Nine Seventeenth-Century Organ Transcriptions from the Operas of Lully

Jean-Baptiste Lully is perhaps best known in the history of music as the founder of French opera. Although Italian-born himself, he created a form of opera so suited to French tastes and needs that it alone, among the attempts of various other nations at operatic forms of their own, was able to resist domination by Italian opera and to maintain its individual identity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The impress he made upon French music was enormous, and it affected every musical medium of his day. Evidence of his influence in a field as remote from his own as the literature for the organ is seen in the nine pieces that make up this present collection.

Despite their operatic origins, the Lully transcriptions should be useful to the present-day church organist, as the pieces have no secular associations for present-day listeners. The overtures make excellent preludes for festive services, and the marches are suitable both for processionals and postludes. For recital use, several of the pieces could be very successfully grouped together into a suite.