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A moment with Louis: courtly temporality in opera prologues during the Dutch War

Alison Calhoun

Published 2020 in Seventeenth century

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT Contemporaries like the Duke of Saint-Simon and more recent historians like Jean-Marie Apostolidès have claimed that court life under Louis XIV ran “like clockwork”, and served to promote the future glory of the Sun King. However, opera prologues written during the most active years of Louis’ war against the Dutch (1673–1677) reveal a more nuanced and fraught experience of time at court: a courtly temporality in tension with monarchical centrality and legacy. The court’s conception of time, shaped by the increased accessibility of new horological technologies (clocks, pocket and wrist watches) reflects an evolving sense of time as individual, hence multiple, and infinitely divisible, hence significant at newly minute scales. This study argues that interpreting temporalities in the context of courtly artistic output, specifically wartime opera prologues, reveals a key aspect of Louis XIV’s failure in the Dutch War: his failure to synchronize his out-dated temporal model with court time.

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