In 1861, Richard Wagner was ready to take his opera Tannhäuser to the Paris Opera. He knew that in order to please his Parisian audience, he had to revise it to include a ballet, which he managed to do. But that’s as far as he got in terms of understanding the audience's sensibilities, for he made the fatal error of placing it at the end of the first act. You see, in France, it was perfectly normal to show up to the opera exceptionally late, and so the dance number —which nobody wanted to miss — was usually placed at the end of the second act. You did not mess with the ballet’s order of business. Wagner learned that the hard way when Tannhäuser was booed offstage, and then canceled after just three performances.
That’s a pretty brutal reaction. So, why did French audiences take ballet in opera so seriously — and what was it even doing there in the first place?
As Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker point out in their aptly-titled book A History of Opera, a ballet sequence gives the audience a break from the singing. It’s a distraction — politely, a divertissement — that allows you, the honored guest, to “take in the view” without having to balance your attention with any significant plot details. Abbate and Parker even go a step further and liken it to a magnificent CGI sequence in film or television.
The French have taken ballet in opera seriously* from what just might be the beginning of time, if by “beginning of time” you mean “sometime around 1645.” It was then that the Italian cardinal Jules Raymond Mazarin (born with the decidedly more Italian surname of Mazzarini) started to bring Italian opera to the court of King Louis XIV. But there was a problem: It just wasn’t French enough. So they tailored the operas to fit their own cultural tastes. Italian castrati were removed in favor of baritones. Arias soared a little less than their Italian counterparts and recitatives seemed to match the natural rhythm of speech. And, since this was a question of French taste, there had to be ballet.
That uniquely styled artistic dance had been a staple of French court entertainment since at least 1581, during the reign of Henry III. Author John Walter Hill, in Baroque Music, points out that these French “ballets de cour” were based on the Italian masquerades, but in France they took on a decidedly political tone, steeped in tales of mythology and bathed in heavy-handed allegory. A perfect example of this is the Balet Comique de la Royne, considered the first ballet de cour. It was a massive, showy spectacle that all but worshipped the French monarch, obliterating the fourth wall. Royne began with a knight addressing the king directly, for it is the king alone who can foil the evil plot of the mythological witch Circe. But just when things are going wrong, Jupiter, the chief of the gods, intervenes and defeats her. He takes her wand, then presents it to the king who, again, is sitting right in the audience, and declares him the “Jupiter of France.”
If you think that sounds like a reinforcement that whole “divine right of kings” idea, which was really gaining steam (among kings, at least) around this time, you’re right. King Henry’s France was embroiled with the Wars of Religion between the Protestant Huguenots and Roman Catholics, and there was a crisis of succession brewing, since the king was childless. His court really couldn’t have picked a more obvious way to emphasize their authority, and subsequent French monarchs chose a similar divine branding strategy (though, we all know how that worked out for them).
When Mazarin died in 1661, France went full tilt on making opera their own. At the front of those efforts was the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. He first teamed up with the playwright Molière to create a new kind of production called comédies-ballets, which featured spoken dialog interspersed with music, song and dance.
Not long after this, Lully got the ultimate hookup from his royal buddy King Louis XIV. The two had quite a relationship; in 1653 the 20-year-old composer wrote the music for a 12-hour ballet de cour called Ballet de la Nuit, which featured a then 14-year-old King as Apollo the sun god (it’s no coincidence that Louis later styled himself the “Sun King”).
In 1672, Lully established the Académie Royal de Musique, and Louis promptly granted him alone the rights to any performance in all of France that was either a) sung in its entirety, or b) required the contributions of more than two singers and six instrumentalists. Yeah, Lully had a monopoly on opera.
With his librettist Phillipe Quinault, Lully set to work on the new genre of tragédie en musique. Like the ballets de cour, these tragedies were often based in mythology and leaned heavily on the allegory. They also, among other things, were divided into five acts (instead of the traditional Italian number of three), which lent more importance to the chorus and involved a lot of dancing — all hallmarks of “French” opera.
So next time you catch Les Troyens or Romeo et Juliette, don't worry about why the dancing is going on. Enjoy it as a light break from the singing. Or ponder its roots as political propaganda. And be thankful you don't have to battle Jean-Baptiste in a game of Monopoly.
*Ballet in opera isn’t uniquely French — but in French opera the dancing is usually framed within the context of the narrative, while in other operatic traditions it is sometimes removed from the drama. Contrast, for example, with dances in Italian opera seria, which Abbate and Parker note are intermezzo or post-opera spectacle.