 Musical considerations also played a role, since the French court already had a firmly established genre of stage music, "ballet de cour", which included sung elements as well as dance and lavish spectacle.When two Italian operas, Francesco Cavalli's "Xerse" and "Ercole amante", proved failures in Paris in 1660 and 1662, the prospects of opera flourishing in France looked remote.Yet Italian opera would stimulate the French to make their own experiments at the genre and, paradoxically, it would be an Italian-born composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who would found a lasting French operatic tradition.