La Délivrance de Renaud: Ballet Danced by Louis XIII in 1617 (review)

A recent critical facsimile edition of one of early ballet’s best-documented works, La Délivrance de Renaud (1617), draws attention to remarkable French records of seventeenth-century theatrical dance and music. This carefully edited and attractive volume, the first to focus on a single work from the Louis XIII era, opens with bilingual articles on the production’s sources and historical context. The six contributors to this book—Charles T. Downey, Georgie Durosoir, Greer Garden, Anne Surgers, Kate van Orden, and Peter Walls—provide interdisciplinary analyses of the performance and its records from a range of disciplines including musicology, theater, and dance studies. In addition to a full-sized, color copy of the 1617 livret of Etienne Durand’s Discours au vray du ballet dansé par le Roy, the publication includes an English-language translation and new edition of the music. These nuanced contributions revise and build upon earlier analyses of the performance by Margaret McGowan (1963) and Henri Prunières (1914).

Published in Paris by the king’s music printer Pierre Ballard, the Discours au vray is one of the most comprehensive and cohesive records of an early seventeenth-century ballet. The slim booklet is a mine of information on court spectacle, offering contemporary scholars a rare instance of a beautifully preserved livret containing music notation, images related to the ballet, and detailed descriptions of the work.¹

Counter to perceptions of ballets de cour as fussy aristocratic entertainments, this facsimile edition, edited by New Zealand musicologist Greer Garden, puts the medium’s satirical and politically charged elements into evidence. The ballet’s source, in cantos from Torquato Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), celebrates the return of the hero, Renaud, from Crusading armies in Palestine in the eleventh century and the end of his love affair with a “powerful Muslim sorceress . . . a comic character, danced and sung by a man en travesti” (41).² Illustrations of the enchantress in this facsimile include some of the finest, extant representations of a seventeenth-century travesti role in ballet de cour.³

Music for the ballet, transcribed from diverse sources by the volume’s music editor Charles T. Downey, gives insight into the work’s collaborative context (269).⁴ The team of composers working with Pierre Guédron on the ballet included accomplished dancers and musicians who also performed in the work. One of the four composers associated with La Délivrance de Renaud—Jacques de Montmorency (dit Belleville), of whom little is known—likely danced, composed music, and choreographed roles for the demons in the performance (60).⁵ His cross-disciplinary practice is characteristic of a period in which, as contributor Georgie Durosoir proposes, “dance was almost consubstantial with the practice of the violin” (60). Professional performers, including Belleville and Marais (in the role of Armide), appeared in the production with members of the court, performing what Durosoir terms an “interpenetration of roles” in which “composers served as heads of orchestras, violinists were also dancers, and singers performed as lutanists and actors” (56). The artists’ ability to move between disciplines, she suggests, lies at the root of the early medium.

In the narrow sense of actual dance steps, little information on the ballet’s movement appears in Durand’s livret.⁶ Clear in his account, however, is the work’s ambition as choreographic theater. Court ballets are profoundly and self-consciously pluridisciplinary, drawing on a wide variety of techniques for theatrical impact. A single scene from La Délivrance de Renaud, for example, includes such lush compositional prompts as the sound of infinite birds singing with counterfeit human voices and a working fountain containing the figure of a naked siren.⁷ Other standout images from the livret include a ballet of demons...