Quels charmans concerts: four divertissements for Venus in three tragédies en musique of the 1690s

Three operas featuring the goddess Venus as a main character premiered in rapid succession on the stage of the Académie Royale de Musique in the late 1690s. La naissance de Vénus (1696), Vénus et Adonis (1697) and Hésione (1700) all depict significant events in the goddess’s mythology: her birth, her love affair with the mortal huntsman Adonis, and her affair with the Trojan prince Anchises, a union which produced the hero Aeneas. While the librettists for all three works (the Abbé Pic, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and Antoine Danchet) created a similar character type for the goddess—self-absorbed, vain and obstinate—the composers (Pascal Collasse, Henri Desmarets and André Campra) did not respond with equally similar musical settings—with one exception. In all three works, at least one divertissement features the goddess as an object of adoration. A consideration of these divertissements as a group reveals how the composers and librettists of these three works manipulated existing conventions of staging, music and text to create a new type of divertissement to showcase the goddess. By placing the divertissements early in the work, linking them through setting and décor, providing the goddess with an identical group of followers, using triple metre and high-voiced scoring, and allowing the goddess herself to act in the divertissement context, these three works both established Venus’s power and authority and created a distinctive realm for her to rule. In so doing, the creators of these works both emphasized the disruptive qualities of the goddess and normalized them as characteristic of a realm ruled by love.