Philippe Quinault

The piece succeeded, and Quinault followed it up, but he also read for the bar; and in 1660, when he married a widow with money, he bought himself a place in the Cour des Comptes.

But his comedies—especially his first piece Les Rivales (1653), L'Amant indiscret (1654), which has some likeness to Molière's Étourdi, Le Fantôme amoureux (1659), and La Mère coquette (1665), perhaps the best—are much better.

Here he showed a remarkable faculty for lyrical drama, and from this time until just before his death he confined himself to composing libretti for Lully's work.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Quinault, coming at the exact time when opera became fashionable out of Italy, had very much to do with establishing it as a permanent European genre.

Alceste was received very negatively by some critics, and this inspired a debate of published opinions by the writers Jean Racine and Charles Perrault which constitutes one of the first exchanges in what would later become known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.