For years, visitors from around the world poured into Versailles to admire Louis XIV's favorite palace and the geometric triumph of its gardens. At the Louvre, they saw magnificent art works and artifacts amassed by the long-reigning monarch. What this dazzling picture of past splendors did not give them, however, was a sense of the central role that music played in the court of the Sun King.
    The powerful literary tradition in France long obscured the fact that Louis XIV loved music-François Couperin even wrote "Concerts Royaux" to be played in Louis XIV's bed chamber. Yet for centuries, operas, dance music, ballets and other orchestral works by such masters of the French Baroque as Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Marin Marais languished in silence in the archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Few French music lovers who enjoyed Maurice Ravel's tribute to Baroque music, "Le Tombeau de Couperin," knew anything about Couperin-and fewer still had ever heard his music.
    Why this state of neglect? The dismissive explanations were usually that Baroque was too stiff, over-stylized, hellishly difficult to perform and-in the case of the operas-hugely expensive to mount. These arguments are not entirely without merit: 17th-century French opera productions called for elaborate scenery by master set designers such as the Galli da Babiena family, along with rich costumes, dance interludes and stage machinery for lowering the gods from the heavens (hence the phrase "deus ex-machina").
    In spite of the long odds, French Baroque has nonetheless made a comeback, not only in the broader context of recent widespread enthusiasm for classical music in general but as a welcome renascence in its own right. The gods and goddesses, the heroes and heroines, and the demons and shepherds that kept Louis XIV glued to his seat in Versailles are back onstage in elaborate opera productions, not only in France but in the United States (where many of them are being seen for the first time) and elsewhere. In addition, a stream of new recordings-where once there was a mere trickle-has made French Baroque music more accessible, widening its global audience.
    A pivotal figure in breathing new life into French Baroque music is an American musicologist, conductor and harpsichordist from Buffalo, New York: William Christie. A long-time French resident-and now a French citizen and an Officier in the Légion d'Honneur-Christie was teaching Baroque vocal repertoire at the Paris Conservatoire in 1979 when he formed a musical ensemble and named it Les Arts Florissants, after a composition by Charpentier. The group quickly became known as consummate specialists of the French operatic repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries, with equally distinguished excursions into Italian and English works. Christie acquired a reputation in musical circles as a martinet with his musicians, but his exacting standards clearly paid off. London's The Independent has called the group's playing "unutterably chic, sensitive and vivid throughout-almost tear-provokingly perfect."
    Christie was first exposed to early French music by his mother, a choir director, who gave him music lessons. Yet he attributes his epiphany to his grandmother, who gave him a recording of Couperin's organ music. "That blew my mind-it was one of the most extraordinary things I had ever heard," he says. "Lights flashed, bells clanged, and I was in a different state." In other words, he was hooked.
    In 1982, Les Arts Florissants staged the work for which they were named at the Palace of Versailles. The performance was not only a critical success but also seduced a new audience. Major recognition came five years later with the Paris Opera's presentation of "Atys" by Lully, the man who defined French opera under Louis XIV (this particular work was the king's favorite). Christie's ambitious production of "Atys"-the first in France since 1760-established the French early music movement in the musical calendar.
    By the 1990s, Les Arts Florissants had built up an impressive repertoire of French Baroque productions, including Rameau's "Hippolyte et Aricie," his first and in many ways finest operatic work, and "Les Indes Galantes." "Hippolyte" is Rameau's re-working of "Phèdre"; "Les Indes Galantes" is more a show than an opera-a series of mini-spectacles set in faraway lands (Turkey, America) and conceived to have mind-boggling sets and costumes, not to mention very busy dance sequences.
    Whether Le Roi Soleil would recognize contemporary renditions of the operas of his day or merely find them vaguely familiar is open to question. The French Baroque movement strives for authenticity, basing productions on research of the strictures and rules that initially governed the performances. For example, the peculiarities of period diction and the delicate, quivering French Baroque trill in the signing are Arts Florissants trademarks. Still, New York Times music critic John Rockwell, who was at the "Atys" premier in 1987, described it as "not so much a period 17th-century re-creation as a 20th-century fantasy about the 17th century (just as the opera itself is a 17th-century fantasy about classical antiquity)."
    Since 1987, the main quest for authenticity has been entrusted to the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, a government-funded research organization that rediscovers, restores and advances France's musical heritage of the 17th and 18th centuries.
    Aside from being the main publisher of French music scores, the Centre produces recordings, and anyone interested in a total immersion course in early French music could do worse than to acquire the Centre's 20-CD collection, "200 Ans de Musique à Versailles," released this year.
    But while authenticity is important, what matters most is that French Baroque music has made a comeback and recaptured public attention. "The challenge," commented Le Monde back in 2007, "was to prove that Baroque music was for everyone." By then, of course, that challenge had long since been successfully met. How else to explain the box office success of the 1991 film Tous le Matins du Monde-winner of seven French Césars-whose central character, Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, was a 17th-century musician and composer so obscure that even his first name is unknown? Christie himself says, "I'll put on my epitaph that I was able to convince a number of people for a number of years that there are as many great composers, and as many masterpieces in the 17th and 18th centuries as there are in the 19th and 20th. This came as a great surprise to a lot of people."
    Early French music continues to be a modest-sized growth industry. Ensembles such as Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques in Paris and the Grenoble-based Les Musiciens du Louvre, founded in 1982 by resident director Marc Minkowski, are flourishing. Rousset, who juggles his own career as a distinguished solo harpsichodist, conducted Rameau's "Zoroastre" at the Paris Opéra-Comique in March. Outside France there is, among others, the Washington, D.C.-based Opéra Lafayette, which earlier this year staged "Le Déserteur" by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, a late-18th-century composer but still not too distant from the French Baroque tradition.
    But the belle of Baroque is unquestionably Emmanuelle Haim, another harpsichordist-turned-conductor of her own orchestra, Le Concert d'Astrée. This past March, the petite Parisienne with the flamboyant, ballet-like conducting style performed Rameau's "Hippolyte" in Toulouse. Haim attributes her passion for Baroque to the decade she spent working as Christie's assistant. "What he gave me above all was a love for French Baroque, especially after his Paris staging of "Atys," which proved that a Lully opera could be a living dramatic experience. After that, I knew that I wanted to devote my life to Baroque music."
    In a recent interview with BBC Music magazine, Haim said that Baroque opera-French or other-would be more widely played and therefore even more popular were it not for the additional expense of hiring a Baroque orchestra. "You cannot do Monteverdi or Rameau with a modern orchestra, but opera houses that can afford a Baroque orchestra are rare-it's an extra expense on top of the regular orchestra."
    But at least, she added, staging a French Baroque opera eliminates one major casting problem compared with Italian operas of the same period: The French never followed the widespread Italian practice of using castrati tenors-and there aren't many of them around these days.