Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII

This book considers the role that sacred music played in legitimating Louis XIII's power, and examines how the Old Testament figure of David, model king, musician and psalmist, became central to musical strategies that presented Louis as God's chosen representative on Earth.

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What role did sacred music play in mediating Louis XIII's grip on power in the early seventeenth century? How can a study of music as 'sounding liturgy' contribute to the wider discourse on absolutism and 'the arts' in early modern France? Taking the scholarship of the so-called 'ceremonialists' as a point of departure, Peter Bennett engages with Weber's seminal formulation of power to consider the contexts in which liturgy, music and ceremonial legitimated the power of a king almost continuously engaged in religious conflict. Numerous musical settings show that David, the psalmist, musician, king and agent of the Holy Spirit, provided the most enduring model of kingship; but in the final decade of his life, as Louis dedicated the Kingdom to the Virgin Mary, the model of 'Christ the King' became even more potent – a model reflected in a flowering of musical publication and famous paintings by Vouet and Champaigne.