Philippe Quinault

Philippe Quinault (* June 3, 1635 in Paris, † November 26, 1688 ) was a French poet who wrote both the speech and for music theater text books and in particular as a librettist and assistant of Jean -Baptiste Lully was known. Together with this, he helped the French opera in competition with the Italian style breakthrough.

When he Lully's librettist was in 1674, began the era of " Tragédie lyrique ", the great tragic opera, to the later - in the transition to education - for example, Christoph Willibald Gluck anknüpfte. The libretti Quinault relationship with the classic tragedy of Corneille and Racine and had success, because the French, unlike the Italians an orderly, content challenging textbook preferred (see also Buffonistenstreit ).

Quinault libretto probably the most successful and also his last work for the stage was Armide (1686). The theme of the conflict between paganism and Christianity, from which it appears that Christianity as a winner, he chose at the behest of the king. This seemed to be the pompous performance one year after the dissolution of the Edict of Nantes in its struggle against paganism to want to build a monument.