Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy
Direction musicale : Jean-Luc Impe
FR
← Back to productions

Atys travesti

A parody of the Quinault and Lully tragédie lyrique, Saint-Germain Fair, 1736

Atys travesti, a parody of the tragédie lyrique "Atys" by Quinault and Lully, given at the Saint-Germain Fair in 1736.

The score was reconstructed by Jean-Luc Impe thanks to the computerised database developed under his direction by the Centre d'Étude de Musique Populaire Baroque.

A few words on the story… the true one and the other!

Atys, the opera by Quinault and Lully, was first given on 10 January 1676 and revived on very many occasions. On 23 December 1725, this tragédie lyrique was performed in Paris and awakened the parodic verve of the Italian players (Arlequin Atys, by Ponteau), of the Opéra-Comique (Arlequin Atys, by Piron) and of the marionettes (La Grand-Mère amoureuse, by Fuzelier and d'Orneval).

Although custom had it that a tragédie lyrique be parodied on the fairground stages immediately after its creation or revival at the Royal Academy of Music, in the specific case of Carolet's Atys travesti it seemed to us, for many years, that an error had slipped into the opening page of the manuscript, for, to our knowledge, no revival of Lully's opera was scheduled in 1736. Yet it does indeed appear, according to the biography devoted by Émile Dacier to the dancer Marie Sallé, that she took part in the choreography of the fourth act of a revival of the original work, in 1736 precisely.

In the first part of the libretto, here is what Quinault's verses tell us: Atys urges the Phrygians to prepare for the coming of the goddess Cybele. Sangaride, for her part, tells us that the good goddess is coming to grace with her presence the union she is to contract with Célénus, king of Phrygia. But Sangaride loves Atys and, although he has denied loving anyone, he too ends up confessing his love for the young woman.

The second act presents us with characters stirred by contrary feelings. Célénus and Atys each wish to be raised by Cybele to the rank of High Sacrificer of her temple, while at the same time ardently desiring to keep the freedom to love Sangaride.

Cybele, secretly in love with young Atys, chooses him for the honorific office. In the following act, she will send him Dreams to make known her love, for a goddess cannot decently stoop to displaying her feelings herself. Alas! Sangaride upsets the dreams of the good mother of the gods by telling her that she does not love Célénus, the husband intended for her. Atys seconds her plea with such passion that the goddess, suspecting the amorous complicity between the two young people, sheds a tear… one of those tears so sad in the reality of a wounded heart, but so beautiful at the Opera. After a misunderstanding between the two lovers, Atys tries to interrupt the wedding festivities between his rival Célénus and Sangaride.

The end of the opera turns tragic. Cybele and Célénus, understanding the twofold betrayal of Atys and Sangaride, take the cruellest revenge. Atys, driven mad by a device of the goddess, kills his beloved, whom in his delirium he takes for a monster. Coming to his senses and realising his mistake, he seeks to end his life. Cybele prevents him by transforming him into a pine tree.

The parody follows the dramatic action of the tragédie lyrique almost scene by scene. The main protagonists are all there, even if they undergo a few merry disguises! The gods and the nymphs of the streams give way to peasants and boatmen from the outskirts of Paris.

What characterises the parody of Atys lies chiefly in the extraordinary felicity with which its author stigmatised the constituent elements, textual or musical, of the original narrative. To do so, he managed to establish a subversive relationship between the two structures! To each of the most significant scenes of Quinault and Lully's opera there corresponds a burlesque counterpoint.

While most parodies of this tragédie lyrique presented themselves as a mere burlesque commentary on the original work, Carolet's Atys travesti takes another path and transposes the characters and situations into a peasant world. This adaptation has as its main effect the encouragement of ribald allusions, which a certain view of gardening may readily suggest. We do not think we have a particularly dirty mind in saying this, and if the reader still believes in the innocence of fairground theatre, reading this Atys travesti will, we are sure, finally disabuse him.

Apart from this "transposition", Carolet follows Quinault's libretto step by step. One of the chief advantages one might recognise in this work lies, beyond doubt, in its more than successful fit with the world of the marionette. The characters, unlike those of La Grand-Mère amoureuse, are here proper to the theatre of Polichinelle, both lexically and in their habits of speech and gesture.

After the horrible carnage that punctuates the last act of Atys, the murderous madness brought on by the hero's passing dementia and caused by the jealousy of the mother of the gods, Cybele to name her, the goddess has a moment of remorse when Atys, in his turn, falls ill:

Ah, my dear, forgive me; let your last sigh at least be for Cybele. I consent. Here, take my last hiccup.

Without wishing to endorse Polichinelle's "flatulent" habit, without claiming that this is a model of literature, one cannot but note the theatrical force of Carolet's text, which uses the syntax of the oldest rascals of the Fair, whereas the more literary text (all proportions kept) of Lesage, Fuzelier and d'Orneval was far less suited to the wooden players.

One thing struck us! If theatrical works answer one another, as is customary between a model and its parody, two parodies several years apart may also call to each other. In Atys travesti, the hero is, in the end, turned into a cabbage, a symbol not only of his role as "Grand Gardener" but also the official sign of fashionable taverns. If the reader will kindly recall, the first marionette parody of the Florentine's opera that we encountered, in 1726, La Grand-Mère amoureuse, transformed the main protagonist into a capon (that is, a castrated cockerel, a "veiled" reminder of the castration of young Atys in mythology), which allows Carolet to recall this fact:

He is unwell, and I am the cause of all this uproar. Dog of love! My dear Polichinelle!

Air: Des fraises

Ne descends point au tombeau
Et vois couler mes larmes.
En trépassant qu'il est beau !
Mon poulet, veux-tu de l'eau
Des carmes (ter)

This little kindness will not stop the goddess from transforming Atys-Polichinelle, no longer into a denizen of the farmyard, but into a guest of the vegetable garden.

Notes: the dancer Marie Sallé danced on 16 February 1736 in Atys, Act IV, the retinue of the river Sangar, solo entrance (Émile Dacier, Une danseuse à l'Opéra sous Louis XV, Mlle Sallé, 1909, reprint Minkoff, Geneva, 1972, p. 330). "Eau des carmes" is an elixir made from lemon balm.

The Menus-Plaisirs du Roy production in 2011

Actors and singers:

Musicians:

A few words on the performers

Through their studies and the research carried out jointly with Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy and various centres of baroque theatre, the puppeteers of the Golem theatre are today specialised in the approach to the early repertoire for wooden players, and endeavour to reconstruct as faithfully as possible the staging and the handling of the rod-and-string marionettes of the 18th century. Particular work has been done on the gestures and the various symbolic postures of the period, in use on the stages of the theatres and of the Opera, or found in the painting and sculpture of the first half of the Age of Enlightenment. The musicians of the company Les Menus-Plaisirs du Roy are all specialists in the performance of baroque music and belong to the greatest early-music ensembles of today: Les Arts Florissants, La Chapelle Royale, Il Cortegiano, Le Concert Spirituel, La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy…

The musical part of the marionette pieces is very important… indeed paramount, since it takes up, quantitatively, more than three quarters of the time. The lines of the various pieces are either spoken, to a very small extent, or sung, more widely, by the puppeteers or by professional singers.

One of the all-too-rare iconographic documents depicting a fairground marionette theatre in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment shows the presence of an actor serving as a relay between the audience and the stage, as well as that of two musicians in front of the scenic opening of the castelet. On Polichinelle's trestles our hunchbacked master frolics merrily with his new accomplice, Dame Gigogne. It is this scenic device that the Menus-Plaisirs du Roy company had rebuilt, from plans drawn up by the Golem and with the help of the Centre de la Marionnette, on the occasion of the revival of Atys.

For the record, the Menus-Plaisirs du Roy production in 1994-1995

Actors and singers:

Musicians: