Molière’s comedy-ballets and the tragedy-ballet Psyché, many written in haste, form a heterogenous whole, but we must not forget the habitual presence of music in theatre of the time. Molière, himself an amateur musician, gave himself a number of roles involving singing, and music – that attribute of a cultivated, city-based society – is discussed in his plays, often ironically. Comedy-ballet – inspired musically by the court ballet – was a princely spectacle performed in the royal residences, and Molière benefitted from exceptional financial, technical and musical resources. He may have been given a free choice regarding their subjects, but he relied heavily on instrumentalists and dancers from the royal institutions, many of whom had participated in the great ballets of previous years, and his comedy-ballets gained from their qualities. Comedy-ballet was, therefore, devised in view of the effects desired and the means at his disposal. Most were organised around scenes or characters taken by Molière and Lully from a topical repertoire and composed according to a variety of writing conventions. Certain scenes were suggested to Molière by Lully, and some comedy-ballets were entirely devised around musical scenes in the same way as was the case for ballets.

A little known occasional work by Telemann, the Pastorelle en musique of circa 1714, offers evidence that a modern, enlightened understanding of freedom was manifest in the composer’s thinking during his early Frankfurt period (1712–16). It is this understanding that Jean Starobinski examined in his influential book The Invention of Liberty, 1700–1789. Telemann himself described his departure from the Eisenach court for the free imperial city of Frankfurt as a move toward freedom; later, he criticized his Frankfurt wedding serenatas for having gone too far in this direction. Compositional strategies in the Pastorelle en musique document a novel, free, and extraordinarily diverse mingling of literary and musical models together with formal, stylistic, and generic traditions of the most varied provenance – a tendency toward freer composition that also surfaces in the pastorale’s details, such as the setting of the words “freedom shall be the watchword.”

The Epilogue and Conclusion take as their starting point the developments in music and liturgy that occurred in the early years of Louis XIV’s reign – the earliest grands motets, the changes to the liturgical practices at the chapelle royale in the early 1660s, and Pierre Perrins’s pivotal publication, Cantica pro Capella Regis of 1665. Reflecting much broader cultural and social changes, the new musical and liturgical practices at court – now centered around music as an aesthetic construct – throw into sharp relief the practices of the earlier period (the reign of Louis XIII). While the grand motet was part of narrowly directed staging of power for a small and elite audience, Louis XIII was embedded in a universal musical/liturgical discourse, in which almost the whole population of France participated and therefore legitimated the king’s power.