36).

Although many people consider the role of a librettist to be less important than that of a composer, matters were different in France during the seventeenth century. When normally in production, operas credited the librettist at first and the composer consequent to that. Louis XIV in particular believed that poetry had been much more important than music, with opera being a combination of the two in which music was simply meant to make poetry accessible to a larger crowd. Another reason for which people today are inclined to consider Lully less important than he actually was might be that French opera is at the moment shadowed by operas produced by Italians, Austrians, and Germans (Howard, 1989).

One of the elements that are expected to bring French operas back among the most notable artworks related to opera music is the fact that they contain a lot of bass, which is...
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