Who is pierre beauchamp

All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Sign Up. Sign In. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Pierre Beauchamps was born in in Versailles, France. His family members were traditionally musicians and dancers who entertained the monarchs of France.

He was also a distant cousin to the playwright Jean-Baptiste Moliere, a member of the Mazuel family that also was popular with French royalty. Over several generations, the two families had established a dominant position within the royal court of France. Perhaps most prominent among the Mazuels was a great-uncle to Beauchamps-and great-grand-father to Moliere—named Guillaume Mazuel. As the Beauchamps and the Mazuels performed regularly for the king, the influential relationship between the two families and the French monarchy had solidified by the time that Pierre Beauchamps was born.

By early adolescence Beauchamps, with his extraordinary affinity for the dance, had attracted the attention of the royals.

As early as January 23, —no more than 11 years old at the time—he appeared on the bill of the Ballet du dereglement des passions, a performance at the Palais Cardinal.

He possessed a natural ability for the execution of graceful ballet movements and leaps that defied gravity. By he had received an appointment as the private ballet tutor of Louis XIV of France and thereafter worked with the king daily for approximately two decades. Also as a teenager Beauchamps began to perform for his cousin, Moliere, who produced a number of comedie-ballets. The Moliere troupe operated initially under the name of the Illustre Theatre, and later as the Troupe de Monsieur.

After extensive research, recent experts have failed to determine the full extent of Beauchamps's earliest involvement with the Moliere productions. It is certain that he danced in nine of the Moliere-Lully premieres and received top billing in the livres libretto on multiple occasions.

John S. Powell suggested in Music and Letters that it was a very young Beauchamps who composed the music for Moliere's royal production of Les Facheux in the s. It has been established with reasonable certainty that by the relationship between the dancer and the playwright assumed an increasingly formal and professional nature. Beauchamps spent the ensuing 12 years working with Moliere's troupe and performed as a dancer in a wide variety of roles, ranging from dramatic to comic characters, and portrayed a number of beings, from sprites to heroes of epic proportion.

Also performing in the Moliere programs during the s were Louis XIV and the members of his court. Beauchamps and the king were seen in performance together specifically in Le Mariage ford in , Le Sicilien in , and in Les Amants magnifiques in England continued to be involved in the second Anglo-Dutch War, with sea battles in June and July and a raid on Holland in August , but the most significant event of the year as destructive of property as the plague of the previous year had been of life was the great fire of London in early September.

The Great Fire of London. The blaze left much of the city in ruins and it would take some years before life returned to normal. They reopened in December following their month closure because of the plague. With so few performances in , it is hardly surprising that there was no mention of dancing. The first danced entertainment of the year preceded the death of the Queen Mother.

Pierre Beauchamps danced Bacchus. The latter marked his last appearance in a female role. Socially and politically, seems to have been a quiet year with no events of importance in either France or England. In London, there are two tantalising references to dance performances. In January , the play Pompey the Great was given at court. The lack of further information is frustrating. Ogilby is now more widely known as a cartographer, but in his early years he had been a dancer and a dancing master and he seems to have plied his old trade alongside newer ones as a translator and a publisher.

Pepys continued to be on the lookout for dancing actresses. Was her dancing better controlled than her singing and would Pepys have known whether it was or not? On 13 February N. Between and the dancers in ballets de cour were predominantly male. More than male dancers appeared during this period.

Around 90 of them, not quite one-third, were professionals. About men, mostly courtiers, appeared in only one or two of the ballets. Of those who appeared in a significant number of ballets, i.