Musicians have not been immune to the venom of professional rivalry. Tradition appears to attribute the most intense rivalries to operatic composers. In the case of one of the great competitive pairings, Gluck and Piccinni, neither man seems to have had any basis to reproach the other for acts of unfairness. The guilty parties were the factions of the Paris opera world that attempted unsuccessfully to pit the two men against each other in an operatic mano a mano by assigning them the same libretto based on Quinault’s Roland. The legends of other rivalries are darker. In the accounts of the enmity of Salieri for Mozart and of the victory of Jean-Baptiste Lully over Robert Cambert, we read not only testimonies to professional antagonism but also hints or outright charges of assassination.
The Mozart-Salieri traditions have often been summarized and will be the subject of detailed examination in the next chapter. However, the story of how Lully came to be blamed for the death of Cambert in London in 1677 is relatively little known to the English-reading public. In fact, little effort has been made by prior researchers (principally French) to determine whether the traditional view that Cambert died violently can be documented from English records. My two purposes here will be to review the anti-Lully traditions that have grown up around Cambert’s death and to demonstrate, on the basis of a survey of English records, the difficulty of producing evidence that Cambert was murdered by anyone at all.
It is not an accident that the most extreme traditions of musical rivalry from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries derive from the world of opera. Many factors fed the potentialities for conflict that are never wholly lacking when sensitive artists are struggling to find acceptance for their work. Due to the cultural centralism of monarchic society and the great expense of opera productions, the commissioning and subsidizing of operas were primarily under control of the court. The success of opera composers was accordingly determined not only by talent but also by the political strength of their supporters. Courtiers electioneered for the opera composers under their patronage, and their campaigns were marred by “dirty tricks.”
The passions stirred by opera politics were further inflamed by nationalism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Italian opera, and Italian operatic composers and troupes, were exported to the major European capitals, where they met with native resistance. To the extent that this led to adaptation of Italian style or development of newer national styles, such resistance was musically fruitful, but it also took its toll in personal animosities directed against the cultural invaders. The libels against Salieri were based in large measure on his Italian origin. Lully was not able, either by his writ of naturalization from Louis XIV or the changed spelling of his name, to convince the people of Paris that he had, “in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations,” become a true Frenchman.
The story of the competition of Cambert and Lully for mastery of the French opera world might read like the race of the hare and the tortoise if we were to attribute more cunning to the tortoise than is granted by proverb. Cambert was off the mark thirteen years sooner, but he rested for a decade; when success was in sight, his more resourceful adversary overtook him.
Cambert’s musical career in Paris was anchored by significant official posts. He served as organist of the Church of St. Honoré and, from 1662 or 1663, as Anne of Austria’s Master of Music. Early in his career Cambert conceived the idea of creating a comédie en musique in the French language. Under Cambert’s concept, musical continuity would be provided by the use of recitative on the Italian model, and the singers would move freely about the stage instead of striking wooden postures. Cambert’s first effort in the new operatic genre, written to a libretto by the clumsy and conceited poet Pierre Perrin, was the so-called Pastorale of Issy, which was performed at a private country home at Issy near Paris in 1659. Unfortunately, Cambert was never inclined or able to push the borders of opera beyond pastoral scenes. A second opera, Ariane et Bacchus, was composed in 1659 under a commission from Mazarin, but its performance was called off after Mazarin’s death.
Cambert did not turn to opera again until 1669, when he renewed his association with Perrin, who in June of that year had obtained a royal privilège authorizing him to organize an Académie de musique for the production of opera. In March 1671 Cambert and Perrin presented their opera Pomone as the inaugural work of the Académie. It was immensely successful and may have enjoyed more than seventy performances within an eight-month period.
It is speculated that the success of Pomone encouraged Lully to enter the opera world and make it his own, to the exclusion of Cambert and other possible rivals. However, he might have arrived at the same destination in any event, though his route was circuitous. The narrative of the spectacular rise of Lully from obscurity is well-known. A son of an Italian miller, Lully was brought to Paris as a youth to serve Mademoiselle de Montpensier (la Grande Mademoiselle) as an Italian tutor and attendant. Having displayed musical precocity while in her employ, he was astute enough to change sides during the wars of the Fronde and to enter the service of the young Louis XIV. Enjoying Louis’ admiration and affection, Lully began as dancer, ballet director, and orchestra conductor and then became an important court composer, both of ballets and ceremonials and of incidental music to the comedies of another favorite of Louis XIV, Molière. About the same time as the premiere of Pomone, Lully’s Psyche was produced. Although ballet and stage machinery remained dominant, critics agree that elements of opera were also present in the work.
Somehow, Lully became convinced that he should acquire the Perrin privilège and fashion a wider musical monopoly for himself. It is not clear whether the idea originated in Lully’s own ambition or in the encouragement of Colbert or Mme de Montespan or Louis XIV himself. Lully always attributed the idea to the king, and it would certainly have been consistent with the king’s belief that each important task of the nation, whether political or cultural, should be exclusively committed to trusted hands.
In any event, Lully’s original acquisition of the Perrin privilège cannot be regarded as a wrong to Cambert. The theater partnership that had been operating under the privilège had been torn by dissension, Perrin was languishing in debtors’ prison, and Cambert’s role in the venture had been reduced to that of a hired musician (hired but, alas, not paid). Lully worked out a businesslike agreement with Perrin for the transfer of the privilège in consideration for Lully’s discharge of Perrin’s debts. Lully’s transgressions against his musical colleagues, including Cambert, arose not from his agreement with Perrin but from his ruthlessness in obtaining and enforcing a new royal privilège of unparalleled scope. Under this broad authority, and undeterred by litigation brought by his adversaries, Lully closed the theater at which Pomone had triumphed, raided its opera troupe, drove all competing opera composers from the field, and even placed severe restrictions on musical accompaniment in the theater of his old collaborator, Molière.
The musical career of Cambert in London has been traced, as well as the scanty records permit, by André Tessier and W. H. Grattan Flood in separate studies published in 1927 and 1928. Cambert arrived in London in either 1672 or 1673. He was possibly influenced to make this move by the fact that his student Louis Grabu was Master of the King’s Music at the court of Charles II. In the fall of 1673 Cambert founded in London a so-called Royal Academy of Music in which he held the post of director. This institution was an essentially private opera theater, although Cambert appears to have enjoyed for a time a measure of royal patronage, which may have included a loan of stage sets. The high-sounding name Cambert chose for the theater was undoubtedly intended to reflect some of the authority of the Parisian operatic monopolies and apparently served its purpose at least posthumously by misleading historians into attributing to Cambert an official position as royal director of music at Charles’s court.
In the early spring of 1674, Cambert’s Royal Academy presented his opera Ariane, which had been modified with the assistance of Grabu, at the new Royal Theatre in Bridge’s Street (Drury Lane). This theater had been built to replace a predecessor that was destroyed by fire in 1672. It appears that Ariane was performed in French by a troupe of French musicians who had been assembled by the Academy. Cambert’s destiny to remain obscure was mirrored by the libretto, published in London in 1674, which identifies Grabu as the sole composer. The libretto bears a prefatory letter to Charles II dedicating the work of the Academy to his service and is signed, perhaps too optimistically, “your Academy of Music.” It may be that other of Cambert’s works were performed in London in his early years there. It is possible that Pomone and Les Peines et Plaisirs de l’Amour were also produced in London, and a surviving libretto attributes to Cambert’s pen a portion of a Ballet et Musique pour le Divertissement du Roy de la Grande Bretagne performed at the court in 1674.
Unfortunately, Cambert’s royal favor seems to have been short-lived. In August 1674, his mainstay at the court, Grabu, was abruptly dismissed as Master of the King’s Music and replaced by Nicholas Staggins, an Englishman. After 1674 Cambert is lost from sight until April 1677, when Le Mercure Galant reported his death with a resounding eulogy: “Let us say that Music is unfortunate this year in every way, and that if some musicians have lost their lawsuits, others have lost their lives. M. Cambert, master of music of the late Queen Mother, has died in London, where his genius was greatly esteemed. He had received many benefits from the King of England and from the greatest noblemen at his Court, and all that they had seen of his work did not belie in the least what he had done in France. It is to him that we owe the establishment of the operas that we see today.” This obituary did not impute to Lully a role in Cambert’s death. However, both in his historical assessment of Cambert’s achievement and in a possibly ironic linking of Cambert’s death to another man’s suffering at the hands of Lully, the writer appears to have intended to identify Cambert in death both as the superior of Lully and as his enemy. The assertion that France owed to Cambert the establishment of its operas obviously amounted to a rejection of Lully’s claims to that distinction. Not content with this critical judgment, the article delivered a personal blow against Lully by comparing Cambert’s loss of life to another musician’s loss of a lawsuit. This reference was clearly to Lully’s judicial persecution of Henri Guichard, a business associate of Pierre Perrin who had held an interest in Perrin’s theater and royal opera franchise.
Lully, in order to counter Guichard’s opposition to his opera monopoly, had initiated a criminal proceeding against Guichard for an alleged attempt to murder him by the administration of poisoned snuff. The poisoning plot, if it existed at all, was carried forward with all the clumsiness one associates with murder conspiracies in opera librettos. If there was any truth in the accusation, it is likely that the plot was, after feeble beginnings, largely an invention of Lully himself for the purpose of entrapping his adversary. The allusion in Le Mercure’s Cambert obituary to Lully’s legal victory was based on the fact that Guichard had been convicted of the attempted poisoning in September 1676, but the comment was premature: Guichard appealed and was exonerated by the appellate court within a month after the appearance of the article. However, the association made between Cambert’s death and Lully’s own charge of foul play against Guichard was to bear fruit in the creation of a murder legend.
Lully died in 1687, and his death was marked by both praise and bitter invective. One of the most extravagant literary tributes was an account of Lully’s reception into the Elysian Fields by the great departed spirits of music. Possibly in response to this piece or similar exercises in hyperbole, poet and humorist Antoine Bauderon de Sénecé published in 1688 a satirical account of what really happened to Lully in the Elysian Fields. Sénecé’s book is in the form of a letter from the sixteenth-century court poet Clément Marot to a fictional editor, circumstantially specifying as place and date of mailing “Elysian Fields, April 20.” In describing Lully’s entry into the Temple of Persephone, Sénecé, like the Cambert obituary writer, makes a reference to Lully’s charges against Guichard, and he leaves no doubt as to his feeling with regard to their lack of substance: “Barely had he [Lully] taken a few steps when he was seen to change color and to show on his countenance more fear than he had ever had for the alleged poison of Guichard.”
Persephone’s Temple was the Elysian tribunal at which judgment was passed on the qualification of a new entrant to be granted immortality. Lully’s advocate was the Italian musician Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx, who, like Lully, had found favor at the French court. Beaujoyeulx appears to have been a rather maladroit spokesman, since he spiced his eulogy with Sénecé’s own animus. When the ancient Greek poet Anacreon opposed Lully’s claims on the ground that Lully refused to recognize the primacy of the poet’s contribution to opera, Beaujoyeulx rejoined that Lully was well aware of the important role of poetry: why else would he have headed his scores with laudatory verse epistles to Louis XIV?
At this point Perrin’s ghost stepped forward and, still bitter over the loss of opera rights to Lully, urged that, far from being entitled to immortality, Lully should be punished “as the thief that he was of the labors and reputations of others.” Perrin’s final charge that Lully had used his opera monopoly to “cut the throat of so many” is immediately taken up in a melodramatic intervention by the tortured ghost of Cambert:
“Yes, yes, cut the throat!” a furious shade cried in a terrifying out-burst, and, breaking through the crowd, was immediately recognized as that of poor Cambert, still entirely disfigured by the wounds that he had received when he was in England. “You see, Madame,” he continued in the same tone, “to what end I was brought by the tyranny of Lully. The applause that I received from the public for the merit of my compositions aroused his indignation. He wanted to seize the fields that I had prepared, and reduced me to the cruel necessity of going to seek my bread and glory in a foreign court, where envy found a way of finishing, by depriving me of life, the crime that it had begun by exiling me from my homeland. But regardless of whose hand struck the blows that took my life, I shall never impute them to anyone but Lully, whom I regard as my real murderer, and against whom I demand that you give justice. And it is not for myself alone, Madame, that I implore your equity; it is in the name of all those who distinguished themselves in their times by some rare ability in music, whom he never ceased to persecute by all sorts of means.”
Like the Mercure obituary, this passage can be read as falling far short of a murder accusation against Lully. The “crime” of which Lully is most clearly accused is that of having driven Cambert into exile by unfair competition, and in Sénecé’s view this crime also entails moral responsibility for Cambert’s death in exile, regardless of the identity of the actual assailant. But the author’s reference to “envy” as a common element in the crimes of exile and murder created an ambiguity. Did Sénecé mean to imply that minions of Lully pursued Cambert to London to complete his destruction, or that Cambert fell victim of envy from musical circles in London as he had done in Paris?
The various strands of Sénecé’s innuendos were taken up by later historians, and his fictional account of a lacerated ghost became the surrogate of a corpus delicti. The historians do not acknowledge their debt to Sénecé, and it is understandably embarrassing to footnote an assertion of murder by reference to a satirist. But the mark of The Letter of Clément Marot is everywhere to be seen in the commentaries on Cambert’s death from the eighteenth century on. In 1705 Le Cerf de La Viéville, a great admirer of Lully, developed the anti-English possibilities of Sénecé’s charges, perhaps in the belief that he would thereby deflect blame from Lully. While Sénecé had left ambiguous the source of the “envy” that had destroyed Cambert, Le Cerf pointed his finger directly at Cambert’s English competitors:
Cambert seeing himself of no use in Paris after the establishment of Lully, moved to London, where his Pomone, which he presented there, attracted to him considerable evidences of friendship and favor from the King of England and the greatest nobles of the Court. But the envy that is inseparable from merit cut short his days. The English do not find it good for a foreigner to intrude into their entertainment and instruction. The poor fellow died there a little earlier than he would have died elsewhere.
The brothers Parfaict in their Histoire de l’Académie royale de musique paraphrased the above passage from Le Cerf de La Viéville and also referred to a rival tradition that Cambert had been murdered by a valet. This accusation (a parallel to the familiar mystery novel formula that “the butler did it”) leaves open the question as to whether the servant was acting for himself or for an undisclosed principal, and some whispered that the murderer was engaged by Lully. In addition to all the mysteries this theory summons up as to the details of the hiring and escape of the murderer, the valet legend makes us wonder how Cambert, obscure as he was in 1677, could have afforded a manservant.
A less sensational residue of the Sénecé lampoon is a suggestion that Cambert died of heartbreak in his London exile. This version leaves those who adopt it free to blame Lully or not, depending on their views of Lully’s musical merits and of the fairness of the steps he took to win and enforce his operatic monopoly.
Although none of the modern authorities attributes Cambert’s death to Lully, a surprising number assume that Cambert was murdered. No evidence is cited in support of this assumption, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is based solely on Sénecé’s book. The writers accepting Sénecé may well have asked: would Sénecé have dared describe the bleeding Cambert while his survivors still lived if Cambert had died peacefully or in his sleep? After all, it is one thing to speculate about a poisoning when a man has died suddenly (as in Mozart’s case) and quite another to make vivid reference to knife wounds when Cambert’s family presumably had seen his body and could tell the public whether he had been stabbed.
In view of the fact that Cambert’s allegedly violent end came in London, it is odd that the tradition of his murder appears to be an exclusively French product. My researches in London libraries and record offices have not uncovered any evidence either that Cambert was murdered or that there were any rumors to such effect current in London at the time of his death. Although exhaustive searches might prove more successful, I have not found any English record of his death or burial. At the time of his death, burial records were maintained by individual parishes, of which there were more than one hundred in London and its environs. None of the published or unbound parish burial registers for London or Middlesex County that I have reviewed contains any record of Cambert’s death or burial, nor do the will indexes list any will in his name. In fact, the only surviving official English record I have discovered with relation to the Cambert family in or after 1677 is a note in the State Domestic Papers of the grant of a passport for France to Cambert’s daughter, Marianne, on December 1, 1678.
Cambert’s death came too early in journalistic history for us to expect to find a story on his death (however lurid it might have been) in the London newspapers. The most important journal, the semi-official London Gazette, devoted most of its space to news of the wars of Louis XIV. Unfortunately, however, it contains no news of Cambert’s death. Accounts of murders were not considered appropriate daily fare for the Gazette’s readers. However, if Cambert had indeed been murdered by a valet who had committed the additional capital offense of stealing plates or linens from his master’s household, notice of the theft would have been permitted to appear among the Gazette’s frequent advertisements for runaway servants and stolen household goods.
The absence of newspaper coverage of crime in the late seventeenth century was compensated for by a welter of pamphlets devoted to murders and executions. These pamphlets are indexed by Donald Goddard Wing in his bibliography of seventeenth-century publications. The name of Cambert does not appear in the index. There is no reference to criminal proceedings arising out of Cambert’s death in the selective edition of the records of the Middlesex Sessions, and a search made at my request of the surviving indictments in the Court of King’s Bench during the Hilary Term of 1677 (January–March 1677) was also unproductive.
And the principal English diarists also make no reference to Cambert’s death. Robert Hooke, friend of Sir Christopher Wren and Samuel Pepys, was in London in early 1677 and made daily entries in his diary during the period. He was an aficionado of crime, if we can judge by an entry in 1677 referring to “H. Killigrews man stabbd next the Kings bedchamber” and by his speculation in a 1679 diary page on the motive for the murder of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey. However, Hooke’s diary does not mention Cambert’s death.
Therefore, in the scales against Bauderon de Sénecé’s vivid description of Cambert’s wounds we place the English silence. This silence is capable of conspiratorial interpretation, particularly if we accept the strand of French tradition that implies that Cambert was disposed of by English rivals. However, it is a strain on credulity to suppose that conspirators, however highly placed, could have imposed a total censorship not only on official records but also on gossip, one of the most highly developed arts in London. If we are to reconcile the possibility of Cambert’s murder with the apparent disregard of his death in London, we must hypothesize that by 1677 Cambert had fallen into obscurity, that his murderer was unknown and went unpunished, and that there was no inquiry into the circumstances of his death. In view of the difficulties presented in researching the records of this period, these possibilities cannot be excluded. However, unless evidence of murder should someday be discovered in England, it will remain difficult to accept not only the libels against Lully in the matter of Cambert’s death but also the more widely accepted hypothesis that he died a violent death by someone’s hand.
A century after Cambert’s death, Sir John Hawkins set down what can still serve as the official English view of the Cambert affair. According to Hawkins’s account, Cambert “died, with grief, as it is said, in 1677.” The source of his grief was the rejection of his work by the English public. Hawkins found no fault with the public’s judgment. Ironically, Hawkins paired the antagonists Lully and Cambert as coworkers in a style that could not fall pleasingly on English ears:
Perhaps one reason of the dislike of the English to Cambert’s Pomone, was that the opera was a kind of entertainment to which they had not been accustomed. Another might be that the levity of the French musical drama is but ill suited to the taste of such as have a relish for harmony. The operas of Lully consist of recitatives, short airs, chiefly gavots, minuets, and courants, set to words; and chorusses in counterpoint, with entrées, and splendid dances, and a great variety of scenery; and, in short, were such entertainment as none but a Frenchman could sit to hear, and it was never pretended that those of Cambert were at all better.
Hawkins’s chauvinistic rejection of French taste was matched by his outrage at the tradition, stemming from Le Cerf de La Viéville, that Cambert had been done away with by envious English musicians. Referring to a republication of Le Cerf’s innuendo in Bourdelot’s music history originally published in 1715, Hawkins comments wryly on the hypothesis that English musicians envied Cambert: “A modest reflexion in the mouth of a man whose country has produced fewer good musicians than any in Europe.”
It is appropriate that this tale of the musical animosities of Italy, France, and England should end on a note of nationalism.
Bibliographical Notes
The Gluck–Piccinni rivalry is discussed in Alfred Einstein, Gluck (New York: Collier, 1962), 162–69. For an analysis of the tradition of Mozart’s murder, see “Salieri and the ‘Murder’ of Mozart,” chapter 2 in this volume. An excellent description of the cultural centralism that fostered Lully’s control over French opera is presented in Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973), 170–247.
The two principal theoretical works contrasting the French and Italian styles as developed in the late seventeenth century were Abbé François Raguenet’s Parallèle des Italiens et des Français (Paris, 1702) and Jean-Louis Le Cerf de La Viéville’s Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, 3 parts (Brussels: F. Foppens, 1705–06). The best biographical works on Lully are those by Henry Prunières: Lully (Paris: Laurens, 1909) and the fictionalized La Vie Illustre et Libertine de Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris: Plon, 1929). Later biographies appear to be highly derivative from Prunières, for example R. H. F. Scott, Jean-Baptiste Lully: The Founder of French Opera (London: Peter Owen, 1973); Eugène Borrel, Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris: La Colombe, 1949). For appraisals of Cambert’s contributions to French opera, see Arthur Pougin, Les Vrais Créateurs de l’Opéra Français: Perrin et Cambert (Paris: Charavay, 1881); Charles Nuitter et Ernest Thoinan, Les Origines de l’Opéra Français (Paris: Plon, 1886). References to Cambert’s career in London are drawn from André Tessier, “Robert Cambert à Londres,” La Revue Musicale, Dec. 1927, 101, 110–11, 118; W. H. Grattan Flood, “Quelques précisions nouvelles sur Cambert et Grabu à Londres,” La Revue Musicale, Aug. 1928, 351.
Musicologist Philippe Beaussant, in Lully ou Le musicien du Soleil (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), provides a balanced assessment of Cambert’s talent and tribulations: “What shall we say about Cambert? Without making him, as some have believed themselves able to do, the great genius shamefully evicted by Lully, the ‘true founder’ of French opera, despoiled of his work, let us say that he deserved better than the misfortune that never ceased to pursue him and his bad luck in having Perrin as a librettist” (453).
The posthumous tribute to Lully referred to is Le triomphe de Lully aux Champs-Elysées (1687), reprinted in a special Lully issue of La Revue Musicale, Jan. 1925, 90. I have translated passages from the first edition of Antoine Bauderon De Sénecé, Lettre de Clément Marot à Monsieur de . . . touchant à ce qui s’est passé, à l’arrivée de Jean Baptiste de Lulli, aux Champs Elysées (Cologne, 1688), 32–33, 51–53. For Le Cerf’s theory of Cambert’s death, see his Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française, part 2:177. The brothers Parfaict are quoted in Pougin, Les Vrais Créateurs, 250n1. See also Romain Rolland, Les Origines du Théâtre Lyrique Moderne—Histoire de l’Opéra en Europe avant Lully et Scarlatti (Paris, 1931), 259n3. An example of the “heartbreak” theory of Cambert’s death is found in Castil-Blaze (François Henri Joseph Blaze), Molière Musicien (Paris: Castil-Blaze, 1852), 2:126.
In the course of my research, I reviewed all of the parish records published by the Harleian Society as well as the unbound parish records for London and Middlesex County in the possession of the Society for Genealogists in London. I also consulted will records at the Guildhall Library, the County Hall, and the Middle-sex Record Office. The reference to Marianne Cambert’s passport is in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Mar. 1, 1678 to December 31, 1678 (London, 1913), 614. The record reflects the grant of a passport to “Marie du Moulier and Marianne Cambert.” It is possible that the first name is a misprint of the maiden name of Cambert’s widow, Marie de Moustier.
I am indebted to records agent Stephen Goslin for the search of the King’s Bench Records.
The comments of Sir John Hawkins are drawn from his General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London: T. Payne, 1776), 4:239n. For Bourdelot’s republication of Le Cerf’s innuendo, see Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effets, depuis son origine, jusqu’à présent, begun by Abbé Pierre Bourdelot, continued by Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot, and completed and published by Jacques Bonnet (Amsterdam, 1725), 3:163–64.
Charles Burney also cites a French music history source for the statement that “Cambert, who died in London in 1677, broke his heart on account of the bad success of his operas in England.” Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London, 1789), 4:188.