Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

LULLY. FALSY SENSY SECURITY

S

adly, nowadays, not much Lully is ever really played or heard. He is, to be fair, best remembered these days for the manner of his end which, despite being well chronicled, deserves to be recounted. It's said he was in the middle of a performance of his?? Deum, a piece which, irony of ironies, he had written to mark his beloved King's recovery from some illness or other. No doubt one of those particularly unpleasant seventeenth-century ones. Er, probably involving pox. Whatever.

Anyway, back then, when you conducted an orchestra, you didn't just wave a baton in front of them. Oh no, back then, they made you earn your money. You had a big stick, roughly the size of a broom handle, sometimes with bells on, sometimes not, and what you did was you held this stick vertically and banged it on the floor, every first beat of the bar, or howsoever took your fancy. In this tragic performance of the?? Deutn, though, there was Lully, banging the floor with gay abandon, when he suddenly whacked himself in the foot -1 don't know, maybe some particularly attractive 'bit-of-wig'-" walked past. Whatever happened, a few days later an abscess is said to have developed, whereupon he contracted gangrene and died some time after. Dead at the age of fifty-five, and forever consigned, alongside Alkan/ '* to that section of music books entitled 'Composers who met sticky ends' Poor sod.