Bellerophon tragedie is the printed French libretto for Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédie en musique Bellérophon. It is not a prose work or philosophical essay by Fontenelle; the volume contains the sung text of an opera, not Lully’s musical score. The text is in French verse and is organised as a prologue followed by five acts, the standard large structure of a Lully operatic tragedy. The prologue provides an allegorical or mythological frame for the drama, while the five acts present the Bellerophon material in the elevated, spectacle-oriented form of French musical tragedy, with scenes of recitative, lyric airs, ensembles, choruses, and divertissements.
The libretto draws on the classical myth of Bellerophon, the hero associated with the winged horse Pegasus and the defeat of the Chimera, and ultimately on Hesiod’s Theogony. It does not offer a scholarly retelling of the myth; it reshapes the legend into an operatic plot involving gods, rulers, and mortal protagonists, with the characteristic Lullian mixture of heroic adventure and amorous or political conflict. The book is therefore a dramatic text for music: its contents are the sung words, scene divisions, and stage action needed to follow the opera, rather than a narrative treatise or a collection of Fontenelle’s other writings.
The sources identify the libretto as a collaboration. Thomas Corneille, Fontenelle’s uncle, is credited with the prologue and the opening section of the fourth act, while Fontenelle is credited with the main body of the text; Lully composed the music. Some catalog records also associate Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux with the work, but the BnF and OCLC/Yale descriptions centre on Corneille, Fontenelle, and Lully. The volume belongs to the corpus of Lully’s mythological operas and to the genre of the printed livret: it gives the verbal and dramatic substance of Bellérophon, not its score, and it should be read within the conventions of the French tragédie en musique rather than as a standalone literary mythography.
Within that operatic frame, the libretto turns the Bellerophon legend into a drama about heroic vocation and its testing. Bellerophon’s glory is not simply won by defeating the Chimera; it is entangled with love, jealousy, slander, and the expectations of rulers and gods. The text sets heroic exploit against courtly intrigue, so that the monster is only one obstacle in a larger pattern of accusation, rivalry, and vindication. Pegasus and the Chimera therefore function both as spectacle and as emblems of a hero whose virtue must be recognised and defended.
The work also uses the characteristic Lullian opposition between amour and gloire: private desire and public duty pull at the protagonists, while choruses and divertissements provide collective commentary and ceremonial display. Divine interventions give the action a providential colouring, so that mortal conflicts are judged and resolved from above, and the dramatic arc presses toward legitimate heroism, magnanimity, and restored order. The book’s significance lies in this double character: it preserves the verbal and dramatic shape of a courtly mythological opera, and it shows how a classical myth could be moralised for the French tragédie en musique as a conflict of virtue with envy, passion, and political power.
