Ramo Grouv

Rameau, Jean-Philippe
(b Dijon, bap. 25 Sept 1683; d Paris, 12 Sept 1764). French composer and theorist. He was one of the greatest
figures in French musical history, a theorist of European stature and France's leading 18th-century composer. He
made important contributions to the cantata, the motet and, more especially, keyboard music, and many of his
dramatic compositions stand alongside those of Lully and Gluck as the pinnacles of pre-Revolutionary French
opera.
1. Life.
2. Cantatas and motets.
3. Keyboard music.
4. Dramatic music.
5. Theoretical writings.
WORKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GRAHAM SADLER (1–4, work-list, bibliography) THOMAS CHRISTENSEN (5, bibliography)
1. Life.
(i) Early life.
(ii) 1722–32.
(iii) 1733–44.
(iv) 1745–51.
(v) 1752–64.
Rameau, Jean-Philippe, §1: Life
(i) Early life.
His father Jean, a local organist, was apparently the first professional musician in a family that was to include
several notable keyboard players: Jean-Philippe himself, his younger brother Claude and sister Catherine, Claude's
son Jean-François (the eccentric ‘neveu de Rameau’ of Diderot's novel) and Jean-François's half-brother Lazare.
Jean Rameau, the founder of this dynasty, held various organ appointments in Dijon, several of them concurrently;
these included the collegiate church of St Etienne (1662–89), the abbey of St Bénigne (1662–82), Notre Dame
(1690–1709) and St Michel (1704–14). Jean-Philippe's mother, Claudine Demartinécourt, was a notary's daughter
from the nearby village of Gémeaux. Although she was a member of the lesser nobility, her family, like that of her
husband, included many in humble occupations. Jean-Philippe, the seventh of their 11 children, was the eldest
surviving son. His birthplace in the cour Saint-Vincent on the rue Saint-Michel still remains (now 5–7 rue Vaillant).
Despite only modest means, the family maintained influential connections; the composer's godparents, for
example, were both from noble families connected with the Burgundian parlement.
The first 40 or more years of Rameau's life can be reconstructed only sketchily. Most of this period was spent in the
comparative obscurity of the French provinces; it was not until his 40th year that he began to make his mark as a
theorist and later still as a composer. He himself was secretive about the first half of his life: according to
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Chabanon, ‘he never imparted any detail of it to his friends or even to Madame Rameau his wife’.
Rameau père apparently took responsibility for his children's early musical education: ‘he taught them music even
before they had learnt to read’ (Maret). It is possible that in 1692 or later Jean-Philippe also had lessons from
Claude Derey, organist of the Ste Chapelle, Dijon. Eventually, perhaps as late as the age of 12, he was sent to the
Jesuit Collège des Godrans. There he would have encountered the didactic music theatre that was an important
element in the contemporary Jesuit curriculum; indeed, it was quite probably the experience of taking part in such
productions that sparked off his enthusiasm for opera which, he later admitted, had begun when he was 12. No
precise details of the Dijon school productions have come to light, however. In view of his later achievements, it is
surprising that the young Rameau did not distinguish himself at the college; according to a classmate, he would
sing or write music during lessons, and he left without completing the course. Certain anecdotes suggest that his
written French was defective at this time, and indeed his prose style in the theoretical works and elsewhere is
notable for its lack of clarity.
After leaving school, Rameau went to Italy. The date of his departure from Dijon is not known; Maret presumed that
it was before his 19th year, but Decroix, in a biographical article (A1824) based on material collected as much as 50
years earlier, states that the composer was 18. The visit was short – perhaps only a few weeks or months – and he
never went beyond Milan. In later life he confided to Chabanon his regrets at not having stayed longer in Italy,
where he believed he might have ‘refined his taste’. Decroix claims that Rameau returned to France as a violinist
with a touring theatrical troupe that performed in various towns in Provence and Languedoc. If this is true, the
troupe concerned was that of the Lyons Opéra (Zaslaw, Dijon 1983), in which case Rameau must have joined it in
southern France (not in Milan, as Decroix maintains). Yet no documentary evidence of Rameau's involvement
survives, and Decroix may even have confused the composer with the dancing-master Pierre Rameau (no
relation), known to have belonged to the troupe at that time.
On 14 January 1702 Rameau was temporarily appointed maître de musique at the Cathedral of Notre Dame des
Doms, Avignon. By 1 May, however, he had taken up a post as organist at Clermont Cathedral. The contract,
signed on 30 June, was for six years, though in fact Rameau served no more than four. By 1706 he had moved to
Paris, where he is said to have lodged opposite the monastery of the Grands Cordeliers (Franciscans) to be near
the church where Louis Marchand was organist. By the time his Premier livre de pieces de clavecin was published
in 1706, he had succeeded Marchand as organist at the Jesuit college in the rue Saint-Jacques (the famous
Collège Louis-le-Grand, the pupils of which at that time included his future collaborator Voltaire); he was also
organist to the Pères de la Merci (Mercedarians). On 12 September 1706 he won a competition for the post of
organist at Ste Madeleine-en-la-Cité, but when the judges learnt that he was unwilling to give up his other two
posts they appointed Louis-Antoine Dornel. Rameau still held the same posts in July 1708.
In 1709 he returned to Dijon to succeed his father as organist at Notre Dame, at that time the town's principal
church. On 27 March he signed a six-year contract with the church authorities, sharing the post with Lorin fils.
Rameau was required to play only on solemn feast days, at performances of the Te Deum and at public
ceremonies. It is clear, though, that when Lorin succeeded to the post (2 July 1713), Rameau had relinquished it
some time before. Probably he had already moved to Lyons: by 13 July he had been there long enough to be
described as ‘maistre organiste et musicien de cette ville’ when the Lyons authorities paid him for organizing a
concert to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht (the concert never took place). Rameau's compositions at this time
probably include motets: the library catalogue of the Lyons Concert, a concert-giving society founded in August
1714, lists his Deus noster refugium among its earliest acquisitions; the piece may even have been written for the
Concert. (Although the catalogue includes three more of his motets, among them the lost Exultet coelem laudibus,
their position in the catalogue suggests that they were acquired after Rameau had left Lyons.) By 1 July 1714 he
was organist at the Dominican convent known as the Jacobins, the organ of which had only recently been rebuilt;
he may already have been there for a year or more. On 13 December, the day of his father's death, he drew his
salary and travelled to Dijon, remaining there for the wedding of his brother Claude in January 1715. When he
returned to Lyons, he organized and composed music for a concert at the Hôtel de Ville (17 March 1715) in honour
of the new archbishop. By this date he had been succeeded at the Jacobins by Antoine Fioco (presumably Antonio
Fiocco) and Etienne Le Tourneur.
The following month, Rameau signed a second contract as organist at Clermont Cathedral, this time to run for 29
years from 1 April 1715. A contemporary description of the organ reveals that it had 15 stops on the grand orgue,
ten on the positif and four each on the pedals and echo organ. As in 1702, his duties included the instruction of one
chorister. (According to Suaudeau (F1958), there existed autograph teaching materials from 1717, but none is now
known.) Rameau briefly revisited Dijon for the baptism on 31 January 1716 of his brother Claude's eldest son
JeanFrançois. Maret claims that three of Rameau's cantatas – Médée, L'absence (both lost) and L'impatience – were
composed at Clermont. Four others – Thétis, Aquilon et Orithie, Orphée and Les amants trahis – survive in copies
made during his time there. It was at Clermont, too, that the greater part of his Traité de l'harmonie must have been
written. From 22 August 1721 until his departure a year later, Rameau seems to have shared his cathedral post
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with an organist named Marchand, a member of a local family of musicians.
Rameau was still at Clermont on 11–13 May 1722, when he was paid for taking part in three Rogation Day
processions. He finally left for Paris shortly afterwards, once again well before his contract expired (on this
occasion it still had 21 years to run). It is alleged that at first the cathedral authorities refused him permission to go,
and consequently that during the octave of Corpus Christi he selected the most disagreeable stop-combinations
and discords until the authorities relented. It is possible, however, that this incident took place (if at all) before
Rameau first left Clermont in 1705 or 1706 (Zaslaw, Dijon 1983). There is, in any case, a well-documented account
of a similar occurrence at Dijon in 1736, when the organist was his brother Claude.
(ii) 1722–32.
Rameau probably arrived in Paris in late May or in June 1722. He was to live there for the rest of his life. The
immediate reason for his move seems to have been a desire to supervise the production of his Traité de l'harmonie
which, he states, had been typeset in Paris while he was still at Clermont. The printing of this work, which the
publisher J.-B.-C. Ballard claimed to have commissioned, had evidently been started three years earlier. Yet
numerous errors remained, and before the treatise was published Rameau included a lengthy supplement of
corrections, a revised or possibly new preface and other changes. The Traité must eventually have been issued
soon after his arrival in the capital, since the first review appeared in the October–November issue of the Journal
de Trévoux (familiar title of Memoires pour l'histoire des sciences et des beaux-arts).
Rameau was virtually unknown in Paris. The appearance of this monumental 450-page treatise immediately
earned him a formidable reputation in France and abroad, soon to be consolidated by the publication of the
Nouveau système de musique théorique (1726). Shortly after publication Rameau sent a copy of the Nouveau
système to the Royal Society in London, where a review by the mathematician Brook Taylor was read on 18
January 1727/8 (Miller, F1985).
The controversial nature of some of Rameau's theories, in particular that of the basse fondamentale, led to a public
debate with ‘a second musician’ in Paris on 8 May 1729, continuing into the following year as a series of polemical
exchanges in the Mercure de France. Rameau's opponent has sometimes been tentatively identified as Jacques de
Bournonville, but is more likely to have been the composer and theorist Michel Pignolet de Montéclair. Meanwhile,
the firm of Ballard, which had published the Traité and the Nouveau système, was in the process of printing the
Dissertation sur les différentes méthodes d'accompagnement pour le clavecin, ou pour l'orgue when Rameau
broke off relations with them. The Dissertation, first mentioned in the preface to his Pieces de clavessin (1724),
was eventually published by Boivin and Le Clerc in 1732. Thereafter, Rameau changed publisher with almost every
new theoretical work.
Incongruous as it may seem in view of his newfound eminence as a theorist, Rameau's first compositions in Paris
consisted of incidental music to a farcical opéra comique, L'Endriague, at one of the Fair theatres (3 February
1723). The suggestion that he should provide music to supplement the well-known tunes traditionally used in such
plays came from the author, Alexis Piron, a fellow Dijonnais and one of the few people in Paris that he would
already have known. Rameau's music, of which there was a considerable quantity, is now lost. In his three
subsequent collaborations with Piron at the Fair theatres, he contributed much less. In spite of the lack of prestige
attached to the Fairs, he was to make useful contacts there, among them Louis Fuzelier, future librettist of Les
Indes galantes.
On 10 September 1725 Rameau attended a performance by two Louisiana Indians at the Théâtre Italien; he was
soon to characterize their dancing in the harpsichord piece Les sauvages, later published in his Nouvelles suites
de pieces de clavecin. Les sauvages was one of the works that Rameau referred to in his oft-quoted letter (25
October 1727) to the dramatist Antoine Houdar de Lamotte, the text of which shows that he was already actively
planning his operatic début, that Lamotte had already refused him a libretto and had cast doubts on his chances of
success. Evidently stung by this, Rameau set out with unusual clarity his credentials as a potential opera
composer, but to no avail.
During the middle and late 1720s, more of his music appeared in print. A second keyboard collection, the Pieces
de clavessin, was issued in 1724, followed by the Nouvelles suites de pieces de clavecin and the Cantates
françoises à voix seule. These last two publications have now been redated, the Nouvelles suites by Bruce
Gustafson (Gustafson and Fuller, D1990) and the Cantates by Neal Zaslaw (Dijon 1983) both to 1729 or 1730, a
year or two later than had long been assumed. One of the cantatas, Le berger fidèle, had been performed at
Philidor's Concert Français on 22 November 1728 by Mlle Le Maure.
On 25 February 1726, now aged 42, Rameau married the 19-year-old Marie-Louise Mangot (1707–85), an
accomplished singer and harpsichordist and possibly already one of his pupils. She bore him four children. Her
father, Jacques, was one of the symphonistes du roy, while her brother, Jacques-Simon, was later to make
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Rameau's music known at the court of Parma and to act as intermediary in correspondence between Rameau and
Padre Martini.
In spite of his growing reputation as a theorist, composer and teacher, especially of harmony and continuo playing,
Rameau was unable to secure an organist's appointment of any importance for many years after reaching Paris.
The title-pages of his music printed in the 1720s, unlike those of his previous publications, give no current post; that
of the Nouveau système describes him as ‘formerly organist of Clermont Cathedral’. He is not mentioned by
Nemeitz (A1727) or Valhebert (A1727) in their listings of prominent Parisian organists. He competed for the post of
organist at the parish church of St Paul (28 April 1727), but lost to Louis-Claude Daquin. By 1732, however,
Rameau had become organist at Ste Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie and, by 1736, at the Jesuit Novitiate (‘les Jésuites de
College’). In 1738 he still held the former appointment but not the latter. (According to Decroix (A1824), after his
defeat in the St Paul competition in 1727 the disillusioned Rameau left Paris to become organist at St Etienne, Lille.
This is unlikely: Rameau was in Paris for the baptism of his son Claude-François on 3 August 1727, and his
subsequent publications give Paris addresses. In any case, Decroix's placing of the St Paul competition – before
Rameau's arrival at Clermont – is far too early. Yet the claim cannot be ignored: Decroix, a native of Lille, was in
frequent contact with Claude-François Rameau after the composer's death and had access to sources unavailable
to other early biographers. Unfortunately, the relevant church archives were destroyed in 1792.)
(iii) 1733–44.
Although Rameau did not make his operatic début until he was 50, it is clear from passages in the Traité, from his
letter to Lamotte in 1727 and from later remarks that it had long been his ambition to write for the Paris Opéra. The
final impetus, it was widely claimed, was provided by Montéclair's Jephté (February 1732). Although he had earlier
quarrelled publicly with its composer, in his later writings he referred admiringly to this work, which had greatly
moved him.
The impact of Rameau's first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), was immense. Initial reactions ranged from
excitement and admiration to bewilderment and disgust. The work gave rise to a long-running dispute between the
conservative lullistes, as the anti-Rameau faction was known, and the composer's supporters, the ramistes (or,
more provocatively, ramoneurs: chimney sweeps). The lullistes, who formed a powerful and vociferous cabal, were
variously motivated by a distaste for the quantity, the complexity and the allegedly italianate character of Rameau's
music and by fear that the new style would annihilate the traditional repertory, above all the works of their revered
Lully. There was a strong element of professional jealousy on the part of certain composers and librettists, and
Rameau had to contend with the ill-will of some of the Opéra performers. The dispute raged around Rameau's
second opera two years later (‘The music is a perpetual witchery … I am racked, flayed, dislocated by this devilish
sonata of Les Indes galantes’, complained an anonymous contributor to the Observations sur les écrits modernes
in 1735) and reached its height with the production of his fifth, Dardanus, in 1739. Rameau was the object of
several satirical engravings and a scurrilous poem; this last led to an unseemly brawl between the composer and its
perpetrator, Pierre-Charles Roy (Sadler, 1988). Although the dispute abated during the following decade as the
public came to terms with the composer's powerful and sophisticated idiom, and accepted that a great theorist
could also be a great artist, echoes could still be heard in the 1750s and beyond. Despite the controversy,
Rameau's first five operas were by no means failures. Castor et Pollux and Dardanus, the two least successful at
their first appearance, had runs of 21 and 26 performances respectively. The two earliest opéras-ballets proved
even more popular: Les Indes galantes was performed 64 times between 1735 and 1737, Les fêtes d'Hébé 71
times in 1739 and 1740.
In December 1733 Rameau made his first visits to the court. Between then and 1740 all the operas he had so far
written were given concert performances attended by the queen, Maria Leszczyńska, and occasionally by Louis
XV. The singers sometimes included Rameau's wife; the Mercure de France (February 1734) reports that ‘the
Queen highly praised her voice and her tasteful ornamentation’.
Almost immediately after the première of Hippolyte et Aricie, Rameau began the first of three collaborations with
Voltaire. The libretto of the ill-fated Samson had been sketched between October and December 1733, and the
composer had written enough of the music by the following October for a rehearsal to take place at the home of the
intendant des finances, Louis Fagon. By then, however, the Sorbonne had begun to take an unwelcome interest in
an opera based on scripture by a writer known for his outspoken criticism of the religious and political
establishment; further, Voltaire had enemies at court. Thus, despite the successful precedent of Montéclair's
biblical opera Jephté, fears of censorship beset the project. At the beginning of 1736 Voltaire was still keen to see it
through, but Rameau appears to have lost interest and the opera was subsequently abandoned. Voltaire later
stated that music from Samson had eventually found its way into ‘Les Incas’ (the second entrée of Les Indes
galantes), Castor et Pollux and Zoroastre. Fragments may also be identified in La princesse de Navarre and in the
1753 version of Les fêtes de Polymnie (Sadler, C1989).
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At the time of his first collaboration with Voltaire, Rameau was beginning his last with Piron – not this time at the
Fair theatres but on the exalted stage of the Comédie-Française. Les courses de Tempé, one of the few pastoral
plays staged there, was given a single performance, on 30 August 1734. The Marquis D'Argenson described
Rameau's divertissement (now largely lost) as ‘pretty and well performed’.
During the 1730s Rameau came under the protection of the tax-farmer A.-J.-J. Le Riche de La Pouplinière and
acted as his director of music. La Pouplinière was one of the richest men in France and an influential patron of the
arts. The formerly accepted date for this development, 1731, was based on a collection of Voltaire's letters, the first
of which is now believed to have been written in October 1733. Rameau had not by then joined La Pouplinière's
entourage. Evidence for earlier contacts between the two (a rehearsal of Hippolyte said to have been held in La
Pouplinière's home in the spring or summer of 1733 and his ‘loan’ of Rameau during September to the financier
Samuel Bernard) is not trustworthy (Sadler, A1988). Moreover, in a letter to Rameau of around December of that
year, Voltaire refers to the composer as being under the protection of the Prince of Carignan, and it seems he
continued so for some time since for well over a year Voltaire sent messages to Rameau, not through his own
agent, Formont (who lived at La Pouplinière's house), but by way of Berger, the prince's secretary. It is in any case
more likely that the fashion-conscious La Pouplinière would have interested himself not so much in Rameau the
eminent theorist and teacher as in Rameau the newly famous (or infamous) opera composer. Significantly, it was in
1734 or shortly after that the financier took as mistress Thérèse des Hayes, a devoted pupil of Rameau and one of
his most enthusiastic champions; it may even have been Thérèse, whom La Pouplinière later married, who
introduced Rameau to the household. At all events, Rameau cannot with any certainty be said to have joined the
financier's circle before November 1735, and possibly not until August 1736.
Rameau's association with La Pouplinière, which lasted until 1753, was of the utmost importance to his career. The
financier's home was ‘a meeting-place for all classes. Courtiers, men of the world, literary folk, artists, foreigners,
actors, actresses, filles de joie, all were assembled there. The house was known as the menagerie and the host as
the sultan’ (Grimm; see Tourneux, A1877–82). It was there that Rameau met most of his future librettists, while the
house became ‘la citadelle du Ramisme’ (Cucuel, A1913). Yet little is known about the terms of Rameau's
appointment or, before 1751, the size and constitution of his patron's musical establishment. In 1741 La
Pouplinière took over some of the Prince of Carignan's players, including the violinist Joseph Canavas, possibly
the flautist Michel Blavet and (more doubtfully, despite his signing himself in 1751 ‘chef des violons de M. de la
Pouplinière’), the violinist Jean-Pierre Guignon. Singers and dancers from the Paris Opéra were frequent dinner
guests and took part in concerts and theatrical entertainments. In the later 1740s La Pouplinière was to import from
Germany and Bohemia virtuoso players of the clarinet and orchestral horn. These instruments were then new to
France, and Rameau was the first to use them at the Paris Opéra.
A second polemic on the subject of music theory erupted in the mid-1730s, this time between Rameau and his
former friend, the Jesuit Louis-Bertrand Castel, mathematician, physicist and scientific journalist. The history of
their association dates back to 1722 with the publication of the Traité de l'harmonie. Castel had been captivated by
the treatise and had sought Rameau out through a mutual friend, ‘M.B.’ (perhaps the Borin whose book La
musique théorique et pratique, published anonymously in 1722 shortly after the Traité, is full of praise for Rameau's
book). Castel took harmony lessons with Rameau, and may also have introduced him to the work of the
mathematician and acoustician J. Sauveur. Castel's enthusiastic review of the Traité (Journal de Trévoux,
October–November 1722) brought Rameau's work to the attention of a wide – indeed, a European – readership.
Reviewing the Nouveau système six years later, Castel had become distinctly cooler. By the early 1730s his views
had diverged sharply from Rameau's. It was for this reason, he was later to claim, that he had refused the offer of
all Rameau's research work, around 1733, when the composer had considered abandoning music theory to
concentrate on his newly launched operatic career. That was apparently their last meeting. Two years later,
Castel's article ‘Nouvelles expériences d'optique & d'acoustique’ (Journal de Trévoux, August–December 1735)
contained an implication that Rameau had not sufficiently acknowledged his debt to certain earlier scholars.
Rameau and Castel exchanged open letters, the tone of which is stiffly courteous. But when Castel finally wrote a
grudging and equivocal review of Génération harmonique (1737), Rameau unleashed a riposte of such withering
sarcasm that the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, which had hitherto published the entire polemic, seems to have
refused to print it; it appeared instead in the Abbé Prévost's independent Le pour et contre (1738). Voltaire's
characteristically witty ‘Lettre à Mr. Rameau’ congratulating Orpheus Rameau on vanquishing Euclid Castel
appeared later the same year.
Génération harmonique is Rameau's only major theoretical work of the period 1733–49. It was dedicated to the
members of the Académie Royale des Sciences, who responded by commissioning a report on the work from three
of their foremost academicians, R.-A. Ferchault de Réaumur and J.-J. Dortous de Mairan, both physicists, and the
scholar E.S. de Gamaches. The last two had already discussed music theory with Rameau, Mairan as much as 12
years earlier. The report was complimentary and Rameau proudly included in his treatise the ‘Extrait des registres
de l'Académie Royale des sciences’ which echoed the sentiments of the report and was signed by the academy's
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eminent secretary, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. Shortly after publication, Rameau sent a copy to the
distinguished English scientist Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society, together with a letter inviting his
opinion of the work. It is not known whether Sir Hans replied.
Between 1737 and 1741 Rameau's views on temperament were criticized by Louis Bollioud-Mermet in lectures at
the Lyons Académie des Beaux-Arts. In a letter to Jean-Pierre Christin, secretary of the academy (3 November
1741), Rameau defended himself sharply; he may even have been responsible for the open letter ‘from a person
interested in Rameau's works’ threatening to publish Bollioud's paper ‘in the public interest’ unless the writer did so
himself. Other academicians, notably Charles Cheinet and Jacques Mathon de la Cour the elder, were staunch
supporters of Rameau's theories.
In December 1737 the Mercure de France carried Rameau's announcement that he was establishing a school of
composition. Up to 12 pupils would meet each week for three two-hour classes. In this way, Rameau claims, a
thorough grasp of the theory and practice of harmony could be gained in six months at the most, even by those
who could not already read music. Around this time, four reviews of Génération harmonique appeared in the
leading Parisian periodicals. That in Le pour et contre was written by ‘a young muse’, almost certainly Thérèse des
Hayes, who was by now Mme de La Pouplinière and renowned for her sharp intellect. (Maret, however, claimed
that the author was ‘Mme de Saint-Maur, née Aléon’, another of Rameau's pupils.) Thérèse and her husband were
among the godparents of the composer's third child, born in 1740. The following year Rameau honoured her
husband by giving one of the Pieces de clavecin en concerts the title ‘La Lapopliniere’ [sic].
The period 1740–44 was uncharacteristically slack by the standards of Rameau's mature years. He produced no
theoretical writings – indeed, nothing of this kind between 1738 and 1749 – while his musical output was limited to
the publication of the Pieces de clavecin en concerts (1741) and the revision for their first revivals of Hippolyte et
Aricie in 1742, Les Indes galantes in 1743 and Dardanus (this revision admittedly involving much new music) in
1744. There is some evidence of a quarrel with the Opéra management (Sadler, A1988). That might explain his
marked lack of enthusiasm for a libretto, Pandore, that Voltaire offered him in 1740, though Rameau might equally
have refused it because he sensed the controversial nature of the work and its librettist or wished to avoid another,
possibly fruitless collaboration. At all events, Rameau's productivity revived sharply soon after Thuret was replaced
by Berger as Opéra director in May 1744.
(iv) 1745–51.
The immediate stimulus to Rameau's creative activity was a series of commissions, three of them from the court,
resulting in the production of no fewer than four dramatic works in 1745. For the festivities surrounding the
dauphin's wedding he composed La princesse de Navarre (his second collaboration with Voltaire) and Platée (a
work that was probably already in progress); for the court celebration of the victory of Fontenoy he wrote Le temple
de la Gloire (again with Voltaire); for the Paris Opéra commemoration of Fontenoy he provided Les fêtes de
Polymnie, a work originally intended, it would seem, for performance at court. Les fêtes de Polymnie was the first of
at least seven collaborations with Louis de Cahusac. Apart from Voltaire and J.F. Marmontel, no other librettist
worked with Rameau on more than two operas.
On 4 May, shortly after the dauphin's wedding, Rameau received a royal pension of 2000 livres and the title
compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roy (in some sources compositeur du cabinet du roy): an exceptional
honour, for the title was normally conferred only on a member of the king's musical establishment.
Thus began a closer association with the court: from 1745 onwards, more than half of Rameau's stage works were
intended for court premières. One, Les surprises de l’Amour (1748), was even written as a vehicle for Mme de
Pompadour's theatrical talents in her Théâtre des Petits Cabinets. There is evidence that, at the time of his first
royal pension, Rameau had not been financially well off. After Le temple de la Gloire Voltaire generously donated
his own fee to Rameau, since ‘his fortune is so inferior to his talents’. (On the other hand, Rameau was already
said to have worked with librettists only if they surrendered their fees to him.) In 1750 the king accorded him a
further pension of 1500 livres, payable by the Opéra out of its revenue. There is, however, some doubt as to
whether this was honoured, at least before 1757.
The five years 1745–9 were Rameau's most productive. No fewer than nine new works were performed, including
the tragédie Zoroastre, the comédie Platée, two pastorales and three opéras-ballets. Moreover, several of his
undated, unperformed operas were probably written during this period or in the following few years (see Green,
B1992). By 1749 his works dominated the stage to such an extent that the Marquis D’Argenson, who had
supervisory responsibility for the Opéra, felt compelled to forbid the management to stage more than two of his
works in any one year, to avoid discouraging other composers.
Around 1750 Rameau had the support of a wider cross-section of the French public than ever before. His position
at court was secure, he enjoyed the esteem of most of the intellectuals (including many who were later to side
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against him) and his works were widely performed in the provinces. The extent to which he had won over the
audiences and performers at the Opéra can be judged by a report in the Mercure de France for May 1751:
At Wednesday's performance [Pigmalion] M. Rameau, who had only just recovered from a long and
dangerous illness, appeared at the Opéra in one of the rear boxes. His presence aroused a murmur
that began in the stalls and spread rapidly throughout the whole audience. Then suddenly there broke
out a general applause and – something that had never been seen before – the assembled orchestra
added their rapturous cheers to those of the parterre … [Rameau] shared with the public the pleasure
of an excellent performance. That night it seemed that all the actors were striving to excel
themselves.
Such spontaneous demonstrations of respect and affection were to become more common during the 1750s and
after. Even so, audiences were still slow to respond to new works; it was frequently observed that Rameau's operas
were really successful only when they were revived.
One operatic casualty of the period was the tragédie Linus. Decroix, who acquired and had a copy made of the first
violin part (now almost the sole contemporary source of the music known to survive), was told by the composer's
son Claude-François that the opera was being rehearsed at the home of the Marquise de Villeroi when the
Marquise was suddenly taken seriously ill. In the confusion, the score and all the other parts were lost or stolen.
The rehearsal must have taken place by 1752; the Abbé de Laporte alludes to it in a book published that year. In
1760 he was to state that the opera was never performed because of flaws in the music of the fifth act. Collé had
claimed in 1754 that Rameau had never quite completed the music after La Bruère had made changes to his
libretto. The libretto survives in manuscript.
Rameau's operatic activities in the mid- and later 1740s had left little time for theoretical work, but in 1749 he broke
an 11-year silence in this field with some minor writings. (The long silence supports Castel's claim that in the mid-
1730s Rameau had felt he could develop his theoretical work no further.) The following year he published the far
more important Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie. Here he had the 35-year-old Denis Diderot as
collaborator: hence the clarity and elegance of what is generally regarded as one of his best and most mature
theoretical works. The Démonstration, approved by members of the Académie Royale des Sciences, including
Alembert, was dedicated to the Count D'Argenson, himself a member of the academy. Though the book was widely
reviewed, no copy – surely deliberately – was sent to the Journal de Trévoux.
In 1745 two events took place that were to sow the seeds of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's undying hatred of Rameau.
Rousseau had completed an opera, Les muses galantes, modelled on Les Indes galantes, and tried to elicit
Rameau's opinion of it. Although Rameau at first refused, a performance of excerpts was arranged at La
Pouplinière's. Rameau listened with growing impatience and, according to Rousseau, finally declared that ‘part of
what he had heard was by someone who was a master of the art and the rest by an ignoramus who did not
understand the first thing about music’. (The stylistic discrepancy he noted is explained by the fact that the young
F.A. Danican Philidor had composed some of the accompaniments and inner parts.) ‘Admittedly’, Rousseau
continued, ‘my work was unequal and inconsistent … Rameau claimed that he could see in me nothing but a little
plagiarist without talent or taste’. Later in the year, while Voltaire and Rameau were busy on Le temple de la Gloire,
the Duke of Richelieu commissioned Rousseau to complete Les fêtes de Ramire, the libretto of which had been
written by Voltaire to re-use Rameau's divertissements from La princesse de Navarre. The task involved writing
verse as well as music, and Rousseau maintained that it cost him much effort. But the result was so harshly
criticized by Richelieu's mistress (the scarcely impartial Mme de La Pouplinière) that the work was sent back to
Rameau. Rousseau claimed to have composed the overture and recitatives, but surviving sources suggest that his
musical contribution to the work as finally performed consisted of little more than the undistinguished monologue
‘O
mort, viens terminer les douleurs de ma vie’. At all events, Rousseau gained no credit from the episode. From then
on, he seldom missed an opportunity to speak in scathing or hostile terms of the compositions, and to a lesser
extent the theories, of his former idol.
When Rameau's troublesome nephew Jean-François was sent to the prison of For l'Evêque in 1748 for insulting
the Opéra directors, the composer was asked by the authorities ‘how long he deemed it fitting that [the nephew]
should stay there’. Rameau evidently suggested that Jean-François be deported to the colonies. In his reply, the
Secretary of State, Phélypeaux, sympathized that Jean-François had not profited more from the good education
procured for him by his uncle, but explained that deportation was out of the question; the nephew was released
three weeks later.
(v) 1752–64.
During his final 13 years Rameau's operatic activity declined sharply. Apart from two major works, Les Paladins
and Les Boréades, his composition was limited to small-scale pastorales and actes de ballet and to the revision of
earlier works for revivals, notably Castor et Pollux and Zoroastre. From 1749 until 1757 Rameau was on bad terms
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with the Opéra management. Of the new works from 1752 onwards, only Les Paladins was given there; the rest
were performed solely at court. Les Boréades is now known to have been prepared for performance not at the
Opéra but at Choisy in June 1763; it was rehearsed two months earlier in Paris and Versailles by a mixture of court
and Opéra personnel, but subsequently abandoned and never performed in the 18th century (Bouissou, C1983).
Until his last year, Rameau continued to take an active part in new productions and in revivals, giving his views on
the distribution of roles and attending rehearsals.
No doubt advancing age and the ill health that Rameau and others increasingly allude to contributed to the
reduction in the quantity, if not necessarily the quality, of his compositions. But this slackening coincides with a
remarkable resurgence of activity in his theoretical work. From 1752 he produced some 23 writings. Many are short
pamphlets; but more weighty works include the Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique (in part a reply to
J.-J. Rousseau's notorious Lettre sur la musique françoise), the Code de musique pratique and the recently
discovered Vérités également ignorées et interessantes tirées du sein de la nature, Rameau's last work (formerly
known only in the fragmentary form, Vérités interessantes; see Schneider, F1986).
The dissemination of his theories was given powerful impetus in 1752 when Alembert, acting on Diderot's
suggestion that ‘someone should extract [Rameau's] admirable system from the obscurities that enshroud it and
put it within everyone's reach’, produced his Eléments de musique théorique et pratique suivant les principes de M.
Rameau. Here the master's theories are expounded with lucidity and elegance. The book was translated into
German by Rameau's lifelong admirer F.W. Marpurg (Leipzig, 1757). A letter of about 1750 from the 33-year-old
Alembert to the 67-year-old Rameau reveals that the two were on cordial terms. The Mercure de France of May
1752 contains an open letter in which Rameau touchingly acknowledges his deep gratitude to Alembert.
By contrast, he was brusque to the point of rudeness with a little-known provincial, ‘M. Ducharger of Dijon’, whose
niggling criticism of his ideas Rameau had apparently promised to answer in a forthcoming book. When Ducharger
inquired when this would appear, he received the following reply (13 June 1754) which he later published:
Sir, The book in question is now in print. It is entitled Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique.
I have neither time nor health to think or to reflect. Forgive me, sir, I am old, you are young, and I am
your very humble and very obedient servant, RAMEAU.
The Observations contain a dismissal of Ducharger's ideas but without even mentioning him by name.
Evidence of Rameau's contacts with foreign scholars increases markedly in this period as he sought wider
recognition. Beginning in 1750 he entered successively into correspondence with Gabriel Cramer (Geneva),
Johann II Bernoulli (Basle), Christian Wolff (Halle), Leonhard Euler (Berlin), Giovanni Poleni (Padua), J.B. Beccari
and Padre Martini (both at Bologna). Although he had also communicated with many French scientists and
scholars over the years, the list now widened to include the aesthetician Charles Batteux, the architect
CharlesEtienne Briseux and the scholar François Arnaud, all of whom were to prove influential.
With the obvious exception of Rousseau, Rameau still had the support of most of the intellectuals at the start of the
decade. During the Querelle des Bouffons (1752–4), however, Melchior Grimm and others found it expedient, partly
at least for extra-musical reasons, to side against the principal living exponent of French music; and Rameau was
soon to break with Diderot and Alembert in a polemic concerning the articles on music in the Encyclopédie. When
Diderot had asked him to write some of these, Rameau had regretfully declined but had offered to comment on the
manuscripts before they were printed. Eventually it was Rousseau who wrote these articles. He later complained
that Diderot had allowed him only three weeks and that this had impaired their quality. Rameau, however, was
never shown them before publication (possibly Rousseau had seen to that). His pride doubtless hurt, he kept silent
for some time, but eventually felt compelled to point out their failings in a series of pamphlets. By the time Diderot
and Alembert had been fully drawn into the conflict, when they defended Rousseau in the preface to volume six of
the Encyclopédie (1756), Rameau had alienated all the principal philosophes. Even without this quarrel, however,
these men could not have allied themselves with some of the latest developments in Rameau’s thinking, in
particular when it took on a metaphysical or a theological tone.
The break with the philosophes must have been desperately disappointing to Rameau, since it had long been his
principal ambition to be accepted as a thinker. ‘Can it not be clearly seen’, he wrote to Diderot and Alembert in
1757, ‘that in honouring me with the titles “artiste célèbre” and “musicien” you wish to rob me of the one [i.e.
“philosophe”] which I alone among musicians deserve, since I was the first to have made music a science by the
discovery of its natural principle?’ He must have been equally disappointed never to have been elected to the
Académie Royale des Sciences despite the high regard that the academy had shown for his work. The nearest he
came to such an honour was in 1752 when, with several other distinguished Burgundians, he was elected an
associate member of Président Richard de Ruffey's Dijon literary society. When that society ceased to exist in
1761, he was elected to its victorious rival, the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon.
After nearly two decades, Rameau's association with La Pouplinière came to an end in 1753. Although the financier
had separated from his wife five years earlier, the composer and Mme Rameau stayed on, spending each summer
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at his country home in Passy and even living for a time in an apartment in his Paris residence. But in 1753 La
Pouplinière's new mistress established herself there and soon made life unbearable for a number of residents,
including the Rameaus. At the same time, the financier seemed keen to replace his venerable, 70-year-old music
director with a more fashionable musician. Maret claimed that the final rift came when La Pouplinière installed
another composer in his house. If so, that composer cannot (as has been conjectured) have been Johann Stamitz;
although Stamitz was eventually to succeed Rameau at La Pouplinière's, he arrived in Paris only in 1754.
Rameau's activities in the 1750s still included teaching. In addition to those already mentioned, his pupils over the
years had included Diderot and possibly Alembert, the future Mme Denis (Voltaire's niece and mistress),
AnneJeanne Boucon (later to marry the composer Mondonville) and the composers Claude Balbastre, Pierre-Montan
Berton, Antoine Davergne, Pietro Gianotti and Jean-Benjamin de La Borde.
In his last years, aware that time was running out, he made feverish attempts to finish his theoretical work, now
more important to him than composition. A rare glimpse of the aged Rameau is contained in his letter of November
1763 to the businessman Casaubon. He begins with profuse apologies for having seemed brusque or even
insulting in a previous letter, but ‘the time that I take up to write concerning my domestic affairs is very precious to
me since I steal it from Him whom I fear and who does not fail me, so that I can bring to light new discoveries’. He
was forced to communicate his thoughts in abbreviated form, he says, because of ‘a lack of brainpower, of
eyesight, and because I cannot concentrate nowadays more than two hours during the daytime’. Very few personal
letters of this sort have survived. According to Claude-François Rameau, who in his youth had often served as a
messenger boy, his father burnt most of his correspondence (Schneider, A1985).
By now Rameau was comparatively rich, having a respectable income from his royal pensions, pupils' fees,
payments from the Opéra, the court and, until 1753, La Pouplinière. There was also revenue from the sale of
books, scores and pamphlets. Details survive of a number of his investments. In 1757 the Opéra belatedly granted
him a pension of 1500 livres, though Rameau justifiably claimed that he had never been adequately recompensed
by the management, considering the revenue his works had brought them. Three years earlier, he helped his son
Claude-François buy the coveted title of valet de chambre in the king's service, providing 17,500 of the necessary
21,500 livres. On several other occasions he gave financial help to members of his family circle (for the most recent
evidence see Bouquet-Boyer, Dijon 1983).
Rameau died at his home in the rue des Bons-Enfants on 12 September 1764, three weeks after contracting a
violent fever. He was buried the next day in his parish church of St Eustache. Five months earlier, he had received
from the king letters patent of nobility; among the papers found after his death is proof that the necessary registry
fees were paid, but only during his final illness and probably on his wife's or eldest son's initiative. The inventory of
his estate, valued at almost 200,000 livres, reveals a sparsely furnished apartment containing only one musical
instrument (‘un vieux clavecin à un clavier en mauvais état’). Yet money bags in the writing desk in his wife's room
contained coins worth 40,584 livres. Mme Rameau was able to provide a grand ‘society’ wedding for her 20-yearold
daughter Marie-Alexandrine (according to Collé, Rameau had sworn that she would never marry in his lifetime)
less than four months after the composer died.
Three memorial services were held in Paris. The first, at the church of the Pères de l'Oratoire (27 September
1764), involved nearly 180 musicians from the Opéra and from the musique du roi and was attended by perhaps
1500 people. Other services were held at the Carmelite church (‘les Carmes du Luxembourg’) on 11 October and
again at the Pères de l'Oratoire on 16 December. Similar commemorations took place in various provincial towns,
among them Marseilles, Orléans and Avignon. Dr Hugues Maret, secretary of the Dijon Academy of which Rameau
had been a member, delivered a carefully researched éloge (25 August 1765) that was published the following year
and is one of the most valuable sources of information on the composer's life.
Descriptions of Rameau's physique agree on his height and build: ‘his stature was extremely tall; he was lean and
scraggy, with more the air of a ghost than a man’ (Chabanon); ‘though much taller than Voltaire, he was as gaunt
and emaciated’ (Grimm; see Tourneux, A1877–82); ‘like a long organ pipe with the blower away’ (Piron; see
Proschwitz, A1982). Collé and Grimm give extremely unflattering and doubtless jaundiced accounts of his
personality. ‘Rameau was by nature harsh and unsociable; any feeling of humanity was foreign to him … His
dominant passion was avarice’ (Grimm); ‘he was a difficult person and very disagreeable to live with; … he was,
furthermore, the most uncivil, the most unmannerly and the most unsociable man of his day’ (Collé; see Barbier,
ed., A1807). Almost all accounts are by those who knew him only as an old and evidently eccentric man; the
picture that they give is thus almost certainly distorted. There are, sadly, scarcely any accounts from his earlier
years to provide balance. He was undoubtedly a difficult man to work with, as numerous scholars, librettists and
others discovered. His shyness and modesty are attested by various anecdotes. The charge of avarice cannot be
dismissed, but against it must be set his acts of generosity to members of his family.
As a keyboard player he excelled in continuo realization. Although he never acquired an organist's post of any great
prestige in Paris, his playing at Ste Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie attracted many music lovers. Marmontel described him,
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on the organ at La Pouplinière's house at Passy, playing ‘pieces of astonishing vitality’. Maret's assessment, though
second-hand, derives from those well acquainted with Rameau's playing: ‘Less brilliant in execution, perhaps, than
Marchand's, but more learned, his touch yielded nothing in delicacy to that of Clérambault’.
2. Cantatas and motets.
Rameau's first sojourn in Paris (c1706–9) coincided with the remarkable first outpouring of French cantata
publications from Morin, Bernier, J.B. Stuck, Campra and others. If Rameau experimented with the new genre in
those years, the results have been lost. Most of his surviving cantatas – all but Le berger fidèle (c1728) and the
recently identified Cantate pour le jour de la Saint Louis (probably dating from the early to mid-1730s; see Green,
B1992) – seem to have been written in the provinces during the decade or so before his return to Paris in 1722.
For much of the 20th century, Rameau's cantatas were regarded as mere prentice works, insipid and somewhat
anonymous beside the powerful and individual creations of his maturity. While it is true that only Orphée and Le
berger fidèle contain hints of the emotional force of the future opera composer, that has much to do with the fact
that the cantata was always a relatively lightweight genre, decorative and largely undramatic. There may be little
profundity here, but there is much that is charming, witty and thoroughly refined. To his immediate forerunners
Rameau owes not only his conception of the cantata but to a large extent its musical style, a peculiar amalgam of
French and Italian elements that tends strongly towards the latter. Among the distinctive features of Rameau's
cantatas are the many energetic and technically demanding obbligato lines, in particular the concerto-like bass viol
parts of L'impatience and Les amants trahis and the fiery tirades in Thétis. Not surprisingly, his work tends to be
harmonically less bland than that of his contemporaries, especially in such poignant movements as the first air of
Le berger fidèle or the central monologue, ‘Emu par des nouveaux accords’, in Orphée. Rameau's only other
secular vocal music consists of convivial drinking songs and some canons, genres that for him, as for others of his
day, were not mutually exclusive.
For one who was employed as a church musician for at least 26 years, albeit mainly as organist rather than as
maître de musique, Rameau appears to have written remarkably little sacred music. Apart from the lost Exultet
coelum laudibus, there is no evidence of any petits motets. Only four grands motets survive, two of them
incomplete. The collector Decroix, who searched assiduously for missing Rameau works during the later 18th
century, was unable to locate anything further. Likewise, the organizers of various memorial services to the
composer in 1764 and 1765 evidently found nothing suitable among his sacred music and resorted to making
contrafacta from his operas which they performed alongside works by Gilles, Philidor, Rebel, Giroust and others.
It may well be that Rameau's grands motets were in any case intended not so much for church as for concert use.
This is certainly true of the surviving version of In convertendo, performed at the Concert Spirituel in Paris in 1751,
while Deus noster refugium was probably written for the Lyons Concert. Like Quam dilecta tabernacula, both have
a quasi-secular character with frequent graphically descriptive passages and bold orchestral writing. All are
substantial works (except ‘Laboravi’, an isolated quintet almost certainly detached from a lost grand motet). In their
use of clearcut, autonomous movements, elaborate arias and ensembles, predominantly contrapuntal choruses
and a vigorously independent orchestra, they resemble, and in some works perhaps even anticipate, the grands
motets of Lalande's later years. Solos and to a lesser extent choruses tend to be more brilliant and technically
demanding than those of Lalande and other older contemporaries. Both Deus noster and In convertendo contain
prominent cross-references between movements.
3. Keyboard music.
Until recently, Rameau's output of keyboard music was believed to consist of three solo collections (1706, 1724,
c1729–30), a volume of accompanied keyboard music (the Pieces de clavecin en concerts, 1741) that also
contains five solo arrangements, and the independent La Dauphine (?1747 or later). To these must now be added
some two dozen harpsichord arrangements of orchestral music from Les Indes galantes (1735; see Sadler, D1979)
and, if the attribution is reliable, Les petits marteaux (Fuller, D1983). Some 18th- and 19th-century writers claimed
that Rameau composed for the organ, but no such works have survived.
This corpus of music, containing Rameau's first known compositions as well as works of his full maturity, naturally
exhibits considerable development of style and approach. The 1706 book comprises a single suite much in the
tradition of Lebègue, Louis Marchand and Gaspard Le Roux. Beginning with an old-fashioned, partly unmeasured
prelude (one of the last of its kind printed in Rameau's day), it consists mainly of the standard dances – two
allemandes, courante, gigue, two sarabandes, gavotte and menuet – and contains only one genre piece,
‘Vénitienne’.
In the next two keyboard collections, this type of suite co-exists with a newer one: each contains a pair of suites
contrasted both in tonality and in character. The first of each pair is dominated by dances (not all of them the
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traditional ones) and includes only two or three genre pieces; the second consists almost exclusively of pieces with
genre titles. In their make-up, if not in their style, these latter suites are closer to the ordres of François Couperin,
19 of which (books 1–3) were published between the appearance of Rameau's first two collections. Given that this
newer type was to dominate French harpsichord publications, Rameau can be seen to be a little conservative in
devoting half of each collection to the older type. The traditional dance movements of the third book, and
particularly the monumental allemande and courante, are indeed among the finest and most highly developed in
the French repertory. It may be that Rameau's interest in such dances was prolonged by the example of Handel,
whose first book of suites, published in 1720, he appears to have known. Kenneth Gilbert (D1979) points out the
remarkable resemblance between the Gavotte with six doubles in the third collection (c1729–30) and the Air with
five doubles in Handel's Suite no.3. The structure of Rameau's theme closely follows Handel's, as do the textures
and figuration of the first three variations. His intention seems to be to emulate and, in the amazing display of
virtuosity in the last three variations, to surpass his model.
If the new emphasis on genre pieces represents one of Rameau's few important debts to Couperin, an equally
important influence may have been Castel. Castel claimed that he introduced Rameau, soon after the composer
had settled in Paris in 1722, to the ‘birdsongs noted in Kircher’ (i.e. in Musurgia universalis, 1650), among which he
specifically mentioned the hen and the nightingale; with Kircher as his example, Castel claimed to have given
Rameau ‘the outlines of pieces which imitate the truth of Nature’. While Rameau's birds in Le rappel des oiseaux,
La poule and elsewhere do not in fact sing the same songs as Kircher's, the composer was undoubtedly stimulated
in the mid-1720s to produce his series of magnificent descriptive movements drawn not only from nature (as in the
bird pieces, Les tourbillons and others) but also from the theatre: Les sauvages, the popularity of which was to be
unrivalled in the 18th century, characterizes the dancing of two Louisiana Indians at the Théâtre Italien in 1725; Les
cyclopes may well have been inspired by the portrayal of these one-eyed giants in Lully's Persée, revived in
November 1722 and probably one of the first operas Rameau saw on returning to Paris. Many titles (e.g. Les
soupirs, La joyeuse, Les tendres plaintes) evoke a mood. Some (La vilageoise, La follette, L'egiptienne) are
character studies. Others (Les trois mains, L'enharmonique) allude to compositional technique.
Rameau's final collection, the Pieces de clavecin en concerts (1741), incorporates several features, most obviously
the inclusion of additional instruments, that set it apart from the earlier ones. There is also the internal organization
of the collection: whereas the suites of the first three books each contain between seven and ten movements, the
concerts of the fourth contain only three or five. Moreover, dance movements are almost entirely supplanted by
genre pieces; of the 19 movements, all but the two menuets and tambourins have characteristic genre titles. By this
time, however, Rameau's approach to titles had changed. While five movements still bear such titles as La timide,
La pantomime or L'indiscrette, nine are named after pupils, patrons, fellow composers and others, a fashion he had
hitherto ignored. The link between title and piece may not, in any case, be strong: according to Rameau's preface,
many titles were suggested by ‘persons of taste and skill’ after the pieces had been composed.
Not surprisingly, all four books consist almost exclusively of binary and rondeau forms (there are no chaconnes).
But whereas the first and third books are composed mainly of binary movements, more than half the pieces in the
second are rondeaux. In the Pieces … en concerts, binary movements outnumber rondeaux by two to one.
Rameau's handling of binary form shows a steady development. In 1706 he still occasionally used the traditional
French technique of balancing elegant phrases that are rhythmically similar but melodically independent. In the
later collections, motivic organization becomes increasingly tighter, and the integration of the two sections by
‘rhyming’ terminations, structural symmetry and other means becomes far closer. None of the solo pieces,
however, comes as near to sonata form as La pantomime in the Pieces … en concerts, with its brief but
unmistakable development section and clearcut recapitulation.
In all three of his mature collections, Rameau provided lengthy prefaces that give invaluable insights into the
performance and composition of his harpsichord music. Among other things, the 1724 preface draws attention to
two features of his keyboard writing: roulements – virtuoso scale passages of the sort found in Les tourbillons, Les
trois mains or La Cupis and often involving hand-crossing; and batteries – rapid, disjunct figuration of which five
main varieties may be distinguished: (1) the same note or notes are struck alternately by the two hands (ex.1); (2)
the hands play rapidly in turn, the left alternately above and below the right (ex.2); (3) the hand rotates around the
thumb in widely-spaced figures of various shapes (ex.3); (4) one hand is required to make successive wide leaps
in the same direction (ex.4); and (5) the hands share brilliant arpeggio figures spanning up to four octaves. None of
these may be found in the 1706 book but they are common from 1724 onwards. Although Rameau's claim to have
invented the first two may not be entirely justified, his use of such virtuoso figuration is both more extensive and
more imaginative than that of any French predecessor; it contributes to the muscular yet spacious character of such
pieces as the A minor Gavotte and Les niais de Sologne (with their multiple doubles), Les cyclopes and many of
the Pieces … en concerts.
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While Rameau's keyboard idiom shows a remarkable flexibility and variety of texture, overt examples of the classic
style luthé beloved of Couperin and his predecessors are strikingly rare, at least from the second book onwards.
Apart from the extraordinarily Couperinesque Les soupirs, or La Livri from the Pieces … en concerts, it may be
found only fleetingly in the mature collections. Broken-chord figures, often slurred to indicate that notes should be
held beyond their written value, continue to form an important element of his style, however. Although the compass
required for his works gradually increases from just over four octaves in 1706 to a full five octaves in 1741, Rameau
was unusual among the French harpsichord composers in being relatively indifferent to the exploration of
unfamiliar keyboard sonorities. He more than compensated, however, in harmonic boldness, at least from the third
book (c1729–30) onwards. Examples include the strange progressions of the A major Sarabande, the quirky
chromaticisms in La triomphante and the G minor Menuet of 1741, and above all the frankly experimental
L'enharmonique.
On at least 20 occasions Rameau borrowed harpsichord pieces for use in his operas. More numerous are his
keyboard arrangements of orchestral originals, even apart from those pieces in the 1724 book (e.g. the musette,
tambourin and rigaudons) that are almost certainly derived from the music to L'Endriague (1723). In 1735 or 1736
Rameau made harpsichord transcriptions of about two dozen movements from Les Indes galantes; these were
published in a multi-purpose volume where the opera's set pieces are regrouped into four concert suites. In his
arrangements Rameau used harpsichord-style ornament signs rather than those normal in opera scores; the
arrangements were, however, intended to be played either as solos or as ensemble pieces, and this dual purpose
prevented Rameau from using keyboard figuration that could not easily be adapted by other instrumentalists. Even
so, many of the pieces are no less idiomatic than, say, La follette, L'indifferente or the rigaudons of earlier
collections. The best of them, the ‘Air gratieux pour les Amours’, the menuets, the rigaudons and, above all, the
‘Air vif pour Zéphire et la Rose’, make attractive additions to the repertory. The arrangements make more use of full
block chords and left-hand octave passages than do Rameau's earlier keyboard works, foreshadowing the greater
use of such features in the Pieces … en concerts.
In permitting other instrumentalists to double the harpsichord, the arrangements from Les Indes galantes might be
considered Rameau's first contribution to the genre of accompanied keyboard music. Far more important in this
respect, however, is his final collection, the Pieces de clavecin en concerts, in which the harpsichord is partnered
by a violin or flute and a seven-string basse de viole or second violin. From his preface it is clear that the immediate
stimulus was Mondonville's Pieces de clavecin en sonates op.3 (1734), for harpsichord and violin, though the
composer must have been aware of a longer tradition of accompanied keyboard music.
Rameau's technical demands on the players, of harpsichord and viol especially, are high. Indeed, the viol part is
one of the most taxing in the repertory: the instrument spends so little time doubling the bass and so much in the
higher registers that the composer's alternative part for second violin involves remarkably little adaptation. The
collection was published in score, Rameau stated, ‘because not only must the three instruments blend but … the
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violin and viol must above all adapt themselves to the harpsichord, distinguishing what is merely accompaniment
from what is thematic, in order to play still more softly in the former case’. In spite of the subtle and intimate
interplay between the three instruments, the harpsichord remains the dominant partner. Indeed, the composer
maintained that the pieces could be played by harpsichord alone; his preface gives detailed instructions as to what
small changes would be necessary if this were done, and the volume includes solo arrangements of five pieces that
required more extensive adaptation. Although we might not agree with Rameau that such solo versions ‘lose
nothing’, a number of movements, notably those of the second concert, deserve to be heard more often in this
guise.
Apart from the 1706 collection, surviving exemplars of which are so rare that it was long considered lost, Rameau's
harpsichord publications circulated widely. Although there were people who preferred such music ‘free of that
affected harmony and those risky and brilliant passages that astonish the mind more than they touch and charm
the heart’ (Titon du Tillet, Suite du Parnasse françois jusqu'en 1743, 1743), the collections proved at least as
influential as Couperin's. There can be little doubt, however, that they contributed to an emphasis, in the works of
his successors, on virtuosity at the expense of emotional depth and intellectual weight. Indeed, Rameau's own last
surviving harpsichord pieces, La Dauphine and Les petits marteaux, cannot escape the same criticism.
4. Dramatic music.
By French standards, Rameau's operatic output was large. Taking into account lengthy prologues and works now
lost, it amounts to the equivalent of more than a hundred separate acts. This quantity is the more astonishing in
view of the composer's late start at the Opéra and his continued production of theoretical writings.
The operas may be grouped into three periods: 1733–9, 1745–51 and 1753–63. To the first belong five works, the
tragédies Hippolyte et Aricie, Castor et Pollux and Dardanus and the opéras-ballets Les Indes galantes and Les
fêtes d'Hébé. All are now considered among his finest achievements, controversial though they may have been at
their first appearance. The second period, more prolific, includes 12 varied and attractive works but few, apart from
Platée and Pigmalion, that are the equal of those of the first. In his final period Rameau's rate of production
slackened as he devoted more of his by now limited energies to theoretical writing. Most of the operas of this period
are one-act ballets and pastorales, but there are also two full-length works, including one of his finest, Les
Boréades. This and the major revisions of Castor (1754) and Zoroastre (1756) demonstrate that his creative
powers had in no way failed.
Rameau's output includes virtually all the sub-species of French opera then current, but is perhaps most
remarkable for its emphasis on the tragédie. At a time when most composers were paying scant attention to this
weightiest and most demanding of French operatic genres, Rameau devoted to it almost a quarter of his output.
Only four of his seven tragédies were staged during his lifetime (Samson, Linus and Les Boréades were for various
reasons abandoned), but Dardanus and Zoroastre were so extensively revised for their first revivals that these later
versions can almost be considered new works. Rameau himself described the revised Dardanus as a ‘nouvelle
tragédie’ when he published it in 1744.
Revolutionary though they may at first have seemed, Rameau's tragédies now appear firmly rooted in French
operatic tradition. This is true of their subject matter (only Samson and Zoroastre depart from classical myth and
legend or medieval romance), of their dramatic structure and organization (all are in five acts, each involving a
spectacular fête or divertissement) and of many important musical details. Rameau's achievement was to
invigorate the native tradition by bringing to it a musical imagination of unrivalled fertility, a harmonic idiom of
greater richness and variety than that of any French predecessor, and a forcefulness of expression that can still
seem astonishing. He may never have been as fortunate as Lully in his choice of librettist (he is known to have
shied away from the idea of re-setting Quinault), but the librettos of several of his tragédies, notably those by
Pellegrin, Bernard and Voltaire, are among the finest of the 18th century.
Of the five surviving tragédies, the most successful in their integration of music and drama are Hippolyte et Aricie,
Castor et Pollux and Les Boréades. There is about Hippolyte a tragic grandeur that few of Rameau's other works
possess (significantly, the libretto's ancestry can be traced to Euripides by way of Seneca and Racine). This is in no
small measure due to the scope that Pellegrin provided for characterization, his eye for impressive and dramatic
set-pieces and his skill in placing the obligatory divertissements so that they enhance rather than weaken the
action.
In spite of the opera's title, it is not the youthful lovers Hippolytus and Aricia that dominate the drama but rather the
tragic figures of Theseus and Phaedra. That of Theseus is the more extensive and powerful. It gains immensely by
Pellegrin's decision to devote the whole of Act 2 to the king's selfless journey to Hades, his eloquent pleas for the
life of his friend Peirithous and his trial by Pluto's court. In Act 3 Theseus is forced by the welcoming of his loyal
subjects to suppress his reactions to what seems an attempt on his wife's honour by his own son; the delay, subtly
engineered by Pellegrin, gives extra force to Theseus's eventual outburst, the tragic consequences of which are felt
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in Act 4. Finally, his attempted suicide when he discovers his son's innocence and his dignified acceptance of the
punishment exacted by Neptune provide a fitting end to one of the most moving and monumental characterizations
in Baroque opera.
The smaller role of Phaedra naturally suffers from comparison with Racine's altogether more subtle study in the
psychology of jealousy. But the queen's revelation of her guilty love for her stepson is certainly worthy of Racine,
while her expression of remorse at his apparent death is among the outstanding passages in 18th-century opera.
Nevertheless, Hippolyte was never considered Rameau's finest work during the composer's lifetime. This was
undoubtedly the result of the savage cuts, made early in the first run and never restored, that severely weakened
the characterization and blunted the opera's impact.
It was, in fact, Castor et Pollux that was generally regarded as Rameau's crowning achievement, at least from the
time of its first revival (1754) onwards. The opera's subject matter – the brotherly love of the twins Castor and
Pollux, the one mortal, the other immortal – was unusual in French opera of the period, which normally concerned
itself with romantic love. The central theme of the plot is the generosity of Pollux in renouncing his immortality so
that his mortal twin might be restored to life. This provides the motivation for more genuine conflicts of feeling than
can be found in any other Rameau opera: the struggle between Pollux's own inclination and his duty, the
complication of his love for Castor's bereaved Telaira, the jealousy of the spurned Phoebe and the conflict of the
brothers' mutual affection, where neither can be persuaded to return to Earth while the other is condemned to
remain in Elysium. This last is particularly marked in the revised, dramatically more taut version of 1754, arguably
the best constructed libretto Rameau set.
Dardanus and Zoroastre are both marred by serious defects in their librettos. The former suffers from an inept and
puerile plot. The latter, though its theme is the conflict of Good and Evil as found in the dualist religion of ancient
Persia (Cahusac's libretto also contains much masonic symbolism), is weakened by structural flaws and by the
introduction of a conventional love element that implausibly involves the great religious reformer Zoroaster himself.
Both works also make excessive use of the supernatural. Although many of the worst failings of these operas were
eliminated or lessened at their first revivals, neither opera succeeds more than fitfully in dramatic terms. Yet they
are full of music that is at times awe-inspiring in its power and seldom below Rameau's best.
If Les Boréades is not quite on the level of Hippolyte and Castor, it avoids most of the failings of the other
tragédies. The plot may be conventional but it is expertly constructed and is swept along by music so lively and
inventive that it is astonishing to realize that Rameau was in his late 70s when he completed it. Much of the work's
character derives from the many representations of storms, whirlwinds and the like (the plot involves Boreas, god of
the North Wind, and his descendants). Though much of this tempestuous writing is directly linked to the action, it
may also be found in the decorative music of the divertissements (e.g. those of Acts 1 and 2) and thus provides a
unifying element. Why the opera was abandoned in 1763 is still not known. Doubtless the explanation has to do
with changing musical tastes in the 1760s, with seemingly subversive elements in the libretto, or with the fact that
the music is phenomenally difficult to perform on mid-18th-century instruments, particularly the woodwind. It may
even be connected with the disastrous fire which burnt down the Opéra a few weeks before the two rehearsals that
the work is known to have received.
The six opéras-ballets belong to the years 1735–48. Rameau was, however, sporadically concerned with the form
during his final decade or so, refurbishing earlier works and composing numerous one-act ballets and pastorales
that may be considered isolated opéra-ballet entrées, to be loosely combined as ‘fragments’ or ‘spectacles coupés’,
or, like Les sibarites, eventually subsumed into an existing opéra-ballet.
Cahusac (C1754) neatly characterized the differences between opéra-ballet and tragédie: if the latter was ‘un
tableau d'une composition vaste’ like those of Raphael or Michelangelo, the former comprised ‘de jolis Watteau,
des miniatures piquantes’ that demanded precision of design, graceful brushstrokes and a brilliant palette of
colours. Unlike the tragédie with its continuous action, the opéra-ballet is made up of three or four acts or entrées,
each with its self-contained plot. The subject matter of these is linked to some general theme hinted at in the title
(or more often, in Rameau's case, in the subtitle – e.g. Les fêtes de l'Hymen … ou Les dieux d'Egypte) and
expounded during the prologue. In each case, a slender thread of plot leads up to the all-important divertissement,
dominated by spectacle, chorus and, above all, ballet.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the limitations of such a genre preclude dramatic interest. The subject matter
of Pigmalion, for example, is ideally suited to the medium in this respect. The legend is familiar: the sculptor
Pygmalion falls hopelessly in love with his own creation, implores the aid of Venus, and is eventually rewarded
when the statue comes to life. This simple plot gives rise to a surprisingly wide range of moods – the deeply-felt
yearning of Pygmalion's opening monologues, his wonderment and elation as the statue comes to life, the
uninhibited joy of the final divertissement. It also gives a central position to the obligatory ballet: soon after the
statue has come to life, she naturally tries out her steps, at first haltingly but then with growing confidence, until she
has encompassed almost the entire range of dance movements.
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Spectacle in these works is often suggested by exotic locations. Like all the entrées in Les fêtes de l’Hymen,
‘Canope’ is set in ancient Egypt; the action involves preparations for a human sacrifice and culminates in the
overflowing of the River Nile. Equally exotic are the locations of Les Indes galantes. The four entrées are set
respectively in a Turkish garden, a desert in the Peruvian mountains, a Persian market and a village in the North
American forests. Three of the entrées culminate in a ritual act: the adoration of the Sun in ‘Les Incas du Pérou’, a
Persian flower festival in ‘Les fleurs’ and the ceremony of the Great Pipe of Peace in ‘Les sauvages’. The librettist
cleverly uses these ethnic elements to develop fashionable Enlightenment themes involving the interaction of and
contrast between European and other cultures, not always to the former's advantage. In its choice of modern
characters, Les Indes galantes reverted to an earlier style of opéra-ballet pioneered by Campra in L'Europe galante
(1697). Rameau's other works in this genre all derive from the more orthodox oriental and Greek myths or legends.
The opéra-ballet was ideally suited to Rameau's musical talents, and he responded with an inexhaustible stream of
first-rate and by no means merely decorative music. Not surprisingly, many of the opéras-ballets and isolated
entrées have proved to be among his most popular and enduring works.
Among Rameau's remaining operas, two principal species may be distinguished: the pastorale-héroique and the
comédie lyrique. Both differ from opéra-ballet in their use of a single continuous plot and from tragédie in their
division usually into three rather than five acts and in their subject matter. This last is self-evident in the comédies;
the pastorales, for their part, lack the sustained dramatic tone of the tragédie and place greater emphasis on the
decorative divertissement. They are ‘heroic’ only in that they happen to involve the actions of heroes and gods.
Although none of the pastorales contains any serious emotional conflict or much attempt at characterization, their
straightforward plots usually prove adequate to sustain interest from one divertissement to the next. The plots also
provide dramatic justification for the divertissements, which are cleverly varied and rich in colour. Those of Naïs,
for
example, involve the ancient Isthmian Games, a country grotto (where the blind soothsayer Tiresias predicts the
future by interpreting the song of the birds) and Neptune's undersea palace. Supernatural elements, strong in Naïs,
are even stronger in Zaïs and Acante et Céphise which are set in the enchanted world of Middle Eastern
mythology, inhabited by spectacular aerial beings. Not surprisingly, all these operas contain an abundance of
pastoral music, much of it in the languorous yet wistful vein so characteristic of Rameau.
The comédie lyrique was the least established of all the genres that Rameau cultivated. Since the mid-1670s,
when Lully eliminated comic roles from his operas, instances of deliberate humour were rare at the Paris Opéra.
Isolated examples may be found by Campra (1699), Destouches (1704), La Barre (1705), Mouret (1714 and 1742)
and Boismortier (1743). It was perhaps the example of these last two works (Mouret's Les amours de Ragonde and
Boismortier's Don Quichotte chez la duchesse) that stimulated Rameau to choose a comic subject, Platée, for the
celebration of the dauphin's marriage in 1745. Much of the humour derives from the ugliness and incongruous
behaviour of the marsh-nymph Plataea, a travesty role created by the haute-contre Pierre de Jélyotte (fig.5). To
the modern mind the choice of subject may seem distasteful or even mischievous (the dauphine herself is said to
have been plain). But Rameau's contemporaries were less fastidious and apparently voiced no such criticism.
Though not immediately successful, Platée came to be regarded as a masterpiece. That is not an unjust view, for
there can be no denying the work's skilful construction and dramatic pace nor the high level of its musical and
comic invention. Few of these qualities, however, may be found in Les Paladins, Rameau's only other essay in the
genre; yet the musical invention, astonishing in a septuagenarian, remains as fresh as ever.
Rameau's debt to the French operatic tradition extends to most of the musical forms found in his dramatic works
and also to many elements of his style. Few of these elements, however, escaped reappraisal or intensification. In
his recitative, for example, he accepted the fundamental character of the Lullian model, with its meticulously
notated declamatory rhythms, its active bass line and frequent changes of metre; he even accepted many of its
turns of phrase. Yet compared with that of his predecessors, Rameau's recitative seems far more flexible and
varied. It makes greater use of syncopation, cross-accents and, in later works, triplets, and contains a wider variety
of note values (ex.5). Bold leaps, especially those involving augmented or diminished intervals, are frequent (ex.6),
while the severely syllabic style of word-setting is increasingly relieved by discreet use of decorative or expressive
detail (ex.7). Above all, Rameau brought to the recitative one of the richest harmonic idioms of his age, full of 7ths,
9ths and other dissonant chords, numerous appoggiaturas, frequent modulations, often to remote keys, and even
occasional enharmonic progressions.
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Many of these developments arise from a desire to enhance and intensify the declamation. At the same time,
Rameau could not help allowing purely musical considerations to invade his recitative: ‘Lully needs actors’,
Voltaire
reported him as saying, ‘but I need singers’. It was this greater musical elaboration and complexity that caused
many contemporaries to compare his recitative style unfavourably with ‘le beau naturel’ of Lully's.
Accompanied recitative, though by no means absent from the operas of his predecessors, is used by Rameau with
increasing frequency, especially from the mid-1740s onwards. In style it is uniquely French. The vocal line remains
much as in simple recitative, while the accompaniment generally takes one of two principal forms: the first,
reserved for solemn pronouncements, consists of organ-like sustained chords involving double-stopped strings
and, occasionally, independent woodwind lines; the second, found in agitated contexts, consists of tremolandos,
scales and a variety of energetic figures demanding considerable orchestral agility and co-ordination. Rameau
broke new ground in using this sort of accompaniment in passages of dialogue (e.g. Hippolyte et Aricie, Act 4
scene iii). In his later operas, accompanied recitative is treated with growing flexibility and may indeed be used to
add extraordinary intensity even to the briefest passages.
The vocal airs in Rameau's operas, like those of his contemporaries, are of four principal varieties: the dance
songs and ariettes found exclusively in the divertissements, and the airs de mouvement and monologues of the
main scenes. In many of his dance songs, Rameau adopted the traditional practice of ‘parodying’ (in this context,
adapting words to) an existing dance. Often, however, he reworked the material. Occasionally this reworking is so
extensive that air and dance have wholly different musical forms (e.g. ‘Pénétrez les humains’ and the ‘Air vif pour
les Héros’ in the prologue of Le temple de la Gloire).
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Rameau's treatment of the ariette (the French used this diminutive for what, paradoxically, were their longest solo
vocal items) underwent considerable development. In his first operas, these large-scale but essentially decorative
da capo arias are not numerous; moreover, vocal display is limited to long-held notes and to occasional, fairly brief
vocalises on standard words (gloire, volez etc.). It was doubtless the expertise of singers like Marie Fel, Pierre de
Jélyotte and Sophie Arnould that encouraged the composer not only to include more ariettes in his later operas and
revivals but also to increase the element of vocal display. The technical demands of an ariette like ‘Un horizon
serein’ (Les Boréades, 1.iv), with its high tessitura and extended melismas (ex.9), would have been unthinkable 30
years earlier. Even so, the technique required in Rameau's music remained modest by contemporary Italian
standards.
Quite different in character are the vocal set pieces employed outside the divertissements. Much the simplest are
the airs de mouvement (sometimes known as petits airs or airs tendres) that are scattered throughout the recitative.
Rameau's treatment of these airs – some only two or three bars long, most no more than two dozen – differs little
from that of his predecessors. He was, however, inclined to make use of orchestral rather than continuo
accompaniment and to decorate the melodic line with appreciably more ornament (e.g. ‘Que d'un objet aimé’, Les
Boréades, 3.ii).
By far the weightiest ‘arias’ are the large-scale monologues often situated at the beginnings of acts and employed
exclusively for expressions of pathos. Rameau was drawn to this type of air which, in the hands of composers such
as Campra, Destouches and Montéclair, had already developed into a potent, highly-charged mode of expression.
Although most of his monologues involve a da capo section, they have stylistically little in common with
contemporary Italian da capo arias. The vocal lines, slow-moving, intense and almost entirely syllabic, have the
character of heightened recitative. The opening ritornello introduces thematic ideas that are employed, often only
loosely, in the subsequent accompaniments but not necessarily in the vocal line itself. Accompaniments tend to be
very rich and sombre, as in ‘Tristes apprêts’ (Castor et Pollux, 1.iv) or ‘Lieux funestes’ (Dardanus, 1744 version,
4.i), both of which have important lines for bassoons.
French opera in Rameau's day was as rich in ensembles and choruses as it had always been. In this it contrasts
strikingly with contemporary opera seria where such elements had become rare. Yet even by French standards,
Rameau's first opera contains a high proportion of ensembles, several of them (e.g. the enharmonic Trio des
Parques, Hippolyte, 3.iv) quite extensive. This opera includes a number of duets in which the characters express
conflicting ideas in terse, vigorous counterpoint. To many Frenchmen this sort of ensemble seemed irrational; in
response to criticism, therefore, Rameau shortened several of them during the first run of Hippolyte and thereafter
composed fewer ensembles of this type. Duets in which the singers express the same sentiment remain an
important ingredient. One of his late works, the 1756 version of Zoroastre, includes as many as eight, three of them
admittedly short. In these ‘unanimous’ duets, counterpoint is not wholly eliminated; it plays an important part, for
example, in ‘Mânes plaintifs’ (Dardanus, 1.iii). But more characteristic is a homorhythmic style in which parallel
3rds
and 6ths predominate, especially in love duets.
In their richness, variety and dramatic power, Rameau's choruses are comparable with those of the Handel
oratorios and the Bach passions. They are deployed in the traditional French manner, either as important
decorative components of the divertissements or as agents in the drama itself. It is in the latter role that the chorus
is at its most powerful and expressive, whether in reaction to dramatic events such as battles (Castor, 1754
version, 1.v), spectacular natural or supernatural phenomena (Les fêtes de l'Hymen, 1.vii) or, above all, to the
deaths of protagonists (Hippolyte, 4.iii, iv; Castor, 1.i). Sometimes the distinction between divertissement and
action choruses is blurred, as in those that occur during Theseus's trial by Pluto's court (Hippolyte, 2.iii, iv) or during
Abramane's occult sacrifice (Zoroastre, 4.vi, vii). In the latter the successive choruses build up to a climax of
unprecedented ferocity as the forces of evil rouse themselves to vengeance.
Rameau maintained the traditional distinction between the grand choeur, or full four-part chorus in which the ‘alto’
part was sung by high tenors (hautes-contre), and the petit choeur, a semi-chorus consisting usually of three upper
voice parts. Occasionally he would divide the grand choeur into as many as eight (e.g. ‘Impétueux torrents’, Les
fêtes de l'Hymen, 1.vii). Here and elsewhere, he combined the chorus with independent lines for the principal
singers. The chorus ‘Quel bonheur, l'enfer nous seconde’ (Zoroastre, 4.vi) combines a three-part men's choir with
lines for three furies and the allegorical figure of La Vengeance.
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In his treatment of the orchestra, Rameau was generally more original than in his writing for voices, eloquent
though that often is. Not only in the accompaniments to vocal pieces but also in the many purely instrumental
movements, his eclectic approach and imaginative orchestration (the latter often misrepresented in the Durand
Oeuvres complètes) help create music of almost symphonic richness and variety. His introduction of instruments
new to France (orchestral horns from about 1745, clarinets from 1749) is paralleled by his experimentation with
techniques previously seldom used at the Opéra: pizzicato from 1744, glissando in 1745. With younger
contemporaries such as Royer and Mondonville, he gradually developed a much more varied approach to the
combining of wind and strings. In his later works he pioneered a style of orchestration less concerned with blend
than with a ‘counterpoint of timbres’, whereby superimposed layers are distinguished not only by instrumental
timbre but also by their thematic material.
Orchestral virtuosity is at its greatest in the purely instrumental movements – the dances and dramatic symphonies.
Rameau's ballet music is second to none in its freshness and variety. Diderot may have been exaggerating when
he claimed that before Rameau ‘no-one had distinguished the delicate shades of expression that separate the
tender from the voluptuous, the voluptuous from the impassioned, the impassioned from the lascivious’. But the
composer's ability to capture a wider range of moods in his dance music, as elsewhere, is indeed one of his most
remarkable gifts – the more remarkable given the limitations of form, phrase structure and rhythm imposed by
contemporary choreography. Almost without exception he breathed new life into the standard patterns of menuet,
gavotte, tambourin and the rest; at the same time, he vividly characterized freer movements bearing such titles as
‘Air tendre pour les Muses’ or ‘Air pour les guerriers’. No other Baroque dance music seems so clearly to suggest
its own choreography. As the famous ballet-master Claude Gardel was modestly to admit: ‘Rameau perceived
what the dancers themselves were unaware of; we thus rightly regard him as our first master’.
Clear signs of Rameau's desire to integrate the instrumental movements can be seen in his development of the
ballet figuré and dramatic entr'acte and in his re-thinking of the role of the overture. The ballet figuré, in which the
dancers present a stylized action linked to that of the drama, may be found in the earlier 18th century and before;
but it was not until Rameau – or rather his librettist Cahusac – championed the idea in their works of the 1740s that
examples become plentiful. The dramatic entr'acte appears in the Rameau operas at about the same period.
Traditionally, the entr'acte had usually consisted of the repetition of an instrumental movement drawn almost at
random from the act that had just ended. The 1744 version of Dardanus, however, includes a newly-composed
bruit de guerre accompanying offstage action between Acts 4 and 5. An expanded version of this was used in 1754
between Acts 1 and 2 of Castor. Further specially composed entr'actes may be found in Naïs, Acante et Céphise,
the 1756 version of Zoroastre and Les Boréades.
More significant is Rameau's transformation of the overture from an isolated introductory movement into one
closely connected with the ensuing drama. Though briefly anticipated in Castor, the idea of connecting the two did
not gain ground until the mid-1740s. From that date, several of Rameau's overtures contain tone-paintings that
clearly foreshadow the action (e.g. Pigmalion, Zaïs, Zoroastre and Acante et Céphise). Others are linked musically
to a later scene (e.g. Platée, La naissance d'Osiris and Les Paladins). Some fall into both categories (e.g. Les fêtes
de Polymnie, Les surprises de l'Amour, Naïs and Les Boréades). In all of these, Rameau anticipated Gluck by
several decades. Rameau was also the first to diversify the form and style of the overture. Only those of his first two
tragédies can truly be said to preserve the spirit of the Lullian French overture. Several of his later works adopt the
general form – or even, in La princesse de Navarre, the style – of the contemporary Italian overture, with its two fast
movements flanking a slower one.
In spite of such developments, it is remarkable how little Rameau's concept of opera seems to have changed when
his output is viewed as a whole. Hippolyte et Aricie and Les Boréades, for instance, have much in common, though
separated by some 30 years. The only major structural difference is the absence from the later work of the
traditional prologue, considered redundant from the time of Zoroastre (1749) onwards. Yet even in his 60s and 70s,
Rameau remained receptive to new musical fashions. His lofty and dignified idiom of the 1730s became noticeably
influenced during the next two decades by the lighter German and Italian styles of the mid-18th century and
softened by a proliferation of ornamental detail. The differences of style appear most acute from the 1750s onwards
whenever new music was added to revivals of older operas.
A number of Rameau's works remained in the repertory after the composer's death. Few, however, survived
beyond 1770 and fewer still beyond the middle of that decade, when Gluck's operas took Paris by storm. Those
that did survive were subjected to the same reworking as the rest of the ‘ancien répertoire’. There were some
people, a small minority, who deplored what they saw as this corruption of taste. To Decroix, it even seemed a
contributory cause of the Revolution.
5. Theoretical writings.
If Rameau’s lifelong engagement with problems of music theory strikes us today as at odds with his activities as a
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composer, no such incompatibility was perceived in his own day. The kind of theoretical speculation in which
Rameau involved himself was held in high prestige among his intellectually minded peers; in the self-proclaimed
age of Enlightenment, it was seen as eminently reasonable that one of France’s leading composers should also be
the one most suited to the task of analysing and explaining the musical practice in which he was an acknowledged
master.
Inspired by the celebrated examples of scientific synthesis bequeathed by 17th-century scientists such as
Descartes, Kepler and Newton, Rameau believed music to represent an empirical body of acoustical evidence for
which rational principles could be found. The ‘evidence’ with which he was initially concerned was the burgeoning
variety of chord ‘signatures’ confronting any musician attempting to realize or compose a figured bass. As a young
organist and music instructor in Clermont, Rameau wished to simplify the mastery of figured bass and composition
for himself and for his students by reducing the plethora of signatures to a few fundamental types (Suaudeau,
F1960). At the same time, he hoped to be able to account for the behaviour of most dissonant intervals and
harmonic successions encoded in these signatures using a few basic prototypes. Towards this end, Rameau
conceived of the basse fondamentale, which is perhaps less properly to be seen as an original invention than as a
unification of received practical and speculative traditions in music theory.
Beginning with an informal heuristic of chord inversion (renversement) that can be found in many 17th-century
thorough-bass manuals, Rameau invoked a more systematic notion of ‘octave identity’ by which he could reduce
most chord signatures to one of two fundamental types: the triad and the 7th chord. Taking disparate arguments of
intervallic generation made by Descartes and Mersenne, Rameau further claimed that the lowest pitch class of
each triad and 7th chord constitutes its fundamental sound (son fondamental). By displaying the succession of
these chord fundamentals on a fictive bass line, Rameau could reveal the ‘fundamental bass’ of any harmonic
succession and show how it followed a limited number of paradigmatic cadence-like models.
It was in his pioneering Traité de l’harmonie (1722; see fig.6) that Rameau attempted to offer a more rigorous
formalization of his empirical theory by casting it within a Cartesian-inspired deductive model based on a single
‘evident and clear principle’. In the first book of the Traité, Rameau posited this principle to be the first six aliquot
(harmonic) string divisions of a monochord. While successful in generating the major triad in this manner (as had
Zarlino), Rameau’s arguments quickly ran aground when he was unable to discover a satisfactorily consistent
means of generating the minor triad. Generating the repertory of 7th chords he needed proved even more vexing,
requiring Rameau to resort to eclectic arguments of 3rd-stacking, ‘borrowed’ fundamentals (for the diminished 7th
chord), and ‘supposition’ (wherein 9th and 11th chords were explained as 7th chords with feigned roots ‘supposed’
a 3rd or 5th below their true fundamentals).
In later writings (beginning with Nouveau système, 1726), having learnt of Sauveur’s acoustical research, Rameau
became convinced that a better principle for his theory of chord generation was to be found in the harmonic
overtone series detectable in many vibrating systems (corps sonores). Just as Newton had demonstrated, using a
prism, that white light was in fact composed of a spectrum of individual colours, Rameau tried to show how a single
sound was a composite of harmonic overtones. While offering an indubitably more ‘natural’ means of chord
generation than artificial monochord divisions, the overtone series offered little help in the production of the minor
triad and 7th chords. Again, Rameau conceived many ingenious arguments to solve this problem, including
recourse to a putative ‘undertone’ series of arithmetic partials, double fundamentals and functional borrowings
(Génération harmonique, 1737; Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie, 1750). Eventually, Rameau conceded
that only the major triad (accord parfait) was directly generated, and that all other harmonies had to be
conceptually deduced by analogy using the natural harmonic ratios found in the corps sonore (Nouvelles
réflexions, 1760).
If Rameau’s attempt to find a rigorously systematic explanation for the generation of all harmonies proved in vain,
his ability to analyse most harmonic successions using the fundamental bass proved far more successful. Utilizing
the two fundamental chord types of the 7th chord and triad, Rameau conceived of the primary dynamic of music as
a quasi-Cartesian mechanistic model of dissonance (displacement) and consonance (repose). As shown in the
second book of his Traité, this dynamic was best exemplified in the paradigmatic progression of the perfect
cadence (cadence parfaite) in which a dominant 7th chord on the fifth scale degree (called the dominante tonique)
resolves to a consonant tonic triad by a falling perfect 5th in the fundamental bass. Regardless of inversion, the
‘major’ dissonance of the leading note (notte sensible) should resolve upwards to the tonic in this progression,
while the ‘minor’ dissonance of the 7th resolves downwards to the third. 7th chords on other scale degrees (called
simple ‘dominants’) normally imitated the motion of the perfect cadence. Secondary cadence types related to the
perfect cadence were also deduced by Rameau. The ‘irregular’ cadence (cadence irrégulière) inverts the motion of
the perfect cadence by ascending a perfect 5th in the fundamental bass from the fourth degree to the tonic, while a
‘broken’ cadence (cadence rompue) thwarts the expected resolution of the dominant 7th chord with a deceptive
cadence on the sixth degree. Of particular note was Rameau’s observation that the intervals by which the
fundamental bass progressed (primarily perfect 5ths, secondarily major and minor 3rds, with ascending 2nds
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introduced by licence) are those of which chords were constructed. This fact offered powerful support to Rameau’s
claim that his principle of harmony was indeed a comprehensive one, accounting for both the vocabulary and the
grammar of music.
While the fundamental bass was conceived to explain localized chord connections, Rameau was also interested in
more global questions of harmonic function and modal identity. The evolution of his thoughts on the subdominant
(sous dominante) is an illustrative case. The importance of the fourth scale degree in the mode was initially singled
out by Rameau in his Nouveau système (1726). Modelled by a ‘geometric’ triple progression of connected 5ths
(1:3:9), the lower (sous) dominant was posited as a symmetrical counterpart to the upper dominant. In the
Génération harmonique (1737), though, Rameau began to assign the subdominant a privileged harmonic function
in his hierarchy of scale degrees, not only because of its important role in the irregular cadence (now dubbed the
cadence imparfaite), but because of its importance in framing and defining a modal centre. Inspired by elements of
Newtonian physics that were circulating widely in France during the 1730s, Rameau reconceptualized the tonic
chord as a kind of gravitational body that was surrounded by upper and lower dominants. Each of these dominants
was attracted to the tonic and at the same time helped constitute the mode. The subdominant could further play
two different functional roles called by Rameau double emploi. Unlike the dissonant 7th added to the dominant
chord, the ‘characteristic dissonance’ added to the subdominant chord to distinguish it from a common tonic triad
was the major 6th (sixte ajouté). While the bass note would be understood as the chord’s fundamental sound when
it resolved to the tonic as an imperfect cadence, the added 6th could also be inferred as a fundamental (on the
second degree) if the chord moved to the dominant.
Rameau was always insistent that major and minor scales were generated by the fundamental bass, partly in order
to prove the primacy of harmony over melody and partly to justify the pedagogical efficacy of his fundamental bass.
But he found he could not demonstrate this in any systematic way without either transgressing the modal boundary
of the triple geometric proportion, or breaking the prescribed motion of the perfect 5th in the fundamental bass. In
order to solve the problem of harmonizing the scalar harmonies contained in the standard ‘rule of the octave’ (règle
de l’octave), Rameau invoked a number of ad hoc arguments, including interpolated basses, double employment,
rearranging the order of the scale, and changing keys. Although he never arrived at a satisfactory solution, his
efforts led him to many sensitive observations concerning harmonic motion through and between keys (and
referred to at the time as ‘modulation’). He recognized that there was only one principal tonic (ton régnant) in any
composition, while all non-tonic consonant triads represented secondary levels of modulation depending on their
degree of cadential confirmation (called censée tonique, tonique passagère etc.).
In Rameau’s later writings, beginning with his manuscript L’art de la basse fondamentale from the early 1740s
(published as Gianotti, F1759) and particularly in the Code de musique pratique, his last and most comprehensive
composition treatise (1760), Rameau loosened the rigorously deductive structuring of his theory. He allowed
greater flexibility in the rules governing the fundamental bass (to produce, for example, various kinds of chromatic
and enharmonic progressions). Of special note was his increasing willingness to explain chords of supposition as
products of melodic suspension and his acceptance of equal temperament as a necessity demanded by reason and
taste.
Rameau was never so obstinate a theorist that he would disregard his own intuitive musicality. Throughout his
writings he continually invoked ‘the judgment of the ear’ to resolve discrepancies within his theory, even if this
meant reworking or abandoning various of his arguments. When Rameau became acquainted with the
sensationalist epistemology of John Locke in the 1750s, his empirical views became even more pronounced,
although his conviction as to the sensory potency of the corps sonore led him to make some extravagant claims on
its behalf, to wit, that it might be the principle of all arts and sciences (Nouvelles réflexions, 1760).
While Rameau may never have quite attained his desired degree of systematization in his theory of harmony, his
fundamental bass was nonetheless convincing enough as a practical aid for musicians to become, by the end of
the 18th century, the dominant pedagogical paradigm throughout Europe. At the same time, his success in finding
an apparently scientific foundation for harmony, however imperfect, had earned the attention and support of many
distinguished philosophers and scientific minds (Castel, Mairan, Euler, Condillac, Jean Bernoulli, Christian Wolff),
some of whom actually collaborated with him in the formulation and dissemination of his ideas.
Rameau’s stormy relations with the group of philosophes associated with the Encyclopédie – Diderot, Alembert and
Rousseau – has been mentioned above (§1). Although Diderot and Alembert were initially strong supporters of
Rameau – Diderot helped Rameau in the writing of his Démonstration du principe de l’hamonie (1750) and
Alembert published the most influential summary of Rameau’s theory in his Elémens de musique théorique et
pratique (1752) – they soon parted ways with him in noisy disputations over Rameau’s ever more insistent claims
as to the metaphysical priority and scientific validation of his principle of the corps sonore. Rousseau’s arguments
with Rameau took a more aesthetic, and ultimately political turn, and concerned the priority Rameau accorded to
harmony. For Rousseau, the fierce partisan of Italian opera, Rameau’s elevation of the ‘rational’ component of
harmony over the ‘passionate’ component of melody perniciously inverted music’s origins in natural language.
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But despite the many polemics, which consumed much of Rameau’s energy for the last dozen years of his life,
even his most ardent critics continued to acknowledge the profound intellectual accomplishment of his theory and
its indispensable value to music pedagogy. Over some 50 years of relentless contemplation and effort, drawing
upon an astonishing variety of musical and philosophical arguments, Rameau produced a compelling body of
writings that has furnished the basic agenda for tonal harmonic theory over the last two centuries. If he was unable
to answer satisfactorily all the many questions he posed, no-one since has brought to questions of music theory his
extraordinary combination of intellectual perseverance and musical sensibility.
WORKS
Editions: Jean-Philippe Rameau: Oeuvres complètes, ed. C. Saint-Saëns and others (Paris, 1895–1924/R [OC]Jean-Philippe
Rameau:
Pièces de clavecin, ed. E.R. Jacobi (Kassel, 1958, rev.4/1972) [Jc]Jean-Philippe Rameau: Pièces de clavecin, ed. K. Gilbert
(Paris,
1979) [G]Jean-Philippe Rameau: Opera omnia, ed. S. Bouissou and others (Paris, 1996–) [OOR]The Complete Theoretical
Writings of
Jean-Philippe Rameau, ed. E.R. Jacobi, American Institute of Musicology: Miscellanea, iii (1967–72) [Jw]
dramatic
other secular vocal
sacred vocal
solo keyboard
other instrumental
theoretical works
Rameau, Jean-Philippe: Works
dramatic
all performed at the Paris Opéra [Académie Royale de Musique] unless otherwise stated; information given only for 1st
performances and
principal revivals within Rameau’s lifetime; the date of last complete or near-complete 18th-century performance at the Opéra is
given in
parentheses
* wholly or largely autograph
† contains autograph sections, passages, revisions and/or annotations
Title (genre; no. of acts) Libretto Principal
sources
Performance Remarks Edition
Hippolyte et Aricie (tragédie en musique; prol, 5) S.-J.
Pellegrin
print: (Paris,
c1733) [some
copies with
‘Changements
conformes à la
représentation’;
some with revs
made for 1742
revival; F-Pc,
Pn, US-MED,
with MS revs;
copy, F-Pc†];
MSS: Dc, Pa,
Pc, Pn [one
with pr. title
(Paris, 1742)],
Po, V, GB-Cfm
1 Oct 1733 major cuts and
substitutions
during first run
OC vi;
OOR iv/1,
i
11 Sept 1742,
5 Feb 1757
(28 June
1767)
Samson (tragédie en musique; prol., 5) Voltaire music lost; lib unperf. lib begun by lib in L.
R
(Paris, 1745);
MS libs: F-Pa,
S-Sk and
USSR
Leningrad,
Hermitage
Nov 1733; ov.,
chaconne,
dances, Acts 3
and 5
rehearsed Oct
1734; score
substantially
complete by
aut. 1735,
abandoned by
spr. 1736;
music said to
have been reused in Les
Indes galantes
(entrée Les
Incas), Castor
et Pollux, Les
fêtes d’Hébé
and Zoroastre;
text (and
probably
music) of air
‘Echo, voix
errante’ used
in La princesse
de Navarre
and rev. of Les
fêtes de
Polymnie
(1753)
Morland,
ed.:
Voltaire:
Oeuvres
complètes
(Paris,
1877–85),
iii
Les Indes galantes [formerly Les victoires galantes]
(opéra-ballet; prol, 2–4 entrées: Le turc généreux, Les
Incas du Pérou, Les fleurs, Les sauvages)
L. Fuzelier print: (Paris,
c1736) [prol
and 1st 3
entrées arr. as
Quatre grands
concerts; also
contains new
entrée Les
sauvages];
MSS: F-AG,
Pa, Pc, Pn, Po
[one with pr.
title (Paris,
1735)], TLm,
GB-Cfm
23 Aug 1735 prol, 2 entries OC vii
28 Aug 1735 3rd entrée
added; some
rev. of prol and
first 2 entrées
11 Sept 1735 rev. of Les
fleurs
10 March
1736
4th entrée
added
28 May 1743 prol, various
combinations
of 3 or 4
entrées; from
Feb 1744, prol
and 2nd entrée
perf. with other
works
8 June 1751 prol, entrées
1–3; from 3
Aug, Les
sauvages
replaced Le
turc généreux;
from 21 Sept,
Les sauvages
perf. with other
R
works; from 24
Oct, prol, Les
sauvages, Les
Incas, Les
fleurs
14 July 1761 prol, entrées
1–3; from 18
Aug, Les
sauvages
replaced Le
turc généreux;
from 20 July
1762, prol and
Les sauvages
perf. with La
guirlande
(20 Sept
1761)
Castor et Pollux (tragédie en musique; prol, 5) P.-J.
Bernard [?
addns by
A.-J.-J. Le
Riche de
La
Pouplinière,
N.-C.
Thieriot and
J.-J. Le
Franc de
Pompignan]
prints: (Paris,
c1737) (Paris,
c1754) [copy
in F-Pc with
MS revs];
MSS: A, AG,
AIXc, CLO,
Dc, Mc, NAc,
Pa, Pn, Po,
TLm, GB-Cfm,
I-Baf, US–I
24 Oct 1737 OC viii
11 Jan 1754 no prol, new
Act 1, former
Acts 1–5
reworked as
Acts 2–5;
some new
music
24 Jan 1764 minor rev.
(7 Feb 1785)
Les fêtes d’Hébé, ou Les talents lyriques (opéra-ballet;
prol, 3 entrées: La poésie, La musique, La danse)
A.-C.-G. de
Montdorge
[?addns by
Bernard,
Pellegrin,
La
Pouplinière
and Mme
Bersin]
prints: (Paris,
c1739) [some
copies with
rev. 2nd
entrée], (Paris,
c1756 or later)
[copies with
rev. 2nd
entrée,
comprising
either scenes
i–iv or i–vi];
MSS: F-AG,
Pa, Pc, Pn
[one with pr.
title (Paris,
1739)], Po,
GB-Cfm
21 May 1739 from 23 June
with rev. 2nd
entrée
OCC ix;
edn. in
Cyr
(1975)
27 July 1747 minor revs;
incl. 1 air by
Le Vasseur
18 May 1756 1st entrée rev.
5 June 1764 without prol;
from 10 Jan
1765 prol
reinstated
(9 May 1765)
Dardanus (tragédie en musique; prol, 5) C.-A. Le
Clerc de La
Bruère
prints: (Paris,
c1739), (Paris,
c1744) [proof
copy, F-Po†,
19 Nov 1739 cuts, addns
and other
changes (?
collab.
OC x;
OOR iv/5
R
copies in Po
with MS revs];
MSS: AG, Pa,
Pc, Pn [one
with pr. title
(Paris, 1739)],
Po, TLm, GBCfm
Pellegrin)
during 1st run
23 April 1744 rev. as
Nouvelle
tragédie; major
changes to
plot, Acts 3–5
largely new
music
15 April 1760 without prol;
further rev.
(29 March
1770)
La princesse de Navarre (comédie-ballet; 3) Voltaire MSS: F-BO,
Pc, Pn; lib
(Paris, 1745)
Versailles, 23
Feb 1745
for wedding of
Dauphin with
Maria Teresa
of Spain; incl.
spoken
dialogue
OC xi
Bordeaux, 26
Nov 1763
with new prol
by Voltaire
Platée (comédie lyrique; prol: La naissance de la
Comédie, 3)
J. Autreau
adapted by
A.-J. Le
Valois
d’Orville
print: (Paris,
c1749) [proof
copy, Po†];
MSS: Pa, Pn,
Po
Versailles, 31
March 1745
for wedding of
Dauphin with
Maria Teresa
of Spain
OC xii
9 Feb 1749 lib altered by
Ballot de Sovot
21 Feb 1754
(28 March
1754)
Les fêtes de Polymnie (opéra-ballet; prol: Le temple de
Mémoire, 3 entrées: La fable, L’histoire, La féerie)
L. de
Cahusac
print: (Paris,
c1753) [proof
copy, Po†];
MSS: Pa, Pn
[one with pr.
title (Paris,
1745)], Po†
12 Oct 1745 for victory of
Fontenoy; cuts
during 1st run
OC xiii
21 Aug 1753 most cuts
reinstated:
some new
music
(16 May 1754)
Le temple de la Gloire (opéra-ballet; 5) Voltaire MSS: Pa,
Pmeyer, Pn†,
Po†, V, US-BE
Versailles, 27
Nov 1745
for victory of
Fontenoy
OC xiv
7 Dec 1745
19 April 1746 rev. as prol (La
caverne de
l’Envie) and 3
entrées (Bélus,
Bacchus,
Trajan)
(10 May 1746)
Les fêtes de Ramire (acte de ballet; 1) Voltaire
(rev. J.-J.
Rousseau)
MS: F-V; lib
(Paris, 1745)
Versailles, 22
Dec 1745
re-use of
divertissements
from La
princesse de
Navarre, linked
by new lib and
without spoken
dialogue; copy
in F-V contains
at least one air
OC xi
R
(and ? some
recit) by
Rousseau, but
not the ov. and
other nos. he
claims to have
written
Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, ou Les dieux
d’Egypte (opéra-ballet; prol, 3 entrées: Osiris, Canope,
Aruéris ou Les Isies)
Cahusac print: (Paris,
c1748) [proof
copy, Po, with
addns,
some†]; MSS:
AG, Pa, Pn
Versailles, 15
March 1747
for wedding of
dauphin with
Maria-Josepha
of Saxony
OC xv
5 Nov 1748
9 July 1754 without prol
(9 July 1765)
Zaïs (pastorale-héroïque; prol, 4) Cahusac print: (Paris,
c1748) [some
copies with
suppl. of
addns; 4
copies, Pc, 2
with MS
addns; proof
copy, Po†];
MSS: COM,
Pa, Pn
29 Feb 1748 OC xvi
19 May 1761 without prol
(22 March
1770)
Pigmalion (acte de ballet; 1) Ballot de
Sovot, after
A. Houdar
de La
Motte: Le
triomphe
des arts
(entrée: La
sculpture)
print: (Paris,
c1748) [copy
in V, annotated
and corrected];
MSS: AG, BO,
LYm
, Pa, Pc,
Pn
, Po
27 Aug 1748 perf. with other
works
OC xvii/1
9 March 1751 perf. with other
works
10 Aug 1760 perf. with other
works
31 March
1764
perf. with other
works
(22 March
1781)
Les surprises de l’Amour (opéra-ballet; prol: Le retour
d’Astrée, 2 entrées: La lyre enchantée, Adonis [from
1757, L’enlèvement d’Adonis])
Bernard first version:
MSS: Pn, Po*
[prol only]
Versailles, 27
Nov 1748
prol for Treaty
of Aix-laChapelle
OC
xvii/1–2;
OOR,
iv/27
later versions:
prints: (Paris,
c1757) [incl.
L’enlèvement
d’Adonis, La
lyre enchantée
and Anacréon;
some copies
incl. Les
sibarites]; all
entrées also
issued
separately
(Paris, c1757);
La lyre
enchantée
repr. (Paris,
c1758) with
changes; MSS:
31 May 1757 without prol,
major rev. of
entrées, with
Anacréon (ii)
as 3rd entrée;
from 12 July,
Les sibarites
(1753)
replaced La
lyre enchantée
R
Pn, Po†
10 Oct 1758 as 31 May
1757 but with
rev. of La lyre
enchantée and
Anacréon (ii);
from 7 Dec,
Les sibarites
replaced
Anacréon
(8 Feb 1759)
Naïs (pastorale-héroïque; prol: ‘L’accord des dieux’, 3) Cahusac MSS: Lm, Pa,
Pc, Pn, Po,
US-Bp, Wc
22 April 1749 prol for Treaty
of Aix-laChapelle
OC xviii
7 Aug 1764 P.-M. Berton
claims to have
made addns
and revs
(3 Jan 1765)
Zoroastre (tragédie en musique; 5) Cahusac print: (Paris,
c1749)
[annotated
copies in F-Pa,
Pc, Po, V];
MSS: Pa, Pc,
Pn, Po, TLm,
GB-Cfm
5 Dec 1749 OOR,
iv/19
(1749
version);
ed. F.
Gervais
(Paris,
1964)
(1756
version)
20 Jan 1756 major rev. of
plot; music of
Acts 2, 3 and 5
largely new
Linus (tragédie en musique; 5) La Bruère MSS: F-Pn [2
copies of vn 1
only, one†]
unperf. rehearsed in or
before 1752;
most music
lost, MS lib in
Pn
—
La guirlande, ou Les fleurs enchantées (acte de ballet;
1)
J.-F.
Marmontel
print: (Paris,
c1751) [†proof
copy, and copy
with addns and
revs in Po];
MSS: AG, Pa,
Pn
21 Sept 1751 for birth of
Duke of
Burgundy; with
Les sauvages
(from Les
Indes galantes)
and Les génies
tutélaires (by
F. Rebel and
F. Francoeur)
ed. G.
Beck
(Paris,
1981)
11 April 1752 with Zélindor,
roi des sylphes
(by Rebel and
Francoeur) and
Pigmalion
20 July 1762 with prol and
Les sauvages
(from Les
Indes galantes)
(5 Sept 1763)
Acante et Céphise, ou La sympathie (pastoralehéroïque; 3)
Marmontel print: (Paris,
c1751) [copy
in Pn with MS
revs; proof
copies, Po†];
MSS: Pa, Pc,
Pn
, Po†
?18 Nov 1751 probably perf.
at Choisy for
birth of Duke of
Burgundy
OOR,
iv/21
19 Nov 1751 Paris, Opéra
Daphnis et Eglé (pastorale-héroïque; 1) C. Collé MSS: Pn, Po† Fontainebleau,
29/30 Oct
1753
— —
Lysis et Délie (pastorale; 1) Marmontel music lost; lib unperf. intended for —
R
(Paris, 1753) perf. at
Fontainebleau,
6 Nov 1753,
but considered
too similar to
Daphnis et
Eglé,
abandoned
Les sibarites (acte de ballet; 1) Marmontel print: (Paris,
c1757); MSS:
Pn, Po
Fontainebleau,
13 Nov 1753
perf. with La
coquette
trompée (A.
Dauvergne);
entitled Sibaris
in some
sources
OC xvii/2
12 July 1757 rev., added to
revival of Les
surprises de
l’Amour
7 Dec 1758
(8 Feb 1759)
La naissance d’Osiris, ou La fête Pamilie (acte de
ballet; 1)
Cahusac MSS: Pc, Pn,
Po*
Fontainebleau,
12 Oct 1754
for birth of
Duke of Berry;
with Les Incas
du Pérou (from
Les Indes
galantes) and
Pigmalion; at
one stage
entitled Les
fêtes
Pammilies;
orig. intended
as prol to
projected
opéra-ballet
Les beaux
jours de
l’Amour,
possibly
completed by
1751
—
Anacréon (i) (acte de ballet; 1) Cahusac MSS: Pc†, Pn,
Po
Fontainebleau,
23 Oct 1754
—
Anacréon (ii) (acte de ballet; 1) Bernard print: (Paris,
c1757); MSS:
Pn, Po
31 May 1757 added to
revival of Les
surprises de
l’Amour as 3rd
entrée
OC xvii/2
(2 May 1771)
Les Paladins (comédie lyrique; 3) anon.
(probably
D. de
Monticourt,
after J. de
La
Fontaine:
Le petit
chien qui
secoue
l’argent et
des
pierreries
and L.
Ariosto:
Orlando
furioso)
MSS: Pc, Pn*,
Po†, GB-Cfm
12 Feb 1760 lib attrib. D. de
Monticourt by
Beffara (1783–
4) and in the
Soleinne lib
collection (FPn); attrib. P.-
J. Bernard by
Collé, who
mentions C.-H.
de Voisenon
and de
Tressan as
possibilities
ed. in
Wolf
(1977);
facs.
(New
York,
1986)
(20 March
1760)
Les Boréades (tragédie en musique; 5) ?Cahusac MSS: F-Pc, unperf. entitled Abaris ed. in
R
Pn†, US-Bp in some
sources;
rehearsed
Paris (25 April
1763),
Versailles (27
April 1763);
court perf.
planned; lib
attrib. Cahusac
in Decroix
(1776) and
A.B. Teulières,
continuator of
CathalaCoture:
Histoire
politique,
ecclésiastique
et littéraire du
Querci
(Montauban,
1785)
TéreySmith
(1971);
facs.
(Paris,
1982); ed.
A. Villain
(Paris,
1997);*
frags in
Green,
Dijon
1983
Nélée et Myrthis (acte de ballet; 1) ?Cahusac MSS: Pc*, Pn unperf. autograph title:
Mirthis;
intended as
one entrée in
projected
opéra-ballet
Les beaux
jours de
l’Amour. See
La naissance
d’Osiris.
OC xi
Zéphyre (acte de ballet; 1) ?Cahusac MSS: Pc*, Pn unperf. orig. entitled
Les nymphes
de Diane
OC xi
Io (acte de ballet; 1) ?Cahusac MSS: Pc, Pn unperf. all sources
lack final
divertissement;
possibly dates
from before
1745 (see
Sadler, 1989)
—
Incid music to plays by A. Piron (music by Rameau,
possibly collab. others), all lost unless otherwise
stated; plays pr. in Oeuvres complettes d’Alexis Piron
(Paris, 1776): L’Endriague, opéra comique (3 acts),
Foire St Germain, 8 Feb 1723; L’enrôlement
d’Arlequin, opéra comique (1 act), Foire St Laurent, 3
Feb 1726; La P[ucelage], ou La rose, opéra comique
(1 act), by July 1726, unperf., rev. as Le jardin de
l’Hymen, ou La rose, Foire St Laurent, 5 March 1744,
probably without Rameau’s original music but with 1 air
parodied from Hippolyte et Aricie; La robe de
dissension, ou Le faux prodige, opéra comique (2
acts), Foire St Laurent, 7 Sept 1726; Les courses de
Tempé, pastorale (1 act), Comédie Française, 30 Aug
1734, extant vocal part of airs pr. in Sadler (1974)
Doubtful: Le procureur dupe sans le savoir, opéra
comique, mêlé de vaudevilles (1 act), c1758, music
lost, anon. lib (F-Pn) ?copied from a score† found
among Rameau’s papers; La cornemuse; Les
jardinières et les ciseaux
other secular vocal
Deux paysans (duet), S, B, bc, in Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire de différents
auteurs (Paris, 1707); facs. in Masson (1910)
R
Avec du vin (canon), S, S, T, in Recueil d’airs sérieux et à boire de différents
auteurs (Paris, 1719); pubd in Traité de l’harmonie (1722); F. Robert, ed.: Airs
sérieux et à boire à 2 et 3 voix (Paris, 1968); facs. in Jw i
Ah! loin de rire (canon), S, A, T, B, pubd in Traité de l’harmonie (1722); F. Robert,
ed.: Airs sérieux et à boire à 2 et 3 voix (Paris, 1968); facs. in Jw i
Reveillez-vous, dormeur sans fin (canon), S, S, S, S, S, pubd in Traité de
l’harmonie (1722); facs. in Jw i
Mes chers amis, quittez vos rouges bords (canon), 6vv, pr. in La Borde (1780);
transcr. Schneider, RMFC (1985)
Thétis (cant.), B, vn, bc, c1715–July 1718 (attrib. Bourgeois in F-Pn Vm73613); OC
iii
Aquilon et Orithie (cant.), B, vn, bc, c1715–19, rev. version pubd in Rameau:
Cantates françoises à voix seule avec simphonie … livre premier (Paris, c1729–
30/R1990 in ECFC, xi); OC iii
L’impatience (cant.), S, b viol, bc, c1715–22; OC iii
Les amants trahis (cant.), S, B, b viol, bc, by 1721; OC iii
Orphée (cant.), S, vn, b viol, bc, by 1 June 1721; OC iii
Le berger fidèle (cant.), S, 2 vn, bc, by 22 Nov 1728, pubd in Rameau: Cantates
françoises à voix seule avec simphonie … livre premier (Paris, c1729–30/R1990 in
ECFC, xi); OC iii
Cantate pour le jour de la [fête de] Saint Louis, S, tr, bc, ?1730s, *MS, Pc*
Rés.18061 (facs. (Bias, France, 1983))
Un Bourbon ouvre sa carrière (ariette), haute-contre, 2 vn, bc, c1751, Pn Vm73620
Médée (cant.), c1715–22; L’absence (cant.), c1715–22; both lost
Misattrib.: La musette (cant.) [by P. de La Garde]; Diane et Actéon (cant.) [by B. de
Boismortier]: OC iii
sacred vocal
in MSS in F-Pn unless otherwise stated
some voice parts in the sources are designated dessus (S), bas-dessus (A), haute-contre (Ct), taille (T), basse-taille (Bar)
Deus noster refugium (Ps xlvi), grand motet, S, S, Ct, T, T, B, SSCtTB, fl, ob, 2 vn,
va, b, bc, c1714 [vocal line of final récit missing]; OC v
In convertendo Dominus (Ps cxxvi), grand motet, S, Ct, Bar, B, SSCtTBarB, 2 fl, 2
ob, bn, 2 vn, 2 va, b, bc, ?c1713–15, lost; extensive rev. for Concert Spirituel, 1751
(incl. Ps lxix.31 as 5th movt), Pn*; OC iv
Laboravi clamans (Ps lxix.3), quintet, S, A, Ct, T, B, bc, pubd in Traité de l’harmonie
(1722); OC v, facs. in Jw i; probably part of a lost grand motet: Salvum me fac Deus
(Ps lxix) [text of v.31, ‘Laudabo nomen Dei’, is used in 1751 rev. of In convertendo]
Quam dilecta tabernacula (Ps lxxxiv), grand motet, S, S, Ct, T, Bar, B. SSCtTBarB,
2 fl, bn, 2 vn, va, b viol, bc. ?c1713–22; OC iv
Exultet coelum laudibus, petit motet, 3vv, insts, ?c1713–22; lost
Doubtful: Diligam te, Domine (part of Ps xviii), grand motet; OC v
Misattrib.: Inclina Domine, petit motet [by F. Martin; see Cyr (1977)]
solo keyboard
Premier livre de pieces de clavecin (Paris, 1706, repr. 1741 as Pièces de clavecin
… oeuvre premier): Prélude, a; Alemande, a; 2e alemande, a; Courante, a; Gigue,
a; 1ère sarabande, a; 2e sarabande, A; Vénitienne, A; Gavote, a; Menuet, a; Jc, G
Pieces de clavessin avec une methode pour la mechanique des doigts (Paris,
1724/R, rev. 1731 as Pieces de clavecin avec une table pour les agrémens):
Menuet en rondeau, C; Allemande, e; Courante, e; Gigue en rondeau, e; 2e gigue
en rondeau, E; Le rappel des oiseaux, e; lr rigaudon, e; 2d rigaudon, E; Double du
2d rigaudon, E. Musette en rondeau, E; Tembourin, e; La vilageoise, rondeau, e;
Les tendres plaintes, rondeau, d; Les niais de Sologne [with 2 doubles], D; Les
soupirs, D; La joyeuse, rondeau, D; La follette, rondeau, D; L’entretien des Muses,
R
d; Les tourbillons, rondeau, D; Les cyclopes, rondeau, d; Le lardon, menuet, D; La
boiteuse, d; Jc, G
Nouvelles suites de pieces de clavecin … avec des remarques sur les différens
genres de musique (Paris, c1729–30, rev. 2/after 1760/R): Allemande, a; Courante,
a; Sarabande, A; Les trois mains, a; Fanfarinette, A; La triomphante, A; Gavotte
[with 6 doubles], a; Les tricotets, rondeau, G; L’indifferente, g; Menuet, G; La poule,
g; 2e menuet, g [intended to be paired with the previous menuet]; Les triolets, G;
Les sauvages, g; L’enharmonique, g; L’egiptienne, g; Jc, G
Les Indes galantes, balet, reduit à quatre grands concerts (Paris, c1736),
symphonies arr. Rameau for hpd [28 movts in G (which mistakenly includes movts
from the entrée Les sauvages); 24 movts ed. G. Sadler: Rameau, Les Indes
galantes: the Composer’s Transcriptions for Harpsichord (London, 1979)]
Five pieces arr. solo hpd in Pieces de clavecin en concerts (Paris, 1741): La Livri,
rondeau gracieux, c; L’agaçante, G; La timide, 1er rondeau gracieux, a; 2e rondeau,
A; L’indiscrette, rondeau, B ; Jc, G; facs. (Geneva, 1982)
La Dauphine, g, ?c1747 or later, F-Pn*; Jc, G
Les petits marteaux [attrib. Rameau, Pn Vm72108, anon. in Pa MS6820] (?before
1754); facs. in Fuller (1983)
Misattrib.: 7 pieces, OC i appx: La sensible, La Zaïde [by Royer]; L’orageuse
[anon.]; all others by Duphly
other instrumental
Pieces de clavecin en concerts, hpd, vn/fl, b viol/vn (Paris, 1741, 2/1752); OOR i/3;
ed. E.R. Jacobi (Kassel, 1961, 2/1970); facs. (Geneva, 1982)
Premier concert: La Coulicam, c; La Livri, rondeau gratieux, c; Le Vézinet, C
Deuxième concert: La Laborde, G; La Boucon, air gracieux, g; L’agaçante, G;
Premier menuet, G; 2e menuet, g
Troisième concert: La Lapopliniere, A; La timide, 1er rondeau gracieux, a; 2e
rondeau gracieux, A; 1er tambourin, A; 2e tambourin en rondeau, a
Quatrième concert: La pantomine, loure vive, B ; L’indiscrette, B ; La Rameau, B
Cinquième concert: Fugue, La Forqueray, d; La Cupis, d; La Marais, D
Not by Rameau: arr. of 6 concerts, 3 vn, taille (va), bns, vc, db (MS, Pn, 1768); OC
ii:
Premier-cinquième concerts: transcrs. of Pieces de clavecin en concerts (Paris,
1741)
Sixième concert: transcrs. of La poule; 1er menuet; 2e menuet; L’enharmonique;
L’egiptienne: all from Nouvelles suites de pièces de clavecin (Paris, c1729–30)
theoretical works
Traité de l’harmonie reduite à ses principes naturels (Paris, 1722/R; Eng. trans.,
1737); ed. and Eng. trans., P. Gosset (New York, 1971); Jw i
‘De la mechanique des doigts sur le clavessin’, Pieces de clavessin (1724; pr. with
Eng. and Ger. trans. in Jc; facs. in G)
Nouveau système de musique théorique (Paris, 1726/R; Eng. trans., 1975, ed. B.G.
Chandler); ed. J.-F. Kremer (Bourg-la-Reine, 1966); Jw vi
‘Remarques … sur les différens genres de musique’, Nouvelles suites de pieces de
clavecin (c1729–30; pr. with Eng. and Ger. trans. in Jc; facs. in G)
‘Examen de la conférence sur la musique’, Mercure de France (Oct 1729); Jw vi
‘Observations sur la méthode d’accompagnement pour le clavecin qui est en usage,
et qu’on appelle échelle ou règle de l’octave’, Mercure de France (Feb 1730), 253–
63; Jw vi
‘Plan abrégé d’une méthode nouvelle d’accompagnement pour le clavecin’, Mercure
de France (March 1730), 489–501; Jw vi
‘Réplique du premier musicien à la réponse du second’, Mercure de France (June
1730); Jw vi
‘Lettre de M. à M. sur la musique’, Mercure de France (Sept 1731), 2126–45; Jw vi
Dissertation sur les différentes méthodes d’accompagnement pour le clavecin, ou
pour l’orgue (Paris, 1732/R); Jw v
R
‘Lettre de M. Rameau au R.P. Castel, au sujet de quelques nouvelles réflexions sur
la musique’, Journal de Trévoux (July 1736); Jw vi
Génération harmonique, ou Traité de musique théorique et pratique (Paris, 1737/R;
Eng. trans. in Hayes, 1968); Jw iii
‘Remarques de M. Rameau sur l’extrait qu’on a donné de son livre intitulé
“Génération harmonique” dans le Journal de Trévoux, décembre 1737’, Pour et
contre, xiv (1738); Jw vi
Mémoire où l’on expose les fondemens du Système de musique théorique et
pratique de M. Rameau [collab. D. Diderot] (1749), F-Pi*, Po; Jw vi
Démonstration du principe de l’harmonie [collab. D. Diderot] (Paris, 1750/R; Eng.
trans. in Papakhian, 1973, and Briscoe, 1975); Jw iii
Nouvelles réflexions de M. Rameau sur sa ‘Démonstration du principe de
l’harmonie’ (Paris, 1752/R; Eng. trans. in Briscoe, 1975); Jw v
‘Lettre de M. Rameau à l’auteur du Mercure’, Mercure de France (May 1752), 75–7;
Jw vi
‘Réflexions sur la manière de former la voix’, Mercure de France (Oct 1752), 89–
100; Jw vi
‘Extrait d’une réponse de M. Rameau à M. Euler sur l’identité des octaves’, Mercure
de France (Dec 1752); Jw v
Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique (Paris, 1754/R); Jw iii
Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1755/R); Jw v
Suite des erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1756/R); Jw v
Prospectus où l’on propose au public, par voye de souscription, un ‘Code de
musique pratique’, composé de sept méthodes [collab. F. Arnaud] (Paris, 1757); Jw
iv
Réponse de M. Rameau à MM. les editeurs de l’Encyclopédie sur leur dernier
Avertissement (Paris, 1757/R); Jw v
Nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore (1758–9), MS, I-Bc; Jw vi
Code de musique pratique, ou Méthodes pour apprendre la musique … avec de
nouvelles réflexions sur le principe sonore [collab. F. Arnaud] (Paris, 1760/R); Jw iv
Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur ses opinions en musique (Paris, 1760); Jw iv
‘Réponse de M. Rameau à la lettre de M. d’Alembert’, Mercure de France (April
1761), ii, 127–9; Jw v
‘Source où, vraisemblablement, on a dû puiser la première idée des proportions’,
Mercure de France (April 1761), ii, 129–33; Jw v
‘Origine des modes et du tempérament’, Mercure de France (June 1761), 152–70;
Jw v
‘Suite de la Réponse’, Mercure de France (July 1761), i, 150–58; Jw v
Origine des sciences, suivie d’une controverse sur le même sujet (Paris, 1762); Jw
iv
‘Lettre de M*** à M. D**** sur un ouvrage intitulé “l’Origine des sciences”’, Mercure
de France (April 1762. i); Jw vi
‘Seconde lettre de M*** à M*** ou Extrait d’une controverse entre le Géomètre &
l’Artiste sur “l’Origine des sciences”’, Mercure de France (April 1762, ii); Jw vi
‘Observations de M. Rameau sur son ouvrage intitulé, “Origine des sciences”’,
Mercure de France (June 1762); Jw vi
‘Conclusions sur l’origine des sciences’, Journal encyclopédique (July 1762); pr. in
Lescat, Dijon 1983
‘Lettre aux Philosophes’, Journal de Trévoux (Aug 1762); Jw vi
Vérités également ignorées et interressantes tirées du sein de la nature (c1764),
MSS: F-Pn* (inc.), S-Smf (rev. version of Vérités interessantes [after Sept 1763]);
both ed. in Schneider, ‘Rameau: Les vérités’ (1986)
MSS attrib. Rameau: L’art de la basse fondamentale par Rameau. Manuscrit en
partie inédit (d’après d’Alembert) (between 1737 and 1744), F-Pi; rev., pubd as P.
Gianotti: Le guide du compositeur (Paris, 1759)
?Lost: Traité de la composition des canons en musique (see Schneider, RMFC,
1985)
For Rameau’s letters relating to music theory, see Jw v, vi (indexed in vi, p.lxxi) and
Miller (1985); other letters pr. in Mercure de France, May 1752, March 1765, June
1765; Ducharger (1761); Decroix (1776); Brenet (1902/3); La Laurencie (1907);
R
Tiersot (1935); Girdlestone (1957, 2/1969); Jacobi (1963); Jw vi
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A General. B Works: general. C Dramatic works. D Other works. E Performing practice and mise en scène. F
Theory.
a: general
b: works: general
c: dramatic works
d: other works
e: performing practice and mise en scène
f: theory
Rameau, Jean-Philippe: Bibliography

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