French Ballet Music of the 17th and 18th Centuries by Rameau, Grétry and Lully

In our age of historical performance practice, with its emphasis on period instruments, original sources, and «composer’s intentions,» we tend to forget that the nineteenth century - the Age of Historicism - took an equally strong interest in the music of the past. Wagner produced modern performance versions not only of Gluck (Iphigénie en Aulide, 1846-7) but of Palestrina’s Stabat mater (1848); Berlioz curiously transmuted a harpsichord piece from François Couperin’s 18e Ordre for three women’s voices and piano; and the great Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein was fond of opening his recitals with modern renditions of virginal music by John Bull. None of these performances would, of course, have passed the severe muster of today’s early music buffs: like the nineteenth-century’s art restorers and historicizing architects, musicians were satisfied to translate the spirit of the past - as they saw and felt it - into the language of the present. And none was more adept at this than the Austrian conductor Felix Mottl.

Felix Mottl (1856 1911) was one of the orchestral masters of the late nineteenth century. He was a precocious protégé of Wagner, assisting him at the first complete performance of the Ring at Bayreuth at the age of twenty (1876) and producing definitive piano vocal scores of Wagner's major works for Edition Peters (they are still in print today). He also conducted the first complete performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens (1890) and championed the operas of Donizetti, Bellini, Cornelius, and Glinka. But more to the point, he was a superb orchestrator, in which capacity he even earned the praise of Richard Strauss. Mottl produced modern orchestral versions of Schubert's still born operas Die Zauberharfe and Fierrabras, the great F-minor Fantasy for piano duet, and several of his lieder, not to mention Wagner's Wesendonck-Lieder and E-major Symphony. But early music bulked equally large in his catalogue of arrangements: he produced, among other things, modern orchestrations of fourteen Bach cantatas and four of the Brandenburg Concertos, a performance version of Gluck's Alceste (1900), and the present group of ballet suites from the French theatrical tradition.

As Wagner was to learn to his chagrin when he staged Tannhäuser in Paris (1860), French opera was then and always had been inseparable from the dance. Even the unbending Verdi yielded to this French goût when he came to write operas for the Paris stage or in the Parisian manner. It therefore comes as no surprise that Mottl was able to find, in the stage works of Lully, Rameau, and Grétry, more than enough ballet music to fashion three modern orchestral suites in homage to these venerable masters. All three suites originated around the turn of the century and were issued in print. The present volume marks their first appearance in miniature score.