QUINAULT, Philippe (1635-1688), a dramatist of merit, and the only European writer who has made the opera libretto a work of literature (so much so that the popularity of opera may be said to be not a little due to him), was born at Paris on June 3, 1635. He was educated by the liberality of Tristan, the author of Marianne. His first play was produced at the Hôtel de Bourgogne in 1653 when Quinault was only eighteen. It is said that it was the occasion of an important innovation in dramatic history. Tristan had offered it and it had been accepted as his own at the price of a hundred crowns, which, though little enough, was twice the regular price of a few years before. When Tristan told the actors that it was the work of a novice they wished to throw up their bargain and only held to it on the terms of a ninth part of the receipts. The piece succeeded and Quinault followed it up, but he also read for the bar; and in 1660, when he married a widow with money, he bought himself a place in the Cour des Comptes. Then he tried tragedies {Agrippa, <fcc.) with more success than desert. He received one of the literary pensions then recently established, and was elected to the Academy in 1670....
Up to this time he had written some sixteen or seventeen comedies, tragedies, and tragi-comedies, of which the tragedies were mostly of very small value and the tragicomedies not of much more. But his comedies—especially his first piece Les Rivales, L’Amant Indiscret (1654) (which has some likeness to Molière’s Étourdi, and was with it used to make up Newcastle’s and Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-all), Le Fantôme Amoureux (1659), and La Mère Coquette (1665), perhaps the best—are much better. None of these styles, however, made Quinault worthy of a place here. In 1671 he contributed to the singular miscellany of Psyche, in which Corneille and Molière also had a hand, and which was set to the music of Lulli. Here he showed a remarkable faculty for lyrical drama, and from this time till just before his death he confined himself to composing libretti for Lulli’s work. This was not only very profitable (for he is said to have received four thousand livres for each, which was much more than was usually paid even for tragedy), but it established Quinault’s reputation as the master of a new style,—so much so that even Boileau, who had previously attacked and satirized his dramatic work, was converted, less to the opera, which he did not like, than to Quinault’s remarkably ingenious and artist-like work in it. His libretti are among the very few which are readable without the music, and which are yet carefully adapted to it. They certainly do not contain very exalted poetry or very perfect drama.
But they are quite free from the ludicrous doggerel which (not merely in English) has made the name libretto a byword, and at the same time they have quite enough dramatic merit to carry the reader, much more the spectator, along with them. It is not an exaggeration to say that Quinault, coming at the exact time when opera became fashionable out of Italy, had very much to do with establishing it as a permanent European genre. His first piece after Psyche was a kind of classical masque, The Feast of Love and Bacchus (1672). Then came Cadmus (1674), then in the same year and the three following Alceste, Thésée, Atys (one of his best-liked pieces), and Isis. All these, it may be observed, were classical in subject, and so was Proserpine (1680), which was superior to any of them. The Triumph of Love (1681) is a mere ballet, but in Persée and Phaeton Quinault returned to the classical opera. Then he finally deserted it for romantic subjects, in which he was even more successful. Amadis (1684), Roland (1685), and Armide (1686) are his masterpieces, the last being the most famous and the best of all. It should perhaps be observed that the very artificiality of the French lyric of the later 17th century and its resemblance to alexandrines cut into lengths were aids to Quinault in arranging lyrical dialogue. Lulli died in 1687, and Quinault, his occupation gone (for the two had now worked together for more than fifteen years, and it would probably have been difficult to find another composer equally well suited to his librettist) became devout, began a poem called the “Destruction of Heresy,” and died on November 26, 1688. The best edition of his works is that of 1739 (Paris, 5 vols.).
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