Jean-Baptiste Lully in the portrait by Paul Mignard. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Paris, 8 January 1687. Louis XIV has just recovered from an operation that could have killed him, and his most powerful musician, Jean-Baptiste Lully, celebrates the narrow escape by conducting his own Te Deum with a hundred and fifty performers. In those days conducting did not mean waving your hands: it meant beating time by pounding a heavy ceremonial staff on the floor. In the fervour of the performance Lully misses the floor and drives the point into his foot.
It seems like nothing, a bruised toe. But the wound becomes infected, gangrene climbs, and the doctors propose the only therapy of the century: amputate the toe, then the foot, perhaps the leg. Lully refuses. The versions of the reason diverge and both are worth reporting: the practical one says that as a dancer, and he had been the most celebrated court dancer of his generation, he would not accept living mutilated; the malicious one, reported by memoirists, adds that he did not want to give up dancing before the king. The gangrene did not wait for the debate to end. He died on 22 March 1687, at fifty-four, rich as a minister and powerful as few musicians ever are: the royal monopoly on French opera, which he held by privilege, made him master of every note performed in France.
The death of Lully has entered musical mythology as the most absurd in the repertoire, and it is; but inside the anecdote lies a serious piece of performance-practice history. It tells us how an orchestra was held together before the invention of the podium: with noise, a sharp blow on the floor, which the French kept using for decades, so that Rousseau complained about the racket of the staff at the Opéra. The silent gesture of the modern conductor, the one that works an instant before the sound, is born from there too: from the slow replacement of the blow with the sign, of noise with anticipation.
As for Lully, fate reserved an additional irony. The man whom Alessandro Baricco, in his Breve storia eretica, defines with cruel elegance as the only one able to translate nothingness into music, the official supplier of sonic splendour to Absolutism, is remembered today above all for the way he died. Scenographic music evaporates with the scene it decorated; the anecdote remains. For a composer it is a harsh lesson: if you write to reflect a king’s light, when the king sets you reflect the dark.