In the mid-1700s, notorious rake Giacomo Casanova attended a performance of André Campra's Les fêtes vénitiennes (1710) at the Paris Opéra. His reactions varied from amusement (the backdrop placed the bell tower and the ducal palace on the wrong side of Saint Mark's Square) to boredom induced by Campra's music. Most noteworthy to him, however, was the enthusiastic response of the audience to the dancer Louis Dupré, marked by total silence during his appearance and vigorous applause upon its conclusion. According to Casanova, his French companion explained this reverence by stating, “Such is the power of beauty and goodness, of the sublime and the truth to nature which penetrate the soul. … This is true dance.”1
Although the French passion for dance has long been acknowledged by scholars, histories of French Baroque opera have primarily pursued an ideological or evolutionary approach to the development of the genre. No previous...