'Le Triomphe de l'Amour' 1681: A Multimedia Spectacular on the Court and Public Stage

In January 1681 the ballet Le Triomphe de l'Amour was premiered at Louis XIV's court with music by Jean-Baptiste Lully and text by Philippe Quinault and Isaac de Benserade. The production featured royal and aristocratic amateur dancers and professional performers. In May 1681 the ballet was transferred to the public stage at the Paris Opéra with a fully professional cast, including - for the first time at that theatre - women dancers. According to contemporary reports, spectacular scenic effects were devised for the Opéra production by the Italian theatrical engineer Ercole Rivani. The livret (libretto) for the court production is well documented, but that for the Opéra production was thought lost. However, a livret in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France may be identified as that for the Opéra production. It reveals that extensive scenographic changes - and some musical ones - were made for the Opéra. Certain changes affected the presentation of the dances. Engravings of a few costume designs for the ballet have long been known. Mickaël Bouffard and Jérôme de La Gorce have recently identified further designs in the Louvre. With these and the scene descriptions in the Opéra livret we can now reassess the impact of this spectacular multimedia work. 

Sandra Tuppen studied music at Bangor University, obtaining her PhD in 1998 on French influence on seventeenth-century English theatre music. She joined the British Library in 1995 as a curator of printed music, and between 2001 and 2007 managed the AHRC-funded UK RISM cataloguing project at Royal Holloway, University of London. On returning to the British Library, she became Curator of Music Manuscripts, and in this role oversaw several digital music projects. More recently she has been managing the Library's digitisation programme, Heritage Made Digital. In December 2022, she took up the position of Head of Music Collections at the British Library. She is also Secretary of the Purcell Society and the Chair of the RISM (UK) Trust. Her current research interests are focused on seventeenth-century English and French music, early music printing and concert life in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.