Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687)
Grands Motets, Vol. 2

"Exit Perrin, vivat Lully" must have been the cry of some onlookers in 1672 when the ambitious composer purchased the privilege of the Royal Academy of Music from the unfortunate librettist, then imprisoned for debt. Pierre Perrin (1620-1675) seems only to have existed in order to spare Lully the tiresome bother of founding the Academy of Music (1669) and trying out the first production of French opera, Pomone (1671) with music by Cambert. Fate seems to have singled him out to plough the field in which Lully would sow the seeds of his fame. There has been little interest in his pre-opera career, and yet he was one of the prime movers in the renewal of the French motet which was to set the king's glory on an equal footing with that of God and, in its choice of texts and method of performance, sometimes give us cause to imagine that the more powerful of the two is not the one we might