Harpsichord
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. This activates a row of levers that turn a trigger mechanism that plucks one or more strings with a small plectrum; the term denotes the whole family of similar plucked-keyboard instruments, including the smaller virginals and spinet. The harpsichord was used in Renaissance and Baroque music. During the late 18th century, with the rise of the piano, it disappeared from the musical scene. In the 20th century, it made a resurgence, being used in informed performances of older music, in new compositions, in certain styles of popular music. Harpsichords vary in size and shape; the player depresses a key that rocks over a pivot in the middle of its length. The other end of the key lifts a jack; when the player releases the key, the far end returns to its rest position, the jack falls back. As the key reaches its rest position, a felt damper atop the jack stops the string's vibrations; these basic principles are explained in detail below.
The keylever is a simple pivot, which rocks on a balance pin that passes through a hole drilled through the keylever. The jack is a rectangular piece of wood that sits upright on the end of the keylever; the jacks are held in place by the registers. These are two long strips of wood, which run in the gap between bellyrail; the registers have rectangular mortises through which the jacks pass as they can move down. The registers hold the jacks in the precise location needed to pluck the string. In the jack, a plectrum juts out horizontally and passes just under the string. Plectra were made of bird quill or leather; when the front of the key is pressed, the back of the key rises, the jack is lifted, the plectrum plucks the string. The vertical motion of the jack is stopped by the jackrail, covered with soft felt to muffle the impact; when the key is released, the jack falls back down under its own weight, the plectrum passes back under the string. This is made possible by having the plectrum held in a tongue attached with a pivot and a spring to the body of the jack.
The bottom surface of the plectrum is cut at a slant. When the jack arrives in lowered position, the felt damper touches the string, causing the note to cease; each string is wound around a tuning pin at the end of the string closer to the player. When rotated with a wrench or tuning hammer, the tuning pin adjusts the tension so that the string sounds the correct pitch. Tuning pins are held in holes drilled in the pinblock or wrestplank, an oblong hardwood plank. Proceeding from the tuning pin, a string next passes over the nut, a sharp edge, made of hardwood and is attached to the wrestplank; the section of the string beyond the nut forms its vibrating length, plucked and creates sound. At the other end of its vibrating length, the string passes over the bridge, another sharp edge made of hardwood; as with the nut, the horizontal position of the string along the bridge is determined by a vertical metal pin inserted into the bridge, against which the string rests. The bridge itself rests on a soundboard, a thin panel of wood made of spruce, fir or—in some Italian harpsichords—cypress.
The soundboard efficiently transduces the vibrations of the strings into vibrations in the air. A string is attached at its far end by a loop to a hitchpin. While many harpsichords have one string per note, more elaborate harpsichords can have two or more strings for each note; when there are multiple strings for each note, these additional strings are called "choirs" of strings. This provides two advantages: the ability to vary ability to vary tonal quality. Volume is increased when the mechanism of the instrument is set up by the player so that the press of a single key plucks more than one string. Tonal quality can be varied in two ways. First, different choirs of strings can be designed to have distinct tonal qualities by having one set of strings plucked closer to the nut, which emphasizes the higher harmonics, produces a "nasal" sound quality; the mechanism of the instrument, called "stops" permits the player to select the other. Second, having one key pluck two strings at once changes not just volume but tonal quality.
A vivid effect is obtained when the strings plucked are an octave apart. This is heard by the ear not as two pitches but as one: the sound of the higher string is blended with that of the lower one, the ear hears the lower pitch, enriched in tonal quality by the additional strength in the upper harmonics of the note sounded by the higher string; when describing a harpsichord it is customary to specify its choirs of strings called its disposition. Strings at eight foot pitch sound at the normal expected pitch, strings at four foot pitch sound
Royal Library of the Netherlands
The Royal Library of the Netherlands is based in The Hague and was founded in 1798. The mission of the Royal Library of the Netherlands, as presented on the library's web site, is to provide "access to the knowledge and culture of the past and the present by providing high-quality services for research and cultural experience"; the initiative to found a national library was proposed by representative Albert Jan Verbeek on August 17 1798. The collection would be based on the confiscated book collection of William V; the library was founded as the Nationale Bibliotheek on November 8 of the same year, after a committee of representatives had advised the creation of a national library on the same day. The National Library was only open to members of the Representative Body. King Louis Bonaparte gave the national library its name of the Royal Library in 1806. Napoleon Bonaparte transferred the Royal Library to The Hague as property, while allowing the Imperial Library in Paris to expropriate publications from the Royal Library.
In 1815 King William I of the Netherlands confirmed the name of'Royal Library' by royal resolution. It has been known as the National Library of the Netherlands since 1982, when it opened new quarters; the institution became independent of the state in 1996, although it is financed by the Department of Education and Science. In 2004, the National Library of the Netherlands contained 3,300,000 items, equivalent to 67 kilometers of bookshelves. Most items in the collection are books. There are pieces of "grey literature", where the author, publisher, or date may not be apparent but the document has cultural or intellectual significance; the collection contains the entire literature of the Netherlands, from medieval manuscripts to modern scientific publications. For a publication to be accepted, it must be from a registered Dutch publisher; the collection is accessible for members. Any person aged 16 years or older can become a member. One day passes are available. Requests for material take 30 minutes.
The KB hosts several open access websites, including the "Memory of the Netherlands". List of libraries in the Netherlands European Library Nederlandse Centrale Catalogus Books in the Netherlands Media related to Koninklijke Bibliotheek at Wikimedia Commons Official website
Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, Marquise de Montespan
Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marquise of Montespan, better known as Madame de Montespan, was the most celebrated maîtresse-en-titre of King Louis XIV of France, by whom she had seven children. Born into one of the oldest noble families of France, the House of Rochechouart, Madame de Montespan was called by some the "true Queen of France"' during her romantic relationship with Louis XIV due to the pervasiveness of her influence at court during that time, her so-called "reign" lasted from around 1667, when she first danced with Louis XIV at a ball hosted by the king's younger brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, at the Louvre Palace, until her alleged involvement in the notorious Affaire des Poisons in the late 1670s to 1680s. Her immediate contemporary was mistress of King Charles II of England, she is an ancestress of several royal houses in Europe, including those of Spain, Italy and Portugal. Françoise-Athénaïs was born on 5 October 1640 and baptised the same day at the Château of Lussac-les-Châteaux in today's Vienne department, in the Poitou-Charentes region in France.
Françoise, or more formally, Mademoiselle de Tonnay-Charente, possessed the blood of two of the oldest noble families of France through her parents, Gabriel de Rochechouart, Duke of Mortemart, Prince of Tonnay-Charente, Diane de Grandseigne, a lady-in-waiting to Anne of Austria, Queen consort of France. From her father, she inherited the famous Mortemart esprit; as a young girl, she travelled with her mother between the family estates and the court at the Louvre in Paris. At the age of 12, she began her formal education at the Convent of St Mary at Saintes, where her sister Gabrielle had started hers a decade earlier, she was religious and took Communion once a week, a practice that she would continue as a young woman. Her siblings were: Gabrielle, who married Claude Léonor Damas de Thianges, Marquis of Thianges and had children. Louis Victor, known as the Marquis of Vivonne, an enfant d'honneur and a friend of Louis XIV of France in his youth. Marie Madeleine Gabrielle Adélaïde, who due to her relationship with Françoise-Athénaïs, was known as the Queen of Abbesses.
At the age of 20, Françoise-Athénaïs became a maid-of-honour to the king's sister-in-law, Princess Henrietta Anne of England, known at court by the traditional honorific of Madame. Because of the relationship between her mother and the queen dowager, Anne of Austria, Françoise-Athénaïs was appointed to be a lady-in-waiting to the king's wife, Maria Theresa of Spain. On 28 January 1663, Françoise-Athénaïs married Louis Henri de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis of Montespan, one year her junior. Madame de La Fayette says in her Histoire de madame Henriette d'Angleterre that Françoise-Athénaïs was in love with another young man, Louis de La Trémoille, the elder son and heir to the Duc de Noirmoutier. However, La Tremouille had to flee to Spain after a disastrous duel, Françoise-Athénaïs was betrothed to Montespan; the wedding ceremony took place in a chapel at the Église Saint-Eustache in Paris. Françoise recounted that as she had neglected to bring along the proper kneeling cushions for the ceremony, the couple had to kneel on dog cushions.
She soon became pregnant with Christine. Two weeks after her daughter's birth she danced in a Court Ballet, less than a year her second child was born; the Montespan children were: Marie Christine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, who died at the Château de Bonnefont, one of her father's castles in Gascony. Louis Antoine de Pardaillan de Gondrin, Marquis of Antin. Louis Antoine had a cordial relationship with his younger half-brothers, the Duke of Maine and the Count of Toulouse; the couple lived in a small house close to the Louvre, which allowed Madame de Montespan to attend court and carry out her duties there as a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Orléans. She established herself as the "reigning beauty of the court". Beauty, was only one of Madame de Montespan's many charms, she was a cultured and amusing conversationalist, who won the admiration of such literary figures as letter-writer Madame de Sévigné and diarist Saint-Simon. In addition, she kept abreast of political events; this had the effect of making her more appealing to men of intellect and power.
She was courted by a number of suitors including le comte de Marquis de La Fare. Madame de Montespan astounded the court by resenting the position of Queen Maria Theresa of Spain; the daughter of King Philip IV of Spain and Elisabeth de France, the Queen's Spanish title, before her marriage, was Infanta María Teresa de Austria. In France, she was known as Marie-Thérèse d'Autriche. A scandal arose when the Duchess of Montausier, governess of the royal children and lady-in-waiting to the Queen, was accused of acting as a go-between in order to secure the governorship of the Dauphin for her husband, the Duke of Montausier. By 1666, Madame de Montespan was trying to take the place of Louis XIV's current mistress, Louise de La Vallière. Using her wit and charm, she sought to ingratiate herself with the king, she became close to the Dauphin, whose affection for her never wavered. Though Louise de La Vallière knew that Montespan was trying to conquer the King's heart, laughed at her miserable efforts, she underestimated her new rival.
Montespan cleverly cultivated friendships with both Louise and Queen Maria Teresa, when both ladies were pregnant, Madame de Montespan was
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Marc-Antoine Charpentier (French:. Exceptionally prolific and versatile, Charpentier produced compositions of the highest quality in several genres, his mastery in writing sacred vocal music, above all, was recognized and hailed by his contemporaries. Charpentier was born in or near Paris, the son of a master scribe who had good connections to influential families in the Parlement of Paris. Marc-Antoine received a good education with the help of the Jesuits, registered for law school in Paris when he was eighteen, he withdrew after one semester. He spent "two or three years" in Rome between 1667 and 1669, studied with Giacomo Carissimi, he is known to have been in contact with poet-musician Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, composing for the French Embassy in Rome. A legend claims that Charpentier traveled to Rome to study painting before he was discovered by Carissimi; this story is undocumented and untrue. Regardless, he acquired a solid knowledge of contemporary Italian musical practice and brought it back to France.
On his return to France, Charpentier began working as house composer to Marie de Lorraine, duchesse de Guise, known familiarly as "Mlle de Guise." She gave him an "apartment" in the renovated Hôtel de Guise – strong evidence that Charpentier was not a paid domestic who slept in a small room in the vast residence, but was instead a courtier who occupied one of the new apartments in the stable wing. For the next seventeen years, Charpentier composed a considerable quantity of vocal works for her, among them Psalm settings, motets, a Magnificat setting, a mass and a Dies Irae for the funeral of her nephew Louis Joseph, Duke of Guise, a succession of Italianate oratorios set to non-liturgical Latin texts.. Throughout the 1670s, the bulk of these works were for trios; the usual trio was two treble instruments and continuo. About 1680, Mlle de Guise increased the size of the ensemble, until it included 13 performers and a singing teacher. In the pieces written from 1684 until late 1687, the names of the Guise musicians appear as marginalia in Charpentier's manuscripts – including "Charp" beside the haute-contre line.
Étienne Loulié, the senior instrumentalist who played keyboard and viole was entrusted with coaching the newer instrumentalists. Despite what is asserted, during his seventeen years in the service of Mlle de Guise, Charpentier was not the "director" of the Guise ensemble; the director was a gentleman of Mlle de Guise's court, an amateur musician and Latinist named Philippe Goibaut, familiarly called Monsieur Du Bois. Owing to Mlle de Guise's love for Italian music, her frequent entertaining of Italians passing through Paris, there was little reason for Charpentier to conceal the Italianisms he had learned in Rome. During his years of service to Mlle de Guise, Charpentier composed for "Mme de Guise", Louis XIV's first cousin, it was in large part owing to Mme de Guise's protection that the Guise musicians were permitted to perform Charpentier's chamber operas in defiance of the monopoly held by Jean Baptiste Lully. Most of the operas and pastorales in French, which date from 1684 to 1687, appear to have been commissioned by Mme de Guise for performance at court entertainments during the winter season.
By late 1687, Mlle de Guise was dying. Around that time, Charpentier entered the employ of the Jesuits. Indeed, he is not named in the princess's will of March 1688, nor in the papers of her estate, strong evidence that she had rewarded her loyal servant and approved of his departure. During his seventeen-odd years at the Hôtel de Guise, Charpentier had written as many pages of music for outside commissions as he had for Mlle de Guise. For example, after Molière's falling out with Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1672, Charpentier had begun writing incidental music for the spoken theater of Molière, it was owing to pressure on Molière exerted by Mlle de Guise and by young Mme de Guise that the playwright took the commission for incidental music for Le Malade imaginaire away from Dassoucy and gave it to Charpentier. After Molière's death in 1673, Charpentier continued to write for the playwright's successors, Thomas Corneille and Jean Donneau de Visé. Play after play, he would compose pieces that demanded more musicians than the number authorized by Lully's monopoly over theatrical music.
By 1685, the troop ceased flouting these restrictions. Their capitulation ended Charpentier's career as a composer for the spoken theater. In 1679, Charpentier had been singled out to compose for the Dauphin. Writing for the prince's private chapel, he composed devotional pieces for a small ensemble composed of royal musicians: the two Pièche sisters singing with a bass named Frizon, instruments played by the two Pièche brothers. In short, an ensemble that, with Mlle de Guise's permission, could perform works he had earlier composed for the Guises. By ea
National Library of Australia
The National Library of Australia is the largest reference library in Australia, responsible under the terms of the National Library Act for "maintaining and developing a national collection of library material, including a comprehensive collection of library material relating to Australia and the Australian people." In 2012–13, the National Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, an additional 15,506 metres of manuscript material. It is located in Parkes, Canberra, ACT; the National Library of Australia, while formally established by the passage of the National Library Act 1960, had been functioning as a national library rather than a Parliamentary Library since its inception. In 1901, a Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was established to serve the newly formed Federal Parliament of Australia. From its inception the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library was driven to development of a national collection. In 1907 the Joint Parliamentary Library Committee under the Chairmanship of the Speaker, Sir Frederick William Holder defined the objective of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in the following words: The Library Committee is keeping before it the ideal of building up, for the time when Parliament shall be established in the Federal Capital, a great Public Library on the lines of the world-famed Library of Congress at Washington.
The present library building was opened on 15 August 1968 by Prime Minister John Gorton. The building was designed by the architectural firm of Bunning and Madden in the Late Twentieth Century Stripped Classical style; the foyer is decorated in marble, with stained-glass windows by Leonard French and three tapestries by Mathieu Matégot. The building was listed on the Australian Commonwealth Heritage List on 22 June 2004. In 2012–13 the Library collection comprised 6,496,772 items, with an estimated additional 2,325,900 items held in the manuscripts collection; the Library's collections of Australiana have developed into the nation's single most important resource of materials recording the Australian cultural heritage. Australian writers and illustrators are sought and well represented—whether published in Australia or overseas; the Library's collection includes all formats of material, from books, journals and manuscripts to pictures, maps, oral history recordings, manuscript papers and ephemera.
92.1% of the Library's collection has been catalogued and is discoverable through the online catalogue. The Library has digitized over 174,000 items from its collection and, where possible, delivers these directly across the Internet; the Library is a world leader in digital preservation techniques, maintains an Internet-accessible archive of selected Australian websites called the Pandora Archive. The Library collects material produced by Australians, for Australians or about the Australian experience in all formats—not just printed works—books, newspapers, posters and printed ephemera—but online publications and unpublished material such as manuscripts and oral histories. A core Australiana collection is that of John A. Ferguson; the Library has particular collection strengths in the performing arts, including dance. The Library's considerable collections of general overseas and rare book materials, as well as world-class Asian and Pacific collections which augment the Australiana collections.
The print collections are further supported by extensive microform holdings. The Library maintains the National Reserve Braille Collection; the Library houses the largest and most developing research resource on Asia in Australia, the largest Asian language collections in the Southern hemisphere, with over half a million volumes in the collection, as well as extensive online and electronic resources. The Library collects resources about all Asian countries in Western languages extensively, resources in the following Asian languages: Burmese, Persian, Japanese, Korean, Manchu, Thai and Vietnamese; the Library has acquired a number of important Western and Asian language scholarly collections from researchers and bibliophiles. These collections include: Australian Buddhist Library Collection Braga Collection Claasz Collection Coedes Collection London Missionary Society Collection Luce Collection McLaren-Human Collection Otley Beyer Collection Sakakibara Collection Sang Ye Collection Simon Collection Harold S. Williams Collection The Asian Collections are searchable via the National Library's catalogue.
The National Library holds an extensive collection of manuscripts. The manuscript collection contains about 26 million separate items, covering in excess of 10,492 meters of shelf space; the collection relates predominantly to Australia, but there are important holdings relating to Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the Pacific. The collection holds a number of European and Asian manuscript collections or single items have been received as part of formed book collections; the Australian manuscript collections date from the period of maritime exploration and settlement in the 18th century until the present, with the greatest area of strength dating from the 1890s onwards. The collection includes a large number of outstanding single items, such as the 14th century Chertsey Cartulary, the journal of James Cook on the HM Bark Endeavour, inscribed on t
François Couperin
François Couperin was a French Baroque composer and harpsichordist. He was known as Couperin le Grand to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family. Couperin was born into one of the best known musical families of Europe, his father Charles was organist at the Church of Saint-Gervais in Paris, a position occupied by Charles's brother Louis Couperin, a regarded keyboard virtuoso and composer whose career was cut short by an early death. As a boy, François must have received his first music lessons from his father. Charles died in 1679; the church council at Saint-Gervais hired Michel Richard Delalande to serve as new organist, with the condition that François would replace him at age 18. Meanwhile, the boy was taken care of and taught by organist Jacques-Denis Thomelin, who served both at the court and at the famous church of St Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. According to a biography by Évrard Titon du Tillet, Thomelin treated the boy well and became "a second father" to him.
François's talent must have manifested itself quite early, since by 1685 the church council agreed to provide him with a regular salary though he had no formal contract. Couperin's mother Marie died in 1690, but otherwise his life and career were accompanied by good fortune. In 1689 he married one Marie-Anne Ansault, daughter of a well connected family; the next year saw the publication of Couperin's Pieces d'orgue, a collection of organ masses, praised by Delalande. In three more years Couperin succeeded his former teacher Thomelin at the court; the new appointment was prestigious and brought Couperin in contact with some of the finest composers of his time, as well as numerous members of the aristocracy. His earliest chamber music dates from around that time; the numerous duties Couperin carried out at the court were accompanied by duties as organist at Saint Gervais, by the composition and publication of new music. He obtained a 20-year royal privilege to publish in 1713 and used it to issue the first volume of his harpsichord works, Pieces de clavecin.
A harpsichord playing manual followed in 1716, as well as other collections of keyboard and chamber music. In 1717 Couperin succeeded one of his most eminent colleagues, Jean-Baptiste-Henry d'Anglebert, as ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du roi pour le clavecin, one of the highest possible appointments for a court musician. However, his involvement in the musical activities at the court may have lessened after Louis XIV's death in 1715. Couperin's health declined throughout the 1720s; the services of a cousin were required by 1723 at Saint Gervais, in 1730 Couperin's position as court harpsichordist was taken up by his daughter Marguerite-Antoinette. Couperin's final publications were the fourth volume of harpsichord pieces; the composer died in 1733. The building where Couperin and his family lived since 1724 still stands and is located at the corner of the rue Radziwill and the rue des Petits Champs; the composer was survived by at least three of his children: Marguerite-Antoinette, who continued working as court harpsichordist until 1741, Marie-Madeleine, who became a nun and may have worked as organist at the Maubuisson Abbey, François-Laurent, who according to contemporary sources left the family after François died.
Couperin acknowledged his debt to the Italian composer Corelli. He introduced Corelli's trio sonata form to France. Couperin's grand trio sonata was subtitled ou L'apothéose de Corelli. In it he blended the Italian and French styles of music in a set of pieces which he called Les goûts réunis, his most famous book, L'art de toucher le clavecin, contains suggestions for fingerings, touch and other features of keyboard technique. Couperin's four volumes of harpsichord music, published in Paris in 1713, 1717, 1722, 1730, contain over 230 individual pieces, he published a book of Concerts Royaux which can be played as solo harpsichord pieces or as small chamber works; the four collections for harpsichord alone are grouped into ordres, a synonym of suites, containing traditional dances as well as pieces with descriptive titles. They are notable for Couperin's detailed indication of ornaments, which in most harpsichord music of the period was left to the discretion of the player; the first and last pieces in an ordre were of the same tonality, but the middle pieces could be in other related tonalities.
These volumes were admired by Johann Sebastian Bach, who exchanged letters with Couperin, by Brahms and by Ravel, who memorialized their composer in Le tombeau de Couperin. Many of Couperin's keyboard pieces have evocative, picturesque titles and express a mood through key choices, adventurous harmonies and discords, they have been likened to miniature tone poems. These features attracted Richard Strauss. Johannes Brahms's piano music was influenced by the keyboard music of Couperin. Brahms performed Couperin's music in public and contributed to the first complete edition of Couperin's Pièces de clavecin by Friedrich Chrysander in the 1880s; the early-music expert Jordi Savall has written that Couperin was the "poet musician par excellence", who believed in "the ability of Music to express itself in prose and poetry", that "if we enter into
Paris Opera
The Paris Opera is the primary opera and ballet company of France. It was founded in 1669 by Louis XIV as the Académie d'Opéra, shortly thereafter was placed under the leadership of Jean-Baptiste Lully and renamed the Académie Royale de Musique, but continued to be known more as the Opéra. Classical ballet as it is known today arose within the Paris Opera as the Paris Opera Ballet and has remained an integral and important part of the company. Called the Opéra National de Paris, it produces operas at its modern 2700-seat theatre Opéra Bastille which opened in 1989, ballets and some classical operas at the older 1970-seat Palais Garnier which opened in 1875. Small scale and contemporary works are staged in the 500-seat Amphitheatre under the Opéra Bastille; the company's annual budget is in the order of 200 million euros, of which 100 million come from the French state and 70 million from box office receipts. With this money, the company runs the two houses and supports a large permanent staff, which includes the orchestra of 170, a chorus of 110 and the corps de ballet of 150.
Each year, the Opéra presents about 380 performances of opera and other concerts, to a total audience of about 800,000 people, a good average seat occupancy rate of 94%. In the 2012/13 season, the Opéra presented 18 opera titles, 13 ballets, 5 symphonic concerts and two vocal recitals, plus 15 other programmes; the company's training bodies are active, with 7 concerts from the Atelier Lyrique and 4 programmes from the École de Danse. The poet Pierre Perrin began thinking and writing about the possibility of French opera in 1655, more than a decade before the official founding of the Paris Opera as an institution, he believed that the prevailing opinion of the time that the French language was fundamentally unmusical was incorrect. Seventeenth-century France offered Perrin two types of organization for realizing his vision: a royal academy or a public theater. In 1666 he proposed to the minister Colbert that "the king decree'the establishment of an Academy of Poetry and Music' whose goal would be to synthesize the French language and French music into an new lyric form."Even though Perrin's original concept was of an academy devoted to discussions of French opera, the king's intention was in fact a unique hybrid of royal academy and public theatre, with an emphasis on the latter as an institution for performance.
On 28 June 1669, Louis XIV signed the Privilège accordé au Sieur Perrin pour l'établissement d'une Académie d'Opéra en musique, & Vers François. The wording of the privilège, based in part on Perrin's own writings, gave him the exclusive right for 12 years to found anywhere in France academies of opera dedicated to the performance of opera in French, he was free to set the price of tickets. No one was to have the right of free entry including members of the royal court, no one else could set up a similar institution. Although it was to be a public theatre, it retained its status as royal academy in which the authority of the king as the primary stakeholder was decisive; the monopoly intended to protect the enterprise from competition during its formative phase, was renewed for subsequent recipients of the privilege up to the early French Revolution. As Victoria Johnson points out, "the Opera was an organization by nature so luxurious and expensive in its productions that its survival depended on financial protection and privilege."Perrin converted the Bouteille tennis court, located on the Rue des Fossés de Nesles, into a rectangular facility with provisions for stage machinery and scenery changes and a capacity of about 1200 spectators.
His first opera Pomone with music by Robert Cambert opened on 3 March 1671 and ran for 146 performances. A second work, Les peines et les plaisirs de l'amour, with a libretto by Gabriel Gilbert and music by Cambert, was performed in 1672. Despite this early success and two other associates did not hesitate to swindle Perrin, imprisoned for debt and forced to concede his privilege on 13 March 1672 to the surintendant of the king's music Jean-Baptiste Lully; the institution was renamed the Académie Royale de Musique and came to be known in France as the Opéra. Within one month Lully had convinced the king to expand the privilege by restricting the French and Italian comedians to using two singers rather than six, six instrumentalists, rather than twelve; because of legal difficulties Lully could not use the Salle de la Bouteille, a new theatre was built by Carlo Vigarani at the Bel-Air tennis court on the Rue de Vaugirard. Lully and his successors bitterly negotiated the concession of the privilege, in whole or in part, from the entrepreneurs in the provinces: in 1684 Pierre Gautier bought the authorisation to open a music academy in Marseille the towns of Lyon, Rouen and Bordeaux followed suit in the following years.
During Lully's tenure, the only works performed were his own. The first productions were the pastorale Les fêtes de l'Amour et de Bacchus and his first tragedie lyrique called Cadmus et Hermione. After Molière's death in 1673, his troupe merged with the players at the Théâtre du Marais to form the Théâtre Guénégaud, no longer needed the theatre built by Richelieu at his residence the Palais-Royal, near the Louvre. (In 1680 the troupe at the Guénégaud merged again with the players from the Hôtel de Bourgogne forming the Comédie-Fr
