ABSTRACT
Louis XIV's (1643–1715) court spectacles transmitted and produced important cultural identifications for their primarily aristocratic audiences. Through the interaction of music, dance, costume, and text, court audiences (and later, a paying public) witnessed a synthetic depiction of French aristocratic identity achieved through juxtaposition of French and Italian or Spanish music, costume, and dance.1 Specific dance types, such as the sarabande and the chaconne, with their Spanish origins, provided French composers with immediate access to a “foreign” musical language.2 When situated within a theatrical spectacle, complete with costumes, castanets, guitars, and a scenario—however brief—the music for these dances played a central role in the characterization of the onstage personnages as colorful non-French characters. Dance music held a central role in the depiction of character on the seventeenth-century stage and participated in the construction of a web of signification that was especially powerful in the case of Jean-Baptiste Lully's theatrical chaconne.
