The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (review)

Beneath the surface of a contented realm, Georgia Cowart reveals how separate systems of royal image-making operated in an interdependent, and at times oppositional, fashion in the festive spectacles of seventeenth-century France. While the author acknowledges previous research on the staging of Louis XIVs power, she deftly points out the need to treat music and dance as critical components of understanding the arts of spectacle. Her book emphasizes the importance of the peripheral divertissements of court ballet, comedy-ballet, opera, and opera-ballet. The first two chapters focus on court ballets, celebrating a vision of the court as a utopia of pleasure and serving as an icon of an aristocratic class. Cowart brings new insight to works by Isaac de Benserade and Jean-Baptiste Lully through analysis of dance and music, examining the function of the ballet à entrées as well as the role of dactylic rhythms, vocal airs, and ensembles. She shows how creators of ballet and music enjoyed a close relationship with the king, providing opportunities for artistic and political advancement, and uses Lully's solo performance of Orpheus as a case in point. Cowart adeptly explores the relationship of Louis XIV's court ballet to comedy-ballet in a chapter on 'Muses of Satire'. She views the court ballet as an important artistic and ideological model profoundly influencing the conception of the new genre of comedyballet, which both absorbed and reacted to its conventions. By studying song and dance, Cowart reveals how a comedy-ballet like Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme uses burlesque as a means of reversing the content of the court ballet, offering a new social and political construct. She interprets this play as a parody of Louis XIV's Ballet des Muses. The following chapter takes us to the Paris Opéra in the late seventeenth century. Cowart argues that the new opera, like the comedy-ballet of Lully and Molière, carefully negotiated the tastes of its dual audience by balancing praise and pleasure, tragedy and pastoral, heroism and gallantry. She traces how the playwright Philippe Quinault in his collaboration with Lully created a craze for opera. Cowart skilfully turns our attention to a resurgence of the stage ballet at the Paris Opéra, emphasizing André Campra's opera-ballets. By the end of the century the opera had begun to overshadow the court as a noble gathering place to entertain a new audience of upper-class elite who, bored with the dreary atmosphere at court, found themselves freed as a result of the aging Louis's lack of interest. Cowart concludes her study by exploring the 'operatic, proto-Enlightenment vision' of Antoine Watteau who is believed to have worked at the Opéra as a set painter. The book is well documented and includes references to original French texts. It also includes helpful illustrations of fanciful costumes, lavish stage sets, allegorical figures, mythical paintings, and musical scores of the time. Cowart's study is of impressive scope and offers a rich synthesis that draws on a breadth of scholarship by musicologists, art historians, literary historians/theorists, and dance specialists. Her cross-disciplinary approach yields important insights into the field of seventeenth-century studies.