A NEW TYPE OF BALLET
‘AN IMMEDIATE SUCCESS’
COLLIN DE BLAMONT, François.
Les festes grecques et romaines, ballet en musique … représenté pour la première fois, par l’Academie Royale de Musique, le mardy treiziéme juillet 1723.
Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard, 1723.
[bound with:]
[—.] La feste de Diane, nouvelle entrée, ajoutée aux festes grecques et romaines, en fevrier 1734. [Paris, Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard, 1734.]Two works in one vol., oblong 4to, Festes grecques et romaines: pp. [8], lxxxvii, [1], 231, [1 (privilege)], Feste de Diane: pp. 107, [1]; letterpress music throughout, woodcut headpieces (one by Pierre II Le Sueur), woodcut initials, each work signed in ink at the end (pp. 231 and 107 respectively) by both the composer (‘Collin de blamont’) and the publisher (‘Ballard’); small dampstain to lower margins of a few leaves, insignificant nibbling to upper margins of a few leaves at end, but excellent, fresh copies; bound together in contemporary French mottled calf, spine richly gilt in compartments with gilt brown morocco lettering-piece (chipped), edges speckled red, marbled endpapers, green ribbon place-marker; light wear to extremities; eighteenth-century engraved armorial bookplate of Charles de Brosses (signed A. Aveline) to front pastedown.
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Les festes grecques et romaines, ballet en musique … représenté pour la première fois, par l’Academie Royale de Musique, le mardy treiziéme juillet 1723.
First edition of the first ‘Ballet-héroïque’, together with the first edition of a fourth ‘entrée’, La feste de Diane, which was added to it for a 1734 revival, both signed by the composer and the publisher with a manuscript correction by the latter.
François Collin (or Colin) de Blamont (1690–1760) was born and died at Versailles, spending most of his career in the employ of the royal family, organizing and composing music for private concerts at Versailles and Marly, some for Louis XV and others for Queen Marie. ‘Most of his music was composed for the stage. Pièces d’occasion celebrated royal births and marriages. More important, Collin and [Louis] Fuzelier created the Ballet-héroïque with their Fêtes grecques et romaines (1723) which they described as a ballet “d’une espèce toute nouvelle”. The work was an immediate success and was revived up to 1770’ (Grove online). The prologue to Les festes grecques et romaines features Apollo and the three Muses Clio (Muse of history), Erato (lyric and erotic poetry), and Terpsichore (dance). ‘Concerning the revival of 1733 the Mercure reported: “never has a revival at the Opéra been more brilliant or applauded”. Neither the later ballets-héroïques nor the pastorale-héroïque, Diane et Endymion (1731), rivalled the success of the earlier work’ (ibid.).
Provenance: the French polymath and politician Charles de Brosses (1709–1777), comte de Tournay, baron de Montfalcon, seigneur de Vezins et de Prevessin, with his bookplate (engraved by Antoine Aveline).
I. BUC p. 111; RISM C 3324 (recording BL and Harding collection only in the UK, and Berkeley, Library of Congress, and Yale only in the US). See Benoît Dratwicki, Catalogue de l’œuvre de François Colin de Blamont, 1690–1760, Centre de musique baroque de Versailles, 2007, online. II. RISM C 3325 (recording no copies in the UK or the US and only two outside France). Not in BUC.
