Mario Sabate Planes
6K posts
There are going to be riots when this is eaten by the taxpayers. Riots.
Nothing quite like music as a celebration of life – and let’s do it in its grandeur. And nothing does grandeur like French baroque music. Which you probably don’t know. And should. 1. Before we call it opera – they didn’t. The French court of Louis XIV considered the word opéra too vulgar, too Italian, too common for what they were creating. They called them tragédies lyriques – lyrical tragedies. The distinction matters: these were not entertainments. They were civilizational statements, staged at Versailles for the Sun King, combining music, dance, poetry, and spectacle into something that had no precedent and has no successor. Western civilization at its most unapologetically magnificent. 2. Jean-Baptiste Lully stands at the center of it all – the Italian-born genius who became the absolute master of French musical life under Louis XIV. His Te Deum is where you start. Majestic, overwhelming, triumphant beyond what you think music can do. It announces itself like the opening of the heavens. Lully died because of it – he struck his own foot with the long conducting staff he used to beat time on the floor, the wound became gangrenous, and he refused amputation because he did not want to stop dancing. He died for his art in the most literal sense. There are worse exits. 3. Atys – Lully’s masterpiece, Louis XIV’s favorite, known simply as l’opéra du roi – the king’s opera. The myth of Atys and Cybele, the god who loves and is loved by a goddess who cannot be refused. The prologue alone — Time yielding to Glory at the arrival of the Sun King — is the most assured statement of civilizational self-confidence ever set to music. A civilization that could produce this knew exactly what it was and what it was worth. We have lost that certainty. The music survives it. 4. Michel-Richard Delalande – the name almost nobody outside the specialists knows, the composer who should be as famous as Bach. His De Profundis, his grands motets written for the royal chapel at Versailles – sacred music of a depth and grandeur that stops conversation. De Profundis specifically: Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord – set to music that actually sounds like the depths, and the cry, and the reaching upward from them. Delalande understood that sacred music is not decoration. It is architecture for the soul. 5. Jean-Philippe Rameau arrives a generation later and takes everything Lully built and makes it harmonically richer, more daring, more complex. Castor et Pollux. Les Indes galantes. Rameau was a theorist as much as a composer – he understood harmony the way Newton understood motion, as a system with laws that could be discovered. His music feels inevitable, which is the highest compliment you can pay a composer: not that he invented something, but that he found something that was always there. 6. This music was written for a civilization that believed in beauty as a serious matter – not decoration, not entertainment, but the outward form of inner order. Versailles was not extravagance. It was a statement: that human beings, at their best, are capable of this. The tragédie lyrique said the same thing in sound. Every performance was an act of civilizational confidence – we are capable of this height, and we know it, and we are not embarrassed by it. 7. We have largely stopped making things like this – not because we lack the talent, but because we have lost the conviction that height is worth reaching for. The Last Man blinks and finds it excessive. The algorithm serves what gets clicks. The institutions fund what demonstrates the "right values". Meanwhile Lully’s Te Deum is still there, exactly as he left it, waiting for anyone willing to listen to what a civilization sounds like when it still believes in itself. Start there. Then Atys. Then Delalande’s De Profundis. Then Rameau. You will emerge from the other side having heard what Western Civilization was capable of at its peak – and understanding, viscerally, what it means that we stopped.
"Millions of Americans want jobs but can't find them, and the number now exceeds the Great Financial Crisis," per Benzinga
