Abstract:

With Cadmus et Hermione(1673), composer J.-B. Lully and libretto-writer Ph. Quinault established a new dramatic and musical genre, the ‘tragédie en musique’ or ‘tragèdie lyrique’. he work is prima facie, as it has often been observed, a programmatic statement against the contemporary model of Italian (mainly Venetian) opera, but two perspectives that reach back to the Ancient world should be added for a correct understanding of its importance. First, the definition of anew genre entails a return to the theoretical issues of the debate that at the end of the 16thcentury had accompanied the birth of opera as the recuperation of classical tragedy in its original integrity, as a fusion of drama, music and dance, a process that in both cases took its material from Ovid’s Metamorphoses(Orpheus and Cadmus). Secondly, he crucial role of dance as a component of the new genre is to be understood within the political programme of Louis XIV, based on the ancient tradition (mainly Platonic and Pythagorean) of the symbolic and performative power of dance.