Limelight — May 2017

long-dead master of French music – Jean-
Baptiste Lully. While the worst insult the
lullistescould dream up for Rameau’s first
opera was ‘baroque’, his second operaLes
Indes Galantes(1735) took them totally over
the top.“The music is a perpetual witchery,”
ranted one reviewer.“I am racked, flayed,
dislocated by this devilishness.”

Ironically, by the end of his life, it was
Rameau himself who was attacked for
maintaining the conservative French style
in the face of the exciting new ideas of
the Italians. A decade after his death in
1764, Rameau’s music had finally fallen
from fashion – “people had grown tired of
worshipping at the same altar”admitted one
of his followers. It has taken a long time for
Rameau to regain his musical dignity. Of the
great quartet of Baroque composers born in
the 1680s, Rameau has had to endure the
slowest return to favour – a victim of the
sheer ‘baroque’ extravagance and complexity
of his finest operatic works which are only
now being staged with any regularity.
Rameau was born in Dijon in 1683,
just two years before Bach, Handel
and Domenico Scarlatti. But unlike his
distinguished contemporaries, Rameau had

a strangely unbalanced career. During the

first half of his working life he was known

chiefly as a learned musical theoretician

and a composer of impressive harpsichord

music. Then, at the age of 50, he entered the

world of opera – “the age when the ordinary

mortal begins to decay”said one of his

early biographers – and over the next three

decades he produced around 30 theatrical

entertainments covering a multiplicity of

stage forms from opera to ballet. By 1749

his works so dominated the Paris Opéra, a

ruling was made that the company could

only stage two of his operas a year“for fear

of discouraging other composers”.

French opera was a law unto itself. Unlike

the Italians, the French liked their operas to

flow as freely as spoken drama; they couldn’t

understand why the Italians were constantly

interrupting things with long, self-indulgent

solos for egotistical singers. Handel’s

operas could easily contain 30 arias, but

Rameau confined himself to a mere handful,

positioned for minimal dramatic disruption.

Instead, sensory delights were saved up for

one splendiddivertissementper act – an oasis

of musical luxury in which soloists, dancers

and the chorus were given free rein.

French composers made use of a much

wider variety of operatic forms than their

European neighbours, but the ultimate

vehicle for their dramatic ambitions was

thetragédie en musique– originally a courtly

entertainment developed by Lully in the

1670s. Though long-in-the-tooth by the

1730s, Rameau composed seven of these

serious-minded works, although only

four were ever performed. But he was such

a conscientious reviser that each of the

various revivals of his fifth operaDardanus

could almost be considered a new work in

its own right. One contemporary claimed

that, in its final expanded form,Dardanus

was now“so laden with music that for

three whole hours the orchestral players

don’t even have time to sneeze.”

Les Boréades(1763), Rameau’s finaltragédie,

is an exquisitely balanced work – song, dance

and drama expertly oiling each other’s cogs

OThe theorist

For over 50 years, Rameau wrestled

with musical theory, publishing articles

and books he considered to be as

important as his music. Just as Sir

Isaac Newton showed that white light

comprised a spectrum of individual

colours, Rameau demonstrated how

a single sound was made up of a

combination of harmonic overtones.

OChef d’orchestre

Rameau was one of the greatest

orchestrators of the Baroque. From

the mid-1740s he started spicing

up his music with rare instrumental

colours – piccolos, clarinets, brass and

percussion. He then superimposed

layers of sound on top of each

other, distinguishing them by their

contrasting timbres and melodic lines.

OBallet master

A rather formal, frosty man, Rameau’s

most surprising talent was for dance.

His ballet music is sophisticated and

sensual. The philosopher Diderot

claimed “no-one before Rameau

distinguished the delicate shades

of expression that separate the

tender from the voluptuous, the

voluptuous from the impassioned, the

impassioned from the lascivious.”

OMiniaturist

The French loved their musical

miniatures. In his harpsichord pieces

Rameau encapsulated famous

personalities, striking moods and

exotic images. He had the range and

subtlety of a painter –Les Tourbillons

depicts a dust storm; whileLa Poule

is an ingenious caricature of a hen,

complete with clucking.

HIS STYLE...

http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au MAY 2017LIMELIGHT 61

COMPOSER OF THE MONTH O

IT HAS TAKEN A

LONG TIME FOR

RAMEAU TO REGAIN

HIS MUSICAL DIGNITY

Les Indes Galantes,Toulouse, 2012