Commedia dell’arte and Comedy-Ballet
The Hypochondriac by Molière, adapted by Edward Kemp
West Yorkshire Playhouse, 1996
The loquacious, fast-moving and vigorous style of performance Molière developed for his liveliest comedies has its roots in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte. This style of theatre first came to prominence in Italy around the middle of the 16th century and its influence eventually came to be felt, to varying degrees, throughout Europe. While the parent genre itself fell into decline around the start of the 18th century, its descendants can still be recognised in such diverse fields as pantomime, the Punch and Judy show, and the art of the circus clown.
A Role for Life
Dell’arte roughly means ‘of the profession’. The actors were trained professionals who used skills different to those required by performers of the written form of drama also popular at the time, commedia erudita. Commedia dell’arte was also known as commedia all’improvviso, because although the basic plot was worked out beforehand, the performers extemporised their parts as they went along: dei zanni, from the comic servant roles who provided the slapstick humour; and dei maschere, from the fact that nearly all the characters wore masks.
The form mingled the arts of jester, jongleur and acrobat with the tradition of anarchic farce that had been the staple of Greek and Roman comedy over two thousand years before. The plots were similar too, invariably revolving around a pair of young lovers (unmasked) and their struggle to inevitable triumph over the vested interests of old men, parents and guardians who wished them to marry elsewhere for selfish reasons of their own. The comic servants, again descendants of their classical counterparts, survive in various forms today – Arlecchino is the parti-coloured and mischievous Harlequin, Pulcinella is the hook-nosed forebear of Mr Punch, and Pedrolina, the simple peasant boy, became the familiar French Pierrot, sentimental and lovelorn, whose floppy hat and baggy white suit symbolise wordless devotion.
Other traditional types included the Capitano, a knavish, braggart soldier; Colombina, who provided a part for the first actresses on the European stage, usually the partner of the troupe’s leading performer; and Pantalone, the stock old fool who became the Pantaloon of the Elizabethan period. Scapino, the crafty and unprincipled servant, who was forever ready to run away when his plots were found out, became a named character in one of Molière’s best-known farces, Les fourberies de Scapin (The Knaveries of Scapin). Actors traditionally made one particular character their own, refining their skills over a lifetime.
Italy in France
A typical troupe consisted of around a dozen members who carried their props and staging with them. Once arrived at the public square or open space set aside for the performance, they would erect their playing area – six feet off the ground to allow a large crowd to enjoy a good view – with a canvas backcloth depicting the traditional piazza or street scene. Richer companies could afford to hire a hall and add a set of wings. Those moving in the most exalted circles could expect to be accommodated in the mansions of the wealthy and earned themselves a fine name.
Success or failure for the travelling bands depended on the individual skills of the performers, their theatrical sense, speed of wit, and their ability to gauge the shifting moods of their audience. But constant honing of their collective ability through years on the road provided good practical training. The Gelosi troupe first visited France in 1571 and a few years later performed for Henri III at Blois. Their appearances, and the general success of Italian theatre in France throughout the 17th century, eventually led to the setting up of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris, which was already well established by the time Molière arrived in the capital in 1658.
The King’s Pleasure
For any artist to achieve prominence in 17th-century France, he first had to make his mark at Court and, in particular, please the King. Louis XIV presided over one of the most fabulously appointed courts of Europe and expected his entertainments to be on a similarly lavish scale. Poetry, music and dance came together in spectacular fêtes at the various royal palaces, with ballet numbers punctuating the flow of the dramatic (or more usually comic) plot. The audience sat in the thick of the action and during the dance sections would rise from their seats to join in. (Molière himself in an early play makes a joke of the fact that audiences frequently couldn’t tell who was a performer and who a spectator.) Drama at this time was very much subordinated to the other two disciplines, and Molière took it upon himself to raise the status of the writer’s art.
Le malade imaginaire (The Hypochondriac), Molière’s final play, was the apotheosis of the comédie-ballet, a form which he and the composer Lully had virtually invented between them, and one which would lead to the development of a new and independent genre, the comic opera.
In essence, the separate acts of the play were interspersed with ballet interludes which commented light-heartedly on the themes of the work. The first comedy-ballet is generally considered to be Les fâcheux (The Boorish Bores, 1661), although the dramatic or comic scenes still only served as little more than a new and interesting way to link the dance numbers. It was only a shortage of trained dancers that allowed Molière to make so much of the plot.
Le bourgeois gentilhomme (The Would-be Gentleman) and Le malade imaginaire are generally considered the two most fully integrated masterpieces of the form. Both are late works, but by the 1670s, Molière and Lully had been working together long enough to have evolved a style they could call their own. In all they collaborated on ten works, though in the final years of the playwright’s life, their relationship was not s cordial as it had been.
Lully and Charpentier
Jean-Baptiste Lully was born Giovanni Battista Lulli in Florence in 1632. A violinist and dancer, he arrived in France at the age of 14 and entered the King’s service in 1653. Within three years he had become director of the King’s chamber group, Les petits violons du Roi, writing music for Court ballets, conducting the performances and even partnering the King in some of the dances. He adapted Italian opera forms to French tastes, developing a form known as tragédie lyrique which in time would lead to the development of indigenous French opera.
In May 1661 he was appointed Superintendent of Music and in December that year he adopted French nationality, in the process Gallicising his name. From the mid-1660s he was a regular collaborator with the major dramatists of the day, in particular Corneille and Molière, but lost a lot of friends by winning for himself the monopoly on opera production in Paris. This allowed him to restrict the number of players and singers in others’ productions, including Molière’s at the Palais-Royal, making his own at Court seem far richer by comparison.
This act of self-serving self-aggrandisement caused a final rift with the playwright. For Le malade imaginaire, therefore, Molière enlisted the aid of a new collaborator, Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1650–1704). Although a native-born Frenchman, Charpentier too had trained in Italy, and would become the director of music to the Jesuits of the Maison Professe in Paris. His output was not large, but he wrote several operas besides the music for Le malade imaginaire, as well as church music and several oratorios, a form rare for France in those days. He stayed with Molière’s troupe for ten years after the playwright’s death and, in 1689, became Director of Music at the Sainte Chapelle.
Lully, meanwhile, had suffered a bizarre but strangely appropriate death. In 1687, while conducting a Te Deum to celebrate the King’s recovery from illness, he struck his toe with his cane – a much more substantial staff in those days than the little white stick modern audiences are familiar with – and the wound turned septic. Refusing the operation to amputate that would have saved his life, he eventually died of gangrene at the age of 55.