Sainte-Beuve deemed Athalie comparable to an Athenian tragedy by who?
Athalie Athalie is a 1691 play, the final tragedy of Jean Racine, and has been described as the masterpiece of "one of the greatest literary artists known" and the "ripest work" of Racine's genius. Voltaire considered the play the greatest triumph of the human mind, while Flaubert referred to it in "Madame Bovary" as the masterpiece of the French stage, and Sainte-Beuve deemed it comparable to "Oedipus Rex" in beauty, with "the true God added." August Wilhelm Schlegel thought Athalie to be "animated by divine breath"; other critics have regarded the poetics of drama in the play to be superior to those of Aristotle.
Achille et Polyxène Achille et Polyxène ("Achilles and Polyxena") is a tragédie lyrique containing a prologue and five acts based on Virgil's "Aeneid" with a French libretto by Jean Galbert de Campistron. The opera's overture and first act were composed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, who died from a conducting injury before he could complete the score. The prologue and the remaining acts are the work of his pupil Pascal Collasse who finished the work, eight months after Lully's death on March 22, 1687. The opera was first performed on November 7, 1687, by the Paris Opera at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris.