclude that, given the general decline of lyrical tragedy, Rameau was not afraid to make his debut in this genre in the fall of 1733 and went “against the tide,” nevertheless winning a remarkable victory.

GOU Secondary School No. 1399 Hobbydogs for the mini-encyclopedia "Creators of 18th-century culture in the stories of participants in the 2009 MHC Olympiad"

Jean Baptiste Lully

Jean Baptiste Lully - an outstanding musician, composer, conductor, violinist, harpsichordist - went through a life and creative path that was extremely unique and in many ways characteristic of his time. At that time, unlimited royal power was still strong, but the economic and cultural ascent of the bourgeoisie, which had already begun, led to the fact that not only the “masters of thought” of literature and art, but also influential figures of the bureaucratic apparatus began to emerge from the third estate.

Jean Baptiste was born in Florence on November 28, 1632. Originally from Florentine peasants, the son of an Italian miller, Lully was taken to France as a child, which became his second home. Having first been in the service of one of the noble ladies of the capital, the boy attracted attention with his brilliant musical abilities. Having learned to play the violin and achieved amazing success, he joined the court orchestra. Lully rose to prominence at court, first as an excellent violinist, then as a conductor, choreographer, and finally as a composer of ballet and later opera music. In the 1650s, he headed all musical institutions of the court service as "musical superintendent" and "maestro of the royal family." In addition, he was the secretary, confidant and adviser of Louis XIV, who granted him nobility and assisted in acquiring a huge fortune. Possessing an extraordinary mind, strong will, organizational talent and ambition, Lully, on the one hand, was dependent on royal power, but on the other hand, he himself had a great influence on the musical life of not only Versailles, Paris, but throughout France. Since childhood, Lully played the guitar and violin and began to play in the ducal orchestra, and in 1652 he joined the remarkable court orchestra “The King's Twenty-Four Violins.”

As a performer, Lully became the founder of the French violin and conducting school. His performance received rave reviews from several prominent contemporaries. His performance was distinguished by ease, grace and at the same time an extremely clear, energetic rhythm, which he invariably adhered to when interpreting works of the most varied emotional structure and texture. But Lully had the greatest influence on the further development of the French school of performance as a conductor, and especially as an opera conductor. Here he knew no equal.

Actually, Lully's operatic work unfolded in the last fifteen years of his life - in the 70s and 80s. During this time he created fifteen operas. Among them, Theseus (1675), Atys (1677), Perseus (1682), Roland (1685) and especially Armida (1686) became widely famous. In the work of Lully Jean Baptiste, the form of the classical French overture developed.

Lully's last opera is Armida. Painting by Nicolas Poussin.

Lully's opera arose under the influence of the classicist theater of the 17th century, was closely connected with it, and largely adopted its style and dramaturgy. It was a great ethical art of a heroic nature, an art of great passions and tragic conflicts. The very names of the operas indicate that, with the exception of the conventionally Egyptian “Isis,” they were written on subjects from ancient mythology and partly only from the medieval knightly epic. In this sense, they are consonant with the tragedies of Corneille and Racine or the paintings of Poussin.

Lully's work is characterized by accessibility and clarity combined with a masterful use of the laws of the stage. His orchestra was famous for the grace of its playing: Lully avoided the exaggerated ornamentation fashionable at that time and preferred simplicity of expression and technical perfection. By royal privilege, he received exclusive artistic and material rights in the operatic genre and created 14 large tragic operas, all to the libretto of Lully's constant collaborator, the poet F. Kino. Starting from his first lyrical tragedy, Cadmus and Hermione (Cadmus et Hermione, 1673), and right up to the last work of this genre, Armide and Renaud (Armide et Renaud, 1686), Lully demonstrated his experience in vividly meaning the feelings of his heroes, identifying the plot in music. the meaning of their words and actions. The librettist of most of Lully's operas was one of the prominent playwrights of the classicist movement - Philippe Kino. In Kino, love passion and the desire for personal happiness come into conflict with the dictates of duty and the latter take over. The plot is usually associated with war, the defense of the fatherland, the exploits of commanders (“Perseus”), with the hero’s combat against inexorable fate, with the conflict of evil spells and virtue (“Armida”), with the motives of retribution (“Theseus”), self-sacrifice (“Alceste” ). The characters belong to opposing camps and themselves experience tragic clashes of feelings and thoughts. The characters were depicted beautifully and effectively, but their images not only remained sketchy, but - especially in the lyrical scenes - acquired a sweetness. The heroism went somewhere, it was absorbed by courtliness. It is no coincidence that Voltaire, in his pamphlet “The Temple of Good Taste,” through Boileau, called Kino a ladies’ man!

Lully as a composer was strongly influenced by the classicist theater of its best time. He probably saw the weaknesses of his librettist and, moreover, sought to overcome them to some extent with his music, strict and stately. Lully's opera, or "lyrical tragedy" as it was called, was a monumental, widely planned but perfectly balanced composition of five acts with a prologue, a final apotheosis and the usual dramatic climax at the end of the third act. Lully wanted to return the disappearing greatness to the events and passions, actions and characters of Cinema. For this he used the means of pathetically elevated, melodious declamation. Melodically developing its intonation structure, he created his own declamatory recitative, which constituted the main musical content of his opera. “My recitative is made for conversations, I want it to be completely even!” - so said Lully. In this sense, the artistic and expressive relationship between music and poetic text in French opera developed completely different from that of the Neapolitan masters. The composer sought to recreate the plastic movement of verse in music. One of the most perfect examples of this style is the fifth scene of the second act of the opera “Armada”.

The libretto of this famous lyrical tragedy was written by Kino based on the plot of one of the episodes of Torquato Tasso’s epic poem “Jerusalem Liberated”. The action takes place in the East during the era of the Crusades. Lully's opera did not consist of recitatives alone. There are also rounded ariatic numbers, melodically similar to those of that time, sensitive, flirtatious, or written in energetic marching or cutesy dance rhythms. The declamatory scenes-monologues ended with arias.

Lully was strong in ensembles, especially in character ensembles assigned to comic characters, which he was very successful with. Choirs also occupied a significant place in “lyrical tragedy” - pastoral, military, religious-ritual, fantastic-fairy-tale and others. Their role, most often in crowd scenes, was primarily decorative. Lully was a brilliant master of the opera orchestra for his time, who not only skillfully accompanied the singers, but also painted a variety of poetic and picturesque pictures. The author of "Armida" modified and differentiated timbre colors in relation to theatrical stage effects and positions. Particularly famous was Lully’s superbly designed opening “symphony” to the opera, which opened the action, and therefore was called the “French overture.”

Lully's ballet music has been preserved to this day in the theater and concert repertoire. And here his work was fundamental for French art. Lully's opera ballet is not always a divertissement; it was often assigned not only a decorative, but also a dramatic task, artistically and prudently consistent with the course of the stage action. Hence the dances are pastoral-idyllic (in Alceste), mourning (in Psyche), comic-characteristic (in Isis) and various others. French ballet music before Lully already had its own, at least centuries-old, tradition, but he introduced a new stream into it - “brisk and characteristic melodies,” sharp rhythms, lively tempos of movement. At that time, this was a whole reform of ballet music. In general, there were much more instrumental numbers in “lyrical tragedy” than in Italian opera. Usually they were higher in music and more in harmony with the action taking place on stage.

Shackled by the norms and conventions of court life, morals, and aesthetics, Lully still remained “a great commoner artist who considered himself equal to the most noble gentlemen.” This earned him hatred among the court nobility. He was no stranger to freethinking, although he wrote a lot of church music and reformed it in many ways. In addition to palace performances, he gave performances of his operas “in the city,” that is, for the third estate of the capital. With enthusiasm and persistence, he raised talented people from the lower classes, like himself, to high art. Recreating in music that system of feelings, the manner of speaking, even those types of people who were often encountered at court, Lully in the comic episodes of his tragedies (for example, in Acis and Galatea) unexpectedly turned his attention to the folk theater, its genres and intonations. And he succeeded, because from his pen came not only operas and church chants, but also table and street songs. His melodies were sung in the streets and “strummed” on instruments. Many of his tunes, however, originated from street songs. His music, partly borrowed from the people, returned to him. It is no coincidence that Lully’s younger contemporary, La Vieville, testifies that one love aria from the opera “Amadis” was sung by all the cooks in France. Lully's collaboration with the brilliant creator of French realistic comedy Moliere, who often included ballet numbers in his performances, is significant. In addition to pure ballet music, the comic performances of costumed characters were accompanied by singing and storytelling. “Monsieur de Poursonnac”, “The Bourgeois in the Nobility”, “The Imaginary Invalid” were written and staged on stage as comedy-ballets.

Monsieur de Poursonnac - comedy-ballet in three acts by Moliere and J.B. Lully

For them, Lully, an excellent actor himself, who performed on stage more than once, wrote dance and vocal music. On January 8, 1687, while conducting the Te Deum on the occasion of the king's recovery, Lully injured his leg with the tip of a cane, which was being used to beat time at that time. The wound developed into an abscess and turned into gangrene. On March 22, 1687, the composer died. So, the creator of “Perseus” and “Armide” not only with his music, noble and majestic, suppressed or removed the precise and gallant weaknesses of Cinema, raising lyrical tragedy to the level of Racine and Corneille, and made comic ballet consonant with Moliere - he was sometimes broader and above the pure classicism of his era.

Lully's influence on the further development of French opera was very great. He not only became its founder, he created a national school and educated numerous students in the spirit of its traditions.

The genre of French lyrical tragedy is currently known only to a relatively narrow circle of specialists. Meanwhile, works written in this genre were widely known in their time; We should not forget how powerfully the lyrical tragedy had an impact on the subsequent development of musical art. Without understanding its historical role, a full understanding of many phenomena of musical theater is impossible. The purpose of this work is to show the typological features of this genre in the semantic aspect. The semantics of the genre will be considered in connection with the cultural context of France in the 17th-18th centuries. - the time of origin and development of lyrical tragedy.

First of all, let us recall that lyrical tragedy is directed towards mythological material. However, the myth served as the plot basis of the opera at the very beginning of its development. And in this, the creators of lyrical tragedy and Italian opera of the 17th century are united by the desire to create, through the means of musical theater, a kind of fantastic world that rises above everyday reality. If we talk directly about lyrical tragedy, then it turns out to be characterized by a specific interpretation myth. Mythological subjects and images are interpreted in symbolic plan - for example, in the prologue of "Phaeton" by J. Lully, Louis XIV is glorified, while in the very plot of the opera his mythological "analogue" - the sun god Helios - acts. Such an interpretation, of course, was largely due to the connection of the genre of lyrical tragedy with the culture of France during the reign of the “Sun King” (during this period lyrical tragedy experienced its heyday). It is well known that the idea of the absolutization of royal power was reflected in many aspects of the culture of that time, including in music. And yet, reducing the lyrical tragedy only to the idea of glorifying the monarch is hardly legitimate. The tendency towards allegorical interpretation, allegory, permeates a variety of art forms of that time, representing an element of artistic thinking generally.

The figurative system of lyrical tragedy deserves special attention. The world of images of lyrical tragedy appears as an ideal world, existing outside a specific time dimension. It has a fundamentally “monochromatic” character - the variety of semantic shades of reality does not seem to exist for it. The development of the plot itself is predetermined from the beginning - the plot (no matter how complex and confusing it may be) assumes isolation and is oriented towards maintaining a given order and harmony. Therefore, the characters of a lyrical tragedy are endowed with strictly defined traits. The character of the character here has an emphatically “monolithic” character - inconsistency (internal or external) is completely unusual for him. Even at critical points in the development of the plot (scenes from the fifth act in “Armide and Renault” by Lully, or the despair of Theseus in the fifth act of “Hippolytus and Arisia” by J. Rameau, for example), the character of the hero is conceived as a psychologically unified and indivisible complex. In this case, the character appears, as a rule, immediately in all its fullness; its gradual revelation in action is not typical for lyrical tragedy (which distinguishes it, for example, from Gluck’s reform operas). It is clear that the dynamic variability of character, its gradual formation or transformation, which became an integral feature of the interpretation of character in operatic works of later times, is also not typical of it.

As can be seen from all that has been said, such an understanding of character tends more towards its generalized embodiment than towards an individualized one. However, this is quite consistent with both the tendency for a symbolic and allegorical interpretation of myth, and with the desire to present an idealized and sublime world in opera, which was already discussed above. In a broader sense, there is an obvious connection with classicist aesthetics, which influenced the development of lyrical tragedy. As N. Zhirmunskaya notes, “the aesthetic system of classicism is characterized by a tendency towards an abstractly generalized typified embodiment of human passions and characters<…>The rationalistic foundations of the aesthetics of classicism also determined its objective nature, which excluded the arbitrariness of the author’s imagination and minimized the personal element in a poetic work” ( Zhirmunskaya N. Tragedies of Racine // Jean Racine. Tragedies. Novosibirsk, 1977. P. 379).

The described features also predetermined the artistic means used in lyrical tragedy. It turns out to be characterized by exceptional harmony of composition, strictly verified symmetry and balance of dramatic proportions (it is interesting in this regard to remember that Lully began the creation of his works precisely with the development of a plan the whole). This precision is present both at the architectonic level and at the level of composition of a separate act (symmetrical repetitions of choirs or dance numbers, logic of tonal plans, etc.), a separate number (use of a three-part form, rondo form, etc.) . It is not surprising that lyrical tragedies evoked analogies with the architectural monuments of Versailles. However, such analogies should not mislead as to the true nature of the dramaturgy of these works. Thus, V. Konen writes: “Lully acted not as an architect working with musical material, but as a musician, to whom architectonic thinking was deeply characteristic and manifested itself at every stage of the creative process - both in the close-up composition and in the details of the musical language” ( Konen V. The path from Lully to the classical symphony // From Lully to the present day. M., 1967. P. 15).

A similar system of means corresponds to the clearly expressed emotional restraint inherent in lyrical tragedy. The combination of a moderately elevated tone together with a hedonistic attitude of perception was obviously predetermined by the very aesthetics of French art of the period under consideration (in a narrower sense, also by the aesthetics of the aristocratic court art of the reign of Louis XIV). In addition, it was due to the internal genetic connection of lyrical tragedy with the dramatic theater of France in the 17th century. (this connection also had very specific prerequisites. F. Kino, the author of the libretto of Lully’s operas, was a playwright who belonged to the French classical school, Lully himself collaborated with J.B. Moliere). R. Rolland writes that “French tragedy itself led to opera. Its proportionate dialogues, clear division into periods, phrases that respond to each other, noble proportions, and the logic of development called for a musical and rhythmic organization.” The style of lyrical tragedy is filled with “nobility and calm dignity, incompatible with any surprises, loving in its works their unshakable rationality, allowing the depiction only of passions that have passed through the artist’s perception” ( Rolland R. The history of opera in Europe before Lully and Scarlatti. Origins of modern musical theater // Romain Rolland. Musical and historical heritage: First edition. M., 1986. S. 233-234).

The artistic system of lyrical tragedy is distinguished by its amazing completeness - its constituent components are interconnected by the unity of both stylistic and aesthetic order. This allowed her to solve quite complex problems - even when they were generated by historical and local prerequisites. Nevertheless, the isolation of such an artistic system, the impossibility of going beyond certain restrictive limits during development, provided it with a relatively short historical “life”. And at the same time, the impact of lyrical tragedy on the subsequent development of opera was very intense (it was experienced, in particular, by G. Purcell, G. Handel, K. Gluck, W. Mozart) - it preserved this life in the memory of musical art.