Georgia J. Cowart . The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. xxiii, 299. $55.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Musicologist Georgia J. Cowart's book is a masterful history of the performing arts in France during the reign of Louis XIV. Anchored in a series of close readings of ballets performed at the king's court, this compelling study explores the thematic links between music and theater at Versailles as well as at the emerging public theaters in Paris. Cowart is particularly interested in revealing the extent to which artists and musicians constrained by royal patronage were nevertheless able to articulate an anti‐militarist utopian vision in their works. In contrast to the triumph of war found in court ballets, artists from Jean‐Baptiste Poquelin Molière and Jean‐Baptiste Lully to André Campra and even Antoine Watteau instead celebrated the triumph of love and pleasure in their creations. For historians interested in why Louis XIV performed in court ballets and why he turned away from the arts after the 1670s, Cowart's volume has much to offer. This exquisitely written analysis of libretti, choreography, and music during the last decades of the seventeenth century evokes a world of aristocratic gallantry and shows the degree to which genres that modern viewers might consider distinct—opera, ballet, tragedy, and comedy—were still fluid during the grand siècle. Authors and musicians borrowed liberally from one another and over time translated what had been the exclusive genre of the court ballet for the somewhat more open and socially inclusive audiences of the Parisian theaters.. Cowart explores how the youthful Louis XIV's active participation in burlesque ballets that celebrated the theme of noble leisure confirmed his place in the traditional aristocratic hierarchy and confirmed its values. By the late 1660s, however, when his penchant for war led him to engage in a series of long and increasingly costly military conflicts, court ballets shifted to more militaristic music and a more overtly propagandist portrayal of Louis XIV as glorious victor. Yet, as Louis grew older and his marriage to the devout Madame de Maintenon led him away from frivolous entertainments, artists found some leeway to return to the depiction of love and pleasure on the stage. During the 1690s, plays that borrowed heavily from earlier court performances reversed the hierarchy of militarism over love. In the 1696 La naissance de Vénus, Jupiter (representing Louis) is presented as a tyrant whose abuse of power drives Venus to retreat to a pastoral island where peace among the nations reigns under her loving example. Given that these plays were performed at a time when Louis's armies were facing the rest of Europe in what was commonly perceived to be a fruitless military venture, Cowart's claim that these pastoral plays had a wider political resonance is easy to accept. Artists drawn to the burgeoning libertine culture of Paris and to the patronage circle around the Dauphin expressed their ambivalence with war by portraying on the stage a world of pastoral beauty and harmony. On the stage at least, pleasure triumphed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".