Ballet of the Night

Ballet de la Nuit (Ballet of the Night) is a ballet by Jean-Baptiste Boësset, Jean de Cambefort, and Michel Lambert featuring music by Jean-Baptiste Lully. It is ballet de cour, premiered February 23, 1653 at the Salle du Petit-Bourbon. It took 13 hours to perform and debuted fourteen year old Louis XIV as Apollo, the Sun King (Le Roi Soleil). The ballet was the subject of the Oxford Dance Symposium in 2004, and there is an extensive study of the work by a group of scholars.