ABSTRACT
Music, not the verbal arts, offered a perfect artistic medium for a court that ruled so many nations and had perforce to speak so many tongues. Completely cosmopolitan in its appeal and politically neutral in its artistic abstractions, music provided a common meeting ground of taste. It also served to universalize the appeal of the theatrical productions of a baroque court that, like the court of France, ritualized the grandeur of monarchy in sumptuous dramatic allegories.1
