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| Persée composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully |
The opera Persée by Jean-Baptiste Lully – a five-act tragédie lyrique – was originally performed for Louis XIV in 1682. Pierre Corneille had written a drama in 1661 called Andromède, adapting Ovid's ancient story of the rescue of the princess Andromeda from a sea monster by the semi-divine hero Perseus. Twenty years later Philippe Quinault reworked Corneille's play as a libretto and Lully set it to music. They retitled it Persée, adding new characters and including the back-story in which Perseus beheads Medusa. The plot of the opera in fact requires that Perseus face three separate deadly battles (against Medusa, against the sea monster, and against a band of murderers led by an unsuccessful rival for the hand of Andromeda).
The Baroque operas of Handel are basically structured as a succession of solos along a string of half-sung dialogues, only rarely varied with engaged duets or other vocal combinations. Lully's Baroque operas, written earlier and under different cultural conditions, are rich in splendid ensemble singing (as above, where the mother of Andromeda, Queen Cassiopeia (in gold) laments the frustrated love that torments her sister Mérope (in red). Both the court and the public of 1682 delighted in Persée. It continued among the most popular operas of the next century. In 1770 the work was freshly mounted for the opening of the new-built theater at Versailles known as the Opéra Royal. Louis XV had ordered this lavish construction to celebrate the marriage of the Dauphin to the Austrian princess Marie-Antoinette.
After the French Revolution, Lully's work for the stage fell entirely out of favor. For a time, the ascendant Republican spirit felt obliged to reject Royalist art (characterized by lofty characters, artificial rhetoric, formal deportment, and expensive trappings). No performances of Persée are recorded anywhere during the 19th or the 20th centuries. Yet in quite recent years the opera has re-entered the world of performance. In 2014 a production even returned to the Opéra Royal at Versailles.
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| Opéra Royal, Versailles |
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| Opéra Royal, Versailles |
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| Opéra Royal, Versailles |
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| Caravaggio Head of Medusa 1597 oil on canvas, mounted on wood Uffizi Gallery |
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| Benvenuto Cellini Head of Medusa bronze ca. 1545-50 Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Sebastiano Ricci Perseus confronting Phineas with the Head of Medusa ca. 1705-10 oil on canvas Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Jean-Marc Nattier Perseus under the protection of Minerva turns Phineas to Stone with the Head of Medusa 18th century oil on canvas Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours |
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| Domenico Fetti Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster ca. 1620-22 oil on canvas Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna formerly owned by Charles I of England |
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| Anton Raphael Mengs Perseus and Andromeda 1778 oil on canvas Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg |
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| Giorgio Vasari Perseus and Andromeda ca. 1572 oil on slate Palazzo Vecchio, Florence |
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| Hendrik Goltzius Perseus and Andromeda 1597 engraving Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Claude Lorrain Perseus and the origin of Coral ca. 1671 wash drawing Metropolitan Museum of Art |
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| Perseus and Andromeda heeding the advice of Mercury (Toronto, 2004) |