When Les Bouffons Tipped Off the Enlightenment
Tags: Baptiste Lully, bouffons, comedy, french, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, mozart, opera
An old proverb, dating perhaps to the demise of Richard III at Bosworth in 1485, tells us that the loss of a single horseshoe nail can trigger the fall of a Kingdom.
Chaos theorists tell us that a butterfly, flapping its wings in one way rather than another, can influence the movement of a hurricane across an ocean.
It may be, likewise, that an argument over the performance of a single troupe of comic actors helped create that great shift in … Continue Reading