Marin Marais (1656–1728) was France’s most celebrated viol player. He held a post as chamber musician in the Court of Louis XIV and published no fewer than five volumes of music for viol, but he also composed four operas in the genre created by Jean-Baptiste Lully, the ‘musical tragedy’ (‘tragédie en musique’). Alcide was his first such work, a collaborative effort with Lully’s eldest son, the dissolute Louis Lully (1664–1734). It was first performed at the Paris Opéra on 31 March 1693 and had a run that lasted at least into April, and problably well beyond. It was sufficiently successful that it was revived in 1705, 1716 and 1744, and the libretto was republished numerous times in Paris and Amsterdam. A volume of anonymous harpsichord transcriptions of most of the instrumental movements in the opera was published subsequent to the opera’s premiere, but until now the existence of this volume has been completely unknown, and it is an extraordinary revelation.

This is the only French collection of transcriptions from stage music to be published in the seventeenth century. Such arrangements were a staple in manuscripts (we know of more than 500 harpsichord pieces based on tunes from Lully’s stage works, for example), and a few such manuscript transcriptions of pieces by Marais appear in the Appendix of this edition; but it is the published volume that is of primary importance.

from the Introductory Note by Bruce Gustafson