Hilaire Dupuis (1625–1709), nicknamed “the human crystal,” was one of the most important singers in Lully’s court ballets and early ballet comedies. 
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Nicknamed ‘the human crystal’, Hilaire Dupuis (1625-1709) was one of the leading singers in Lully’s court ballets and early comedy ballets. Sister-in-law of Michel Lambert, she performed his court airs and his Leçons de ténèbres. She was a true musical accomplice of the famous theorbo player and composer, with whom she lived for many years. Jean-Baptiste Lully, who married her niece Madeleine Lambert, was also their illustrious roommate.
From the Petits-Champs district of Paris, where they lived for more than 10 years, to the property in Puteaux, which hosted numerous soirées and parties, this programme in the form of a musical biography brings together a selection of arias that she performed at court and in salons (Lambert, Lully and even Cavalli on the occasion of Louis XIV’s wedding).
Virginie Thomas has chosen to draw mainly from Lully’s repertoire of court ballets, selecting those in which her participation is attested. Some pieces are still very similar in character to court airs (with doubles written by Lambert), while others develop more dramatically in the form of lamentations. The duets and trios in French and Italian also evoke her collaborations with the famous Anne de la Barre, Anna Bergerotti and Mlle de Saint Christophe.
After a first programme devoted to nymphs, this album pays tribute to this woman and to the most beautiful pages that were composed for her, a very real woman, a musician, a businesswoman “who formed with Lambert a community of talents and characters so solid and so constant that it would only die with their deaths. ” (C. Massip in L’art de bien chanter)
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