In France, up to 1655, when Cardinal Mazarin sent to Italy for an opera troupe with the purpose of entertaining Anne of Austria (the widow of Louis XIII), there was practically no recognized music except that imported from other countries.  Under Louis XI (d. 1483) Ockeghem, the Netherland contrapuntist, was the chief musician of the land.

The French pantomimes or masques, as they were sometimes called, can hardly be said to have represented a valuable gain to art, although their prevalence in France points directly to their having been the direct descendants of the old pantomime on one hand, and on the other, the direct ancestor of the French opera.  For we read that already in 1581 (twenty years before Caccini’s “Euridice” at Florence), a ballet entitled “Circe” was given on the occasion of the marriage of Margaret of Lorraine, the stepsister of Henry III.  The music to it was written by Beaulieu and Salmon, two court musicians.  There were ten bands of music in the cupola of the ballroom where the ballet was given.  These bands included hautbois, cornets, trombones, violas de gamba, flutes, harps, lutes, flageolets.  Besides all this, ten violin players in costume entered the scene in the first act, five from each side.  Then a troupe of Tritons came swimming in, playing lutes, harps, flutes, one even having a kind of ’cello.  When Jupiter makes his appearance, he is accompanied by forty musicians.  The festivities on this occasion are said to have cost over five million francs.  Musically, the ballet was no advance towards expressiveness in art.  An air which accompanied “Circe’s” entrance, may be cited as being the original of the well-known “Amaryllis,” which is generally called Air Louis XV.  Baltazarini calls it un son fort gai, nomme la clochette.

Music remained inert in France until 1650, when the Italians gained an ascendancy, which they retained until 1732, when Rameau’s first opera “Hyppolyte et Aricie” was given in Paris.  Rameau had already commenced his career by gaining great success as a harpsichord player and instrumental composer, mostly for the harpsichord.  By his time, however, music, that is to say, secular music, was already becoming a new art, and the French merely improved upon what already existed.

Now this new art was first particularly evident in the dances of these different peoples.  These dances gave the music form, and held it down to certain prescribed rhythms and duration.  Little by little the emotions, the natural expression of which is music, could no longer be restricted to these dance forms and rhythms; and gradually the latter were modified by each daring innovator in turn.  This “daring” of human beings, in breaking through the trammels of the dance in order to express what lay within their souls in the language that properly belonged to it, would seem almost ludicrous to us, were we not even to-day trying to get up courage to do the same thing.