Jean-Baptiste Lully
Le Carnaval, Mascarade Royale

Critical edition by Bernardo Ticci – BTE2025

-

The World first performance in modern times of Lully’s last Comédie-Ballet

On October 17th 1675, Lully’s opéra-ballet entitled Le Carnaval was performed at the Court and then at the Palais-Royal.
Written to texts by Molière, Isaac de Benserade and Philippe Quinault, it consisted of nine entries, each of them reprising the biggest successes from earlier works: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Les Noces de Village, Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, Le Ballet de Flore, La Pastorale Comique…

The libretto published the same year described the show as follows: “Carnaval, dressed in a way that makes him recognizable, appears on a small throne at the back of the theatre. He is surrounded by his usual retinue, dressed in his livery and made up of a large number of people who sing and play several kinds instruments. The violins that follow him begin to celebrate his return and He himself, by a story that he sings, excites the merrymakers who accompany him, to relieve the greatest of Monarchs of his glorious labours.”

Lully doesn’t just simply use the music from his earlier works, he sometimes transformed them here in quite surprising ways, such as these extracts from Monsieur de Pourceaugnac where the title role (played by Lully himself) becomes an Italian bourgeois who expresses himself... by singing!

This “mascarade” [“royal” because danced by the king] is an extraordinary opera, a sort of anthology (a “best-of ”) of pieces that Lully himself selected from the ten years of success of his comédies-ballets.

Le Carnaval has not yet been performed or recorded in its entirety in modern times. We are also responsible for the edition in modern notation, the only one currently in circulation, which we will use for the staging.