Today is the 350th birthday of André Cardinal Destouches. My, but how time flies!

Destouches’ best-known music is “Les Élémens” (“The Elements”) of 1721. The complete opéra-ballet, consisting of a prologue and four “entrées,” was written in collaboration with Michel Richard Delalande. In the grand tradition of footloose French kings, an 11 year-old Louis XV danced in the divertissements.

According to the composer, “At its first appearance this ballet was by no means the success we hoped for. It was found to be long; it seemed to be too serious; it was danced by noble youths whose talents were not up to the highest standards. Which caused very unpleasant boredom that was most humiliating for the authors.”

It was revived at the Paris Opera four years later to increasing success, and remained in the repertoire for half a century.

In 1697, Destouches’ opera “Issé” had been a big hit with dancing monarch Louis XIV, who claimed to enjoy Destouches’ music as much as that of Jean-Baptiste Lully. (Lully, also a dancer, and the most powerful musician in France, died of a gangrenous foot wound ten years earlier.)

In 1713, Louis appointed Destouches inspector general of the Académie Royale de Musique, at a stipend of 4000 livres a year. In 1725, Louis XV made him director of the Académie, as well as superintendent of La Musique de la Chambre du Roi. With the death of his colleague, Delalande, in 1726, Destouches was installed as Surintendant de la Musique du Roi – a post once held by Lully himself.

Happy semiseptcentennial, André Cardinal Destouches!

From “Les Élémens”

From “Issé”

And speaking of “entrées,” Delalande’s “Symphonies for the King’s Supper”