Emerging in France in the late 16th century, court ballets owed much to the travelling Italian performers during the reign of the last Valois kings. France admired the sophisticated entertainment put on in Italy’s courts and soon established its own choreographic speciality combining poetry, music, painting, costume and singing around dance. This is how a national genre was formed from an Italian idea, in which Louis XIII and Louis XIV themselves performed. In fact, the latter King acted more than 70 roles over an 18-year period in 26 different works, including the famous Ballet de la Nuit in which, after playing the Sun god Apollo, he became known as the Sun King.
When Mazarin introduced Italian opera to France, with La Finta Pazza (1645), the Venetian Giovanni Battista Balbi choreographed intermezzi, danced between acts, as was the custom in Italy. Unrelated to the main show, these balletti made use of parrots, monkeys and ostriches for the amusement of the seven-year-old King. When Louis XIV was old enough to dance, Mazarin sought to tailor Italian opera to French tastes by incorporating ballet, such as in Caproli’s Le Nozze di Peleo e di Teti (1654), “an Italian musical play interwined with a ballet interlude on the same subject”.
Despite exhibiting greater thematic consistency, this hybridization did not survive beyond the Cardinal’s death and hopes of seeing a genuine merging of genres had to wait until the advent of French opera. This inherited the three defining features of court ballets: incorporation of dance in the dramaturgy, five-part orchestral scoring and luxurious costumes.
