Jean-Baptiste Stuck

Despite his Franco-German-sounding name, Jean-Baptiste Stuck was Austrian-Italian, studied primarily in Italy, and made his fortune composing for the Parisian theater in the 1710s. In his "Confessions," Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to him as "Batastin," the diminutive of "Baptiste." Stuck was employed by multiple courts within the French nobility, including the court of Philippe II, the Duke of Orleans, who served as Regent in France from 1715. Ultimately, Stuck moved into the service of the Royal Court, though not long after the Regent's death in 1723, he seems to have abandoned composition in favor of working as a virtuoso cello player. Grove's disputes the oft-repeated claim that Stuck was the first to play the cello at the Paris Opéra, around 1730, although it concurs that Stuck's popularity as cellist probably offered an assist to the decline of the bass viol in Paris. Stuck's operas enjoyed a level of relative success ranging from only moderate to failure; it was really his secular cantatas, often performed at the opera, that made his reputation as a composer. The best-known of these in modern times is Héraclite et Démocrite, an unusual dialogue between allegorical characters representing optimism and pessimism.