The French composer who took his own life

You can die if you try to swallow a pocket Bible. Or when you avoid urinating out of etiquette. It is also not necessarily advisable to hug the moon’s reflection in a river while drunk. The idea that a piece of whale bone inserted into the urethra can clear a blockage is also incorrect.

Anal sex with a horse is wrong on many levels. Be warned: the garden snail you suffocated for a test of courage can still get its revenge eight years later. And know that the ridiculous prices of goods in a five-year-old newspaper made an Australian dog trainer laugh so hard he died in 1920. Inflation can cost lives. Also “A Fish Called Wanda” (1988). At least that of Ole Bentzen, who was so amused by the fries scene that he screamed himself into the afterlife with his empty heart.

Welcome to another episode in the series RIP LOL – Deaths that are not so valuable, but all the more senseless.

Today with…

….Jean Baptiste Lully!

A man with a long wig, you guessed it, he’s from the 17th century. And the court association of the French Sun King, who called this long curly foreign hair the state wig. As such, it gave the wearer dignity, especially when syphilis had already taken hold of natural dignitaries. Thanks to the French disease, many wore their hair “properly shaved,” all without the use of a razor, a modern-day mockery.

We don’t know what exactly happened under Jean-Baptiste Lully’s second haircut. But we don’t have to worry about this certainly very sweaty area, because it wasn’t a spiral-shaped, pale bacteria that ripped him from his 54-year life, but something long, straight and heavy.

But what happened before? What does this vision tell us, in which God so generously distributed the meat? What were Lully’s lips saying when they still lay like two haughty swollen sausages over his big nose? And why are they pressed together almost in annoyance, why is there so much smugness around his mouth? This is made a hundredfold worse by the look that shoots out of these portholes and tries to kill the person on the other side if they don’t immediately recognize their obvious genius. Should he first beat his sheet music – these undeniable testaments to his creative greatness – on his stupid skull?

Jean-Baptiste Lully was the founder of the French national opera. And not just any composer, but Louis XIV’s resident composer, the ‘surintendant de la musique du Roy’, and later even the royal secretary. At least until he was gone, as he was clearly having fun with one of the King’s pages. It was necessary to conceal these strange homosexual tendencies and not to indulge them freely to the shame of the monarch, so that the rumor, only timidly whispered from the wing of the courtiers, took shape in the golden corridors of the castle. It becomes a mocking song that swells from a hundred singing mouths and finally bursts deafeningly against the walls of the Grande Galerie and is then thrown from the 350 mirror surfaces back into the center of the room, where it engulfs the sun. King of his throne.

«Jean-Baptiste is bien afligé
Jean-Baptiste is very sad
This is your Brunet fustigé.
about his brunette’s chastisement [besagter Page]
I am jealous of my brother,
He is jealous of his brother.
Eh bien, Qui fouette son derriere,
Well, who’s going to hit him in the ass?
Vous m’entendez bien.
You heard me right.”

The page Brunet was sent to do penance to Saint-Lazare, the prison on the road from Paris to Saint-Denis, where people who had embarrassed their families were kept. That day in January 1685 had also become night for Lully. The sun turned away. Louis XIV no longer received him. He no longer even had the desire to hear his freshly composed operas.

At that moment, Jean-Baptiste Lully’s face must have collapsed. The smugness was buried under all the meat she had put into it so far. No more poisoned arrows shot from his gaze; his eyes had become but supplications, round and pleading, looking out of the ruined flesh.

He was summoned from Florence to the French court as a young 13-year-old Giovanni Battista, a miller’s son who had lost his sister and brother before he was seven years old. He learned to play the guitar from a Franciscan friar and during Carnival attracted the attention of the French ambassador, who was looking for a suitable Italian for the king’s niece with whom she could perform “Conversazione”. This boy was a gem, a comic, musical and dancing prodigy.

Giovanni Battista became the eight-year-old king’s playmate, making him laugh, spin him around and enter the palace’s royal stage next to him.

Every rough diamond corner of his gift was now polished and brought to perfection at court. Giovanni Battista Lulli became Jean-Baptiste Lully, at the age of 29 he became a French citizen and at the age of 49 he became a French nobleman.

And then it happened. The man who gave Baroque music its French character, who created the ballet tragedy ‘Psiché’ together with Molière and who also wrote the music for fifty plays, fell from grace.

From the top he fell onto the hard boards of an empty stage. ‘Lights on!’, ‘Lights on!’ he screamed desperately inside him. How much his songs missed the ear, his dance the eyes of his friend the king.

But Louis XIV soon had other concerns. They had affected neither his ear nor his eyes, but rather his buttocks. To the horror of his personal physicians, he had been defecating blood for some time, and even the ‘Bouillon purgatif’ did not help, the soup of snake powder, incense and horse manure that stimulated his sluggish intestines to empty themselves. up to 18 times a day.

What began to grow on his anus became more and more threatening, so that the entire court feared for the life of his sun. But then the Sorbonn surgeon Charles-Francois Félix de Tassy rushed to him. Using his scalpel, a strangely curved knife that he invented especially for ‘la grande opération’ – the suitability of which he first tested on 75 Parisian wanderers – he separated the ulcer from its holder.

Louis XIV recovered. And Lully, hoping that such a gifted life would certainly make the monarchs forgiving, immediately began to adapt his ‘Te Deum’ (1678) to that divine resurrection, so that he could participate in the celebrations, and they also in the could make a general contribution. make him alone worthy of the immortal king.

“Te Deum” was Louis’ favorite piece. A ‘grand motet’, a vocal work with biblical texts and sacred music, for which Lully fearlessly brought trumpets and drums from the battlefield to the church to refine. The French Baroque could do that, Jean-Baptiste Lully could do that. The Église des Feuillants in Paris, where he gave his jubilee concert on January 8, 1687 on the occasion of the king’s recovery, was said to vibrate under the drumbeats of his genius.

And she does. Lully himself conducts 150 musicians with his shoulder-high, richly decorated baton, with which he angrily stamps the beat on the ground. He hits the ground and almost hits him. Because the sun had not come. Louis XIV did not want to listen to his masterpiece. All effort for nothing! All his artfully woven praise now echoed senselessly in the walls of St. Bernard.

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s face became as hard as stone. Much of the flesh within was still, none of his wounded blows causing it to tremble, there was no wobble or wave that could have betrayed a hint of movement, a little bit of residual softness.

He was pure rage. And in that hopeless state he rammed his baton into the tip of his foot.

The wound was hardly worth mentioning at first, a bluish bump on the little toe, but it soon became infected, swollen, purulent and foul-smelling, covering the entire foot and soon the leg as well. His doctor advised him to have it amputated, but another healing artist was introduced to Lully, and his prospects seemed much more favorable to the composer: the leg could remain where it was, and he would heal it that way.

He didn’t. Jean-Baptiste Tully died on March 22, 1687 from his eaten leg.