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101-431: Little is known about Rameau's early years. It was not until the 1720s that he won fame as a major theorist of music with his Treatise on Harmony (1722) and also in the following years as a composer of masterpieces for the harpsichord, which circulated throughout Europe . He was almost 50 before he embarked on the operatic career on which his reputation chiefly rests today. His debut, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), caused

202-632: A bronze bust and red marble tombstone were erected in his memory there by the Société de la Compositeurs de Musique in 1883, the exact site of his burial remains unknown to this day. While the details of his biography are vague and fragmentary, the details of Rameau's personal and family life are almost completely obscure. Rameau's music, so graceful and attractive, completely contradicts the man's public image and what we know of his character as described (or perhaps unfairly caricatured) by Diderot in his satirical novel Le Neveu de Rameau . Throughout his life, music

303-484: A century. Unlike Italian opera of the day, which was rapidly moving toward opera seria with its alternating recitative and da capo airs, in Lully's operas the focus was on drama, expressed by a variety of vocal forms: monologs, airs for two or three voices, rondeaux and French-style da capo airs where the chorus alternates with singers, sung dances, and vaudeville songs for a few secondary characters. In like manner

404-506: A composer who wanted above all to be renowned as a theorist of the art. Nevertheless, it is not solely addressed to the intelligence, and Rameau himself claimed, "I try to conceal art with art." The paradox of this music was that it was new, using techniques never known before, but it took place within the framework of old-fashioned forms. Rameau appeared revolutionary to the Lullyistes, disturbed by complex harmony of his music; and reactionary to

505-530: A didacticism that was specifically intended to illuminate, scientifically, the structure and principles of music. With careful deductive reasoning, he attempted to derive universal harmonic principles from natural causes. Previous treatises on harmony had been purely practical; Rameau embraced the new philosophical rationalism, quickly rising to prominence in France as the " Isaac Newton of Music". His fame subsequently spread throughout all Europe, and his Treatise became

606-526: A few cantatas ; a few motets for large chorus; some pieces for solo harpsichord or harpsichord accompanied by other instruments; and, finally, his works for the stage, to which he dedicated the last thirty years of his career almost exclusively. Like most of his contemporaries, Rameau often reused melodies that had been particularly successful, but never without meticulously adapting them; they are not simple transcriptions. Besides, no borrowings have been found from other composers, although his earliest works show

707-500: A great reputation, and it was followed in 1726 by his Nouveau système de musique théorique . In 1724 and 1729 (or 1730), he also published two more collections of harpsichord pieces. Rameau took his first tentative steps into composing stage music when the writer Alexis Piron asked him to provide songs for his popular comic plays written for the Paris Fairs. Four collaborations followed, beginning with L'endriague in 1723, but none of

808-469: A great stir and was fiercely attacked by the supporters of Lully's style of music for its revolutionary use of harmony. Nevertheless, Rameau's pre-eminence in the field of French opera was soon acknowledged, and he was later attacked as an "establishment" composer by those who favoured Italian opera during the controversy known as the Querelle des Bouffons in the 1750s. Rameau's music had gone out of fashion by

909-518: A knight of the Ordre de Saint-Michel. But he did not change his way of life, keeping his worn-out clothes, his single pair of shoes, and his old furniture. After his death, it was discovered that he possessed only one dilapidated single-keyboard harpsichord in his rooms in Rue des Bons-Enfants, yet he also had a bag containing 1691 gold louis . Rameau's music is characterised by the exceptional technical knowledge of

1010-497: A point of not inviting Lully to perform Armide at Versailles the following year. Lully died from gangrene , having struck his foot with his long conducting staff during a performance of his Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from surgery. He refused to have his toe amputated. This resulted in gangrene propagating through his body and ultimately infecting the greater part of his brain, causing his death. He died in Paris and

1111-560: A radical revolution in the style of the dances of the court itself. In the place of the slow and stately movements which had prevailed until then, he introduced lively ballets of rapid rhythm , often based on well-known dance types such as gavottes , menuets , rigaudons and sarabandes . Through his collaboration with playwright Molière , a new music form emerged during the 1660s: the comédie-ballet which combined theater, comedy, incidental music and ballet. The popularity of these plays, with their sometimes lavish special effects, and

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1212-590: A scheming musician, Jeanne-Thérèse Goermans , as his mistress. The daughter of harpsichord maker Jacques Goermans , she went by the name of Madame de Saint-Aubin , and her opportunistic husband pushed her into the arms of the rich financier. She had La Poupelinière engage the services of the Bohemian composer Johann Stamitz , who succeeded Rameau after a breach developed between Rameau and his patron. By then, however, Rameau no longer needed La Poupelinière's financial support and protection. Rameau pursued his activities as

1313-507: A short while in Milan . On his return, he worked as a violinist in travelling companies, and then as an organist in provincial cathedrals, before moving to Paris for the first time. There, in 1706, he published his earliest-known compositions: the harpsichord works that make up his first book of Pièces de Clavecin , which show the influence of his friend Louis Marchand . In 1709, he moved back to Dijon to take over his father's job as organist in

1414-619: A single sung courante, added after the work's premiere at Nicolas Fouquet 's sumptuous chateau of Vaux-le-Vicomte . Their collaboration began in earnest in 1664 with Le Mariage forcé . More collaborations followed, some of them conceived for fetes at the royal court, and others taking the form of incidental music ( intermèdes ) for plays performed at command performances at court and also in Molière's Parisian theater. In 1672, Lully broke with Molière, who turned to Marc-Antoine Charpentier . Having acquired Pierre Perrin 's opera privilege, Lully became

1515-594: A theorist and composer until his death. He lived with his wife and two of his children in his large suite of rooms in Rue des Bons-Enfants, which he would leave every day, lost in thought, to take a solitary walk in the nearby gardens of the Palais-Royal or the Tuileries. Sometimes he would meet the young writer Chabanon , who noted some of Rameau's disillusioned confidential remarks: "Day by day, I'm acquiring more good taste, but I no longer have any genius" and "The imagination

1616-409: Is a music treatise written by Jean-Philippe Rameau . It was first published in Paris in 1722 by Jean-Baptiste-Christophe Ballard. It is Rameau's first treatise on musical theory. A fundamental work in the development of Western music, it earned Rameau a reputation as the most learned musician of his time. The Treatise summarizes the efforts of its author to make music a science, when before him it

1717-447: Is also credited with writing the libretto of Rameau's final work, Les Boréades (c. 1763). Many Rameau specialists have regretted that the collaboration with Houdar de la Motte never took place, and that the Samson project with Voltaire came to nothing because the librettists Rameau did work with were second-rate. He made his acquaintance of most of them at La Poupelinière 's salon, at

1818-812: Is commonly heard in the Victoria Centre in Nottingham by the Rowland Emett timepiece, the Aqua Horological Tintinnabulator . Emett quoted that Rameau made music for his school and the shopping centre without him knowing it. Rameau's 1722 Treatise on Harmony initiated a revolution in music theory. Rameau posited the discovery of the "fundamental law" or what he referred to as the "fundamental bass" of all Western music. Heavily influenced by new Cartesian modes of thought and analysis, Rameau's methodology incorporated mathematics, commentary, analysis and

1919-538: Is considered a master of the French Baroque music style. Best known for his operas, he spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France and became a French subject in 1661. He was a close friend of the playwright Molière , with whom he collaborated on numerous comédie-ballets , including L'Amour médecin , George Dandin ou le Mari confondu , Monsieur de Pourceaugnac , Psyché and his best known work, Le Bourgeois gentilhomme . Lully

2020-452: Is exceptionally small and his organ works nonexistent. Judging by the evidence, it was not his favourite field, but rather, simply a way of making reasonable money. Rameau's few religious compositions are nevertheless remarkable and compare favourably to the works of specialists in the area. Only four motets have been attributed to Rameau with any certainty: Deus noster refugium , In convertendo , Quam dilecta , and Laboravi . The cantata

2121-459: Is often credited with introducing new instruments into the orchestra, but this legend needs closer scrutiny. He continued to use recorders in preference to the newer transverse flute, and the "hautbois" he used in his orchestra were transitional instruments, somewhere between shawms and so-called Baroque oboes . Lully created French-style opera as a musical genre ( tragédie en musique or tragédie lyrique ). Concluding that Italian-style opera

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2222-415: Is the quintessence of music, melody only proceeding from harmony. The Treatise describes music and how to write it based on the tonal system used today in classical music . It uses the modern major and minor keys to teach readers what to do to achieve good-sounding music based on the 12 tone music scale . It states the principle of the equivalence of octaves, the notions of the fundamental bass and

2323-642: Is the use of the basso continuo as the driving force behind the music. The pitch standard for the French opera at the time was about 392 Hz for A above middle C, a whole tone lower than modern practice where A is usually 440 Hz . Lully's music is known for its power, liveliness in its fast movements and its deep emotional character in its slower movements. Some of his most popular works are his passacailles ( passacaglias ) and chaconnes , which are dance movements found in many of his works such as Armide or Phaëton . The influence of Lully's music produced

2424-455: Is worn out in my old head; it's not wise at this age wanting to practise arts that are nothing but imagination." Rameau composed prolifically in the late 1740s and early 1750s. After that, his rate of productivity dropped off, probably due to old age and ill health, although he was still able to write another comic opera, Les Paladins , in 1760. That as due to be followed by a final tragédie en musique, Les Boréades but, for unknown reasons,

2525-592: The philosophes , who only paid attention to its content and who either would not or could not listen to the sound it made. The incomprehension Rameau received from his contemporaries stopped him from repeating such daring experiments as the second Trio des Parques in Hippolyte et Aricie , which he was forced to remove after a handful of performances because the singers had been either unable or unwilling to execute it correctly. Rameau's musical works may be divided into four distinct groups, which differ greatly in importance:

2626-544: The Pièces de clavecin en concerts (1741), which some musicologists consider the pinnacle of French Baroque chamber music. Adopting a formula successfully employed by Mondonville a few years earlier, Rameau fashioned these pieces differently from trio sonatas in that the harpsichord is not simply there as basso continuo to accompany melody instruments (violin, flute, viol) but as equal partner in "concert" with them. Rameau claimed that this music would be equally satisfying played on

2727-453: The Ballet des saisons (1661), the lament "Rochers, vous êtes sourds" and Orpheus's sarabande "Dieu des Enfers", from the Ballet de la naissance de Vénus (1665). Intermèdes became part of a new genre, the comédie-ballet , in 1661, when Molière described them as "ornaments which have been mixed with the comedy" in his preface to Les Fâcheux  [ fr ] . "Also, to avoid breaking

2828-473: The French Revolution , Rameau's did not. By the end of the 18th century, his operas had vanished from the repertoire. For most of the 19th century, Rameau's music remained unplayed, known only by reputation. Hector Berlioz investigated Castor et Pollux and particularly admired the aria "Tristes apprêts", but "whereas the modern listener readily perceives the common ground with Berlioz' music, he himself

2929-447: The Société du Caveau  [ fr ] , or at the house of the comte de Livry, all meeting places for leading cultural figures of the day. Not one of his librettists managed to produce a libretto on the same artistic level as Rameau's music: the plots were often overly complex or unconvincing. But this was standard for the genre, and is probably part of its charm. The versification, too,

3030-567: The 1730s are among Rameau's most highly regarded works. However, the composer followed them with six years of silence, during which the only work he produced was a new version of Dardanus (1744). The reason for the interval in the composer's creative life is unknown, although it is possible he had a falling-out with the authorities at the Académie royale de la musique. The year 1745 was a turning point in Rameau's career. He received several commissions from

3131-481: The Académie Royale de Musique on 1 October 1733. It was immediately recognised as the most significant opera to appear in France since the death of Lully , though its reception drew controversy. Some, such as the composer André Campra , were stunned by its originality and wealth of invention; others found its harmonic innovations discordant and saw the work as an attack on the French musical tradition. The two camps,

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3232-540: The Académie royale de musique: three tragédies en musique and two opéra-ballets that still form the core of his repertoire. After the interval of 1740 to 1744, he became the official court musician, and for the most part, composed pieces intended to entertain, with plenty of dance music emphasising sensuality and an idealised pastoral atmosphere. In his last years, Rameau returned to a renewed version of his early style in Les Paladins and Les Boréades . His Zoroastre

3333-645: The French stage only by assimilating the latter's beautiful works and making them his own." Camille Saint-Saëns (by editing and publishing the Pièces in 1895) and Paul Dukas were two other important French musicians who gave practical championship to Rameau's music in their day, but interest in Rameau petered out again, and it was not until the late 20th century that a serious effort was made to revive his works. Over half of Rameau's operas have now been recorded, in particular by conductors such as John Eliot Gardiner , William Christie , and Marc Minkowski . One of his pieces

3434-667: The Italian method of dividing musical numbers into separate recitatives and arias , choosing instead to combine and intermingle the two, for dramatic effect. He and Quinault also opted for quicker story development, which was more to the taste of the French public. Lully is credited with the invention in the 1650s of the French overture , a form used extensively in the Baroque and Classical eras, especially by Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel . Lully's grand motets were written for

3535-464: The Italian tradition were increasingly looking towards Rameau as a way of reforming their own leading operatic genre, opera seria . Tommaso Traetta produced two operas setting translations of Rameau libretti that show the French composer's influence, Ippolito ed Aricia (1759) and I Tintaridi (based on Castor et Pollux , 1760). Traetta had been advised by Count Francesco Algarotti , a leading proponent of reform according to French models; Algarotti

3636-634: The Twenty-Four Violins or Grands Violons ("Great Violins"), who only slowly were abandoning the polyphony and divisions of past decades. When he became surintendant de la musique de la chambre du roi in 1661, the Great Violins also came under Lully's control. He relied mainly on the Little Violins for court ballets. Lully's collaboration with the playwright Molière began with Les Fâcheux  [ fr ] in 1661, when Lully provided

3737-459: The beginning and two at the end, and one between each of the three acts. Lully's intermèdes reached their apogee in 1670–1671, with the elaborate incidental music he composed for Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Psyché . After his break with Molière, Lully turned to opera; but he collaborated with Jean Racine for a fete at Sceaux in 1685, and with Campistron for an entertainment at Anet in 1686. Most of Molière's plays were first performed for

3838-402: The career of Claude-Bénigne Balbastre in the capital. Furthermore, he gave his daughter Marie-Louise a considerable dowry when she became a Visitandine nun in 1750, and he paid a pension to one of his sisters when she became ill. Financial security came late to him, following the success of his stage works and the grant of a royal pension. A few months before his death, he was ennobled and made

3939-594: The chorus performed in several combinations: the entire chorus, the chorus singing as duos, trios or quartets, the dramatic chorus, the dancing chorus. The intrigue of the plot culminated in a vast tableau, for example, the sleep scene in Atys , the village wedding in Roland , or the funeral in Alceste . Soloists, chorus and dancers participated in this display, producing astonishing effects thanks to machinery. In contrast to Italian opera,

4040-420: The conductor of La Poupelinière's private orchestra, which was of an extremely high quality. He held the post for 22 years, and was succeeded by Johann Stamitz and then François-Joseph Gossec . La Poupelinière's salon enabled Rameau to meet some of the leading cultural figures of the day, including Voltaire , who soon began collaborating with the composer. Their first project, the tragédie en musique Samson ,

4141-499: The court for works to celebrate the French victory at the Battle of Fontenoy and the marriage of the Dauphin to Infanta Maria Teresa Rafaela of Spain . Rameau produced his most important comic opera, Platée , as well as two collaborations with Voltaire: the opéra-ballet Le temple de la gloire and the comédie-ballet La princesse de Navarre . They gained Rameau official recognition; he

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4242-437: The definitive authority on music theory, forming the foundation for instruction in western music that persists to this day. RCT numbering refers to Rameau Catalogue Thématique established by Sylvie Bouissou and Denis Herlin. Music mostly lost. Notes Sources Sheet music Treatise on Harmony Traité de l'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels ( Treatise on Harmony Reduced to Its Natural Principles )

4343-526: The director of the Académie Royale de Musique , that is, the royal opera, which performed in the Palais-Royal . Between 1673 and 1687, he produced a new opera almost yearly and fiercely protected his monopoly over that new genre. After Queen Marie-Thérèse 's death in 1683 and the king's secret marriage to Mme de Maintenon , devotion came to the fore at court. The king's enthusiasm for opera dissipated; he

4444-403: The embittered Rousseau nursed a grudge against Rameau for the rest of his life. Rousseau was a major participant in the second great quarrel that erupted over Rameau's work, the so-called Querelle des Bouffons of 1752–54, which pitted French tragédie en musique against Italian opera buffa . This time, Rameau was accused of being out of date and his music too complicated in comparison with

4545-406: The end of 1745, Voltaire and Rameau, who were busy on other works, commissioned Rousseau to turn La Princesse de Navarre into a new opera, with linking recitative , called Les fêtes de Ramire . Rousseau then claimed the two had stolen the credit for the words and music he had contributed, though musicologists have been able to identify almost nothing of the piece as Rousseau's work. Nevertheless,

4646-430: The end of the 18th century, and it was not until the 20th that serious efforts were made to revive it. Today, he enjoys renewed appreciation with performances and recordings of his music ever more frequent. The details of Rameau's life are generally obscure, especially concerning his first forty years, before he moved to Paris for good. He was a secretive man, and even his wife knew nothing of his early life, which explains

4747-539: The engraving, he stands to the left, on the lowest level, his right arm extended and holding a scroll of paper with which to beat time. (The bronze ensemble has survived and is part of the collections of the Museum of Versailles.) Titon honored Lully as: the prince of French musicians, ... the inventor of that beautiful and grand French music, such as our operas and the grand pieces for voices and instruments that were only imperfectly known before him. He brought it [music] to

4848-424: The experiments of a theorist and musical innovator ("L'enharmonique", "Les Cyclopes"), which had a marked influence on Louis-Claude Daquin , Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer and Jacques Duphly . Rameau's suites are grouped in the traditional way, by key. The first set of dances (Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, Les Trois Mains, Fanfairenette, La Triomphante, Gavotte et 6 doubles) is centred on A major and A minor, while

4949-466: The fourteen-year-old entered Mademoiselle's service; from 1647 to 1652 he served as her "chamber boy" ( garçon de chambre ). He probably honed his musical skills by working with Mademoiselle's household musicians and with composers Nicolas Métru , François Roberday and Nicolas Gigault . The teenager's talents as a guitarist, violinist, and dancer quickly won him the nicknames "Baptiste", and " le grand baladin " (great street-artist). When Mademoiselle

5050-686: The full in his operas. For example, the chaconne that ends the Ballet de la Raillerie (1659) has 51 couplets plus an extra free part; in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670) he added a vocal line to the chaconne for the Scaramouches . The first menuets appear in the Ballet de la Raillerie (1659) and the Ballet de l'Impatience (1661). In Lully's ballets one can also see the emergence of concert music, for example, pieces for voice and instruments that could be excerpted and performed alone and that prefigure his operatic airs: "Bois, ruisseau, aimable verdure" from

5151-599: The genre blossomed and markedly changed in character. At first, as composer of instrumental music for the King's chamber, Lully wrote overtures, dances, dance-like songs, descriptive instrumental pieces such as combats, and parody-like récits with Italian texts. He was so captivated by the French overture that he wrote four of them for the Ballet d'Alcidiane . The development of his instrumental style can be discerned in his chaconnes . He experimented with all types of compositional devices and found new solutions that he later exploited to

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5252-425: The harpsichord alone, but the claim is not wholly convincing because he took the trouble to transcribe five of them himself, those the lack of other instruments would show the least. After 1733 Rameau dedicated himself mostly to opera. On a strictly musical level, 18th-century French Baroque opera is richer and more varied than contemporary Italian opera, especially in the place given to choruses and dances but also in

5353-431: The high tenor voice by that name), taille ( baritenor ), quinte , and basse , divided as follows: one voice of violins, three voices of violas, one voice of cello, and basse de viole (viole, viola da gamba). He also utilized guitar, lute , archlute , theorbo , harpsichord, organ, oboe, bassoon, recorder , flute, brass instruments (natural trumpet) and various percussion instruments ( castanets , timpani ). He

5454-581: The influence of other music. Rameau's reworkings of his own material are numerous; e.g., in Les Fêtes d'Hébé , we find L'Entretien des Muses , the Musette, and the Tambourin, taken from the 1724 book of harpsichord pieces, as well as an aria from the cantata Le Berger Fidèle . For at least 26 years, Rameau was a professional organist in the service of religious institutions, and yet the body of sacred music he composed

5555-523: The inversion of chords, the pre-eminence of the major triad and, at the cost of an intellectual contortion (one of the weaknesses of the theory), that of the minor perfect chord. It thus lays the foundations of classical harmony and tonality in a way that is no longer empirical. The Treatise is divided into four books: At the time of writing his treatise, Rameau was not yet aware of Joseph Sauveur 's work on harmonic sounds. A few years later, he saw that striking confirmation of his theory, which gave rise to

5656-449: The main church. The contract was for six years, but Rameau left before then and took up similar posts in Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand . During that period, he composed motets for church performance as well as secular cantatas . In 1722, he returned to Paris for good, and there he published his most important work of music theory, Traité de l'harmonie ( Treatise on Harmony ). That soon won him

5757-413: The music has survived. On 25 February 1726, Rameau married the 19-year-old Marie-Louise Mangot, who came from a musical family from Lyon, and was a good singer and instrumentalist. The couple had four children, two boys and two girls, and the marriage is said to have been a happy one. In spite of his fame as a music theorist, Rameau had trouble finding a post as an organist in Paris. It was not until he

5858-480: The musical continuity that arises from the respective relationships between the arias and the recitatives . Another essential difference: whereas Italian opera gave a starring role to female sopranos and castrati , French opera had no use for the latter. The Italian opera of Rameau's day ( opera seria , opera buffa ) was essentially divided into musical sections ( da capo arias, duets, trios, etc.) and sections that were spoken or almost spoken ( recitativo secco ). It

5959-481: The national destiny of France." In 1894, composer Vincent d'Indy founded the Schola Cantorum to promote French national music; the society put on several revivals of works by Rameau. Among the audience was Claude Debussy , who especially cherished Castor et Pollux , revived in 1903: " Gluck 's genius was deeply rooted in Rameau's works... a detailed comparison allows us to affirm that Gluck could replace Rameau on

6060-428: The opera was never produced and did not get a proper staging unil the late 20th century. Rameau died on 12 September 1764 after suffering from a fever, thirteen days before his 81st birthday. At his bedside, he objected to a song being sung. His last words were, "What the devil do you mean to sing to me, priest? You are out of tune." He was buried in the church of St. Eustache , Paris on the same day of his death. Although

6161-403: The operatic reforms advocated in the preface to Gluck's Alceste were already present in Rameau's works. Rameau had used accompanied recitatives, and the overtures in his later operas reflected the action to come, so when Gluck arrived in Paris in 1774 to produce a series of six French operas, he could be seen as continuing in the tradition of Rameau. Nevertheless, while Gluck's popularity survived

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6262-475: The peak of perfection and was the father of our most illustrious musicians working in that musical form. ... Lully entertained the king infinitely, by his music, by the way he performed it, and by his witty remarks. The prince was also very fond of Lully and showered him with benefits in a most gracious way. Lully's music was written during the Middle Baroque period, 1650 to 1700. Typical of Baroque music

6363-457: The point of departure was always a verse libretto, in most cases by the verse dramatist Philippe Quinault . For the dance pieces, Lully would hammer out rough chords and a melody on the keyboard, and Quinault would invent words. For the recitative, Lully imitated the speech melodies and dramatic emphasis used by the best actors in the spoken theater. His attentiveness to transferring theatrical recitation to sung music shaped French opera and song for

6464-455: The publication of a complementary treatise, Harmonic Generation . This article about a music publication is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This music theory article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Jean-Baptiste Lully Jean-Baptiste Lully (28 November [ O.S. 18 November] 1632 – 22 March 1687) was a French composer, dancer and instrumentalist of Italian birth, who

6565-558: The reins of government in 1661, he named Lully superintendent of the royal music and music master of the royal family. In December 1661, the Florentine was granted letters of naturalization. Thus, when he married Madeleine Lambert (1643–1720), the daughter of the renowned singer and composer Michel Lambert in 1662, Giovanni Battista Lulli declared himself to be "Jean-Baptiste Lully, escuyer [ squire ], son of Laurent de Lully, gentilhomme Florentin [Florentine gentleman]". The latter assertion

6666-409: The relatively standardised suite form, which had reached its apogee in the first decade of the 18th century and successive collections of pieces by Louis Marchand , Gaspard Le Roux , Louis-Nicolas Clérambault , Jean-François Dandrieu , Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre , Charles Dieupart and Nicolas Siret . Rameau and Couperin had different styles, and it seems they did not know one another: Couperin

6767-507: The remaining pieces (Les tricoteuses, L'Indifferente, Première Menuet, Deuxième Menuet, La Poule, Les Triolets, Les Sauvages, L'Enharmonique, L'Egiptienne [sic]) are centred around G major and G minor. Rameau's second and third collections appeared in 1724 and 1727. After these he composed only one piece for the harpsichord, the eight-minute "La Dauphine" of 1747, while the very short "Les petits marteaux" (c. 1750) has also been attributed to him. During his semiretirement (1740 to 1744) he wrote

6868-478: The royal chapel, usually for vespers or for the King's daily Low Mass. Lully did not invent the genre, he built upon it. Grand motets often were psalm settings, but for a time during the 1660s Lully used texts written by Pierre Perrin , a neo-Latin poet. Lully's petit motets were probably composed for the nuns at the convent of the Assumption, rue Saint-Honoré. When Lully began dancing and composing for court ballets,

6969-423: The royal court. With five exceptions, each of Lully's operas was described as a tragédie mise en musique , or tragedy set to music. The exceptions were: Bellérophon , Cadmus et Hermione , and Psyché , each called simply a tragédie ; and Les fêtes de l'Amour et de Bacchus , described as a pastorale , and Acis et Galathée , which is a pastorale héroïque . (The term tragédie lyrique came later.) With Lully,

7070-449: The scarcity of biographical information available. Rameau's early years are particularly obscure. He was born on 25 September 1683 in Dijon , and baptised the same day. His father, Jean, worked as an organist in several churches around Dijon, and his mother, Claudine Demartinécourt, was the daughter of a notary . The couple had eleven children, five girls and six boys, of whom Jean-Philippe was

7171-497: The seventh. Rameau was taught music before he could read or write. He was educated at the Jesuit college at Godrans in Dijon, but he was not a good pupil and disrupted classes with his singing, later claiming that his passion for opera had begun at the age of twelve. Initially intended for the law, Rameau decided he wanted to be a musician, and his father sent him to Italy, where he stayed for

7272-547: The simplicity and "naturalness" of a work like Pergolesi's La serva padrona . In the mid-1750s, Rameau criticised Rousseau's contributions to the musical articles in the Encyclopédie , which led to a quarrel with the leading philosophes d'Alembert and Diderot . As a result, Jean-François Rameau became a character in Diderot's then-unpublished dialogue, Le neveu de Rameau ( Rameau's Nephew ). In 1753, La Poupelinière took

7373-461: The so-called Lullyistes and the Rameauneurs, fought a pamphlet war over the issue for the rest of the decade. Just before that, Rameau had made the acquaintance of the powerful financier Alexandre Le Riche de La Poupelinière , who became his patron until 1753. La Poupelinière's mistress (and later, wife), Thérèse des Hayes , was Rameau's pupil and a great admirer of his music. In 1731, Rameau became

7474-400: The success and publication of Lully's operas and its diffusion beyond the borders of France, played a crucial role in synthesizing, consolidating and disseminating orchestral organization, scorings, performance practices, and repertory. The instruments in Lully's music were: five voices of strings such as dessus (a higher range than soprano), haute-contre (the instrumental equivalent of

7575-552: The thread of the piece by these interludes, it was deemed advisable to weave the ballet in the best manner one could into the subject, and make but one thing of it and the play." The music for the premiere of Les Fâcheux was composed by Pierre Beauchamp , but Lully later provided a sung courante for act 1, scene 3. With Le Mariage forcé  [ fr ] and La Princesse d'Élide  [ fr ] (1664), intermèdes by Lully began to appear regularly in Molière's plays: for those performances there were six intermèdes, two at

7676-409: The various instrumental genres were present to enrich the overall effect: French overture, dance airs, rondeaux , marches, " simphonies " that painted pictures, preludes, ritournelles . Collected into instrumental suites or transformed into trios, these pieces had enormous influence and affected instrumental music across Europe. The earliest operas were performed at the indoor Bel Air tennis court (on

7777-415: The violin. In 1646, dressed as Harlequin during Mardi Gras and amusing bystanders with his clowning and his violin, the boy attracted the attention of Roger de Lorraine, chevalier de Guise, son of Charles, Duke of Guise , who was returning to France and was looking for someone to converse in Italian with his niece, Mademoiselle de Montpensier ( la Grande Mademoiselle ). Guise took the boy to Paris, where

7878-409: Was a genre within the reach of a composer who was still unknown. Musicologists can only guess at the dates of Rameau's six surviving cantatas, and the names of the librettists are unknown. Along with François Couperin , Rameau was a master of the 18th-century French school of harpsichord music, and both made a break with the style of the first generation of harpsichordists whose compositions adhered to

7979-466: Was a highly successful genre in the early 18th century. The French cantata, which should not be confused with the Italian or the German cantata, was "invented" in 1706 by the poet Jean-Baptiste Rousseau and soon taken up by many famous composers of the day, such as Montéclair , Campra , and Clérambault . Cantatas were Rameau's first contact with dramatic music. The modest forces the cantata required meant it

8080-404: Was a major influence on the most important "reformist" composer, Christoph Willibald Gluck . Gluck's three Italian reform operas of the 1760s— Orfeo ed Euridice , Alceste , and Paride ed Elena —reveal a knowledge of Rameau's works. For instance, both Orfeo and the 1737 version of Castor et Pollux open with the funeral of one of the leading characters who later comes back to life. Many of

8181-528: Was abandoned because an opera on a religious theme by Voltaire—a notorious critic of the Church—was likely to be banned by the authorities. Meanwhile, Rameau had introduced his new musical style into the lighter genre of the opéra-ballet with the highly successful Les Indes galantes . It was followed by two tragédies en musique , Castor et Pollux (1737) and Dardanus (1739), and another opéra-ballet , Les fêtes d'Hébé (also 1739). All those operas of

8282-513: Was an untruth. The couple had six children who survived past childhood: Catherine-Madeleine, Louis , Jean-Baptiste , Gabrielle-Hilarie, Jean-Louis and Louis-Marie. From 1661 on, the trios and dances he wrote for the court were promptly published. As early as 1653, Louis XIV made him director of his personal violin orchestra, known as the Petits Violons ("Little Violins"), which was proving to be open to Lully's innovations, as contrasted with

8383-568: Was annoyed by Lully's dissolute life and homosexual encounters. Lully had avoided getting too close to the secret homosexual grouping that had gathered in the court around the Duc de Vendôme , the Comte de Tallard and the Duc de Gramont . But in 1685 he was accused of improper relations with a page boy living in his household called Brunet. Brunet was removed after a police raid, and Lully escaped punishment. However, to show his general displeasure, Louis XIV made

8484-413: Was approaching 50 that Rameau decided to embark on the operatic career on which his fame as a composer mainly rests. He had already approached writer Antoine Houdar de la Motte for a libretto in 1727, but nothing came of it; he was finally inspired to try his hand at the prestigious genre of tragédie en musique after seeing Montéclair 's Jephté in 1732. Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie premiered at

8585-536: Was born on November 28, 1632, in Florence , Grand Duchy of Tuscany , to Lorenzo Lulli and Caterina Del Sera, a Tuscan family of millers. His general education and his musical training during his youth in Florence remain uncertain, but his adult handwriting suggests that he manipulated a quill pen with ease. He used to say that a Franciscan friar gave him his first music lessons and taught him guitar. He also learned to play

8686-475: Was buried in the church of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires , where his tomb with its marble bust can still be seen. All three of his sons ( Louis Lully , Jean-Baptiste Lully fils , and Jean-Louis Lully ) had musical careers as successive surintendants of the King's Music. Lully himself was posthumously given a conspicuous place on Titon du Tillet 's Parnasse François ("the French Mount Parnassus "). In

8787-458: Was considered an art. Rameau takes up the work of his predecessors, notably Zarlino and Descartes (Compendium musicae), to bring order to the scattered notions identified before him and make harmony a deductive science like mathematics, on the postulate that “sound is to sound as string is to string” (referring to the mathematical relation between pitch and length). For Rameau, “nature” is the basis of his theory, which allows him to affirm that harmony

8888-445: Was difficult to understand, just like his handwriting, which was never fluent. As a man, he was secretive, solitary, irritable, proud of his own achievements (more as a theorist than as a composer), brusque with those who contradicted him, and quick to anger. It is difficult to imagine him among the leading wits, including Voltaire (to whom he bears more than a passing physical resemblance), who frequented La Poupelinière's salon; his music

8989-409: Was during the latter that the action progressed while the audience waited for the next aria; on the other hand, the text of the arias was almost entirely buried beneath music whose chief aim was to show off the virtuosity of the singer. Nothing of the kind is to be found in French opera of the day; since Lully, the text had to remain comprehensible—limiting certain techniques such as the vocalise , which

9090-721: Was exiled to the provinces in 1652 after the rebellion known as the Fronde , Lully "begged his leave ... because he did not want to live in the country." The princess granted his request. By February 1653, Lully had attracted the attention of young Louis XIV , dancing with him in the Ballet royal de la nuit . By March 16, 1653, Lully had been made royal composer for instrumental music. His vocal and instrumental music for court ballets gradually made him indispensable. In 1660 and 1662 he collaborated on court performances of Francesco Cavalli 's Xerse and Ercole amante . When Louis XIV took over

9191-414: Was first performed in 1749. According to one of Rameau's admirers, Cuthbert Girdlestone, this opera has a distinctive place in his works: "The profane passions of hatred and jealousy are rendered more intensely [than in his other works] and with a strong sense of reality." Unlike Lully, who collaborated with Philippe Quinault on almost all his operas, Rameau rarely worked with the same librettist twice. He

9292-400: Was granted the title "Compositeur du Cabinet du Roi" and given a substantial pension. 1745 also saw the beginning of the bitter enmity between Rameau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . Though best known today as a thinker, Rousseau had ambitions to be a composer. He had written an opera, Les muses galantes (inspired by Rameau's Indes galantes ), but Rameau was unimpressed by this musical tribute. At

9393-424: Was highly demanding and bad-tempered, unable to maintain longstanding partnerships with his librettists, with the exception of Louis de Cahusac , who collaborated with him on several operas, including Les fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour (1747), Zaïs (1748), Naïs (1749), Zoroastre (1749; revised 1756), La naissance d'Osiris (1754), and Anacréon (the first of Rameau's operas by that name, 1754). He

9494-408: Was his consuming passion. It occupied his entire thinking; Philippe Beaussant calls him a monomaniac. Alexis Piron explained that "His heart and soul were in his harpsichord; once he had shut its lid, there was no one home." Physically, Rameau was tall and exceptionally thin, as can be seen by the sketches we have of him, including a famous portrait by Carmontelle . He had a "loud voice". His speech

9595-421: Was his passport, and it made up for his lack of social graces. His enemies exaggerated his faults, e.g. his supposed miserliness. In fact, it seems that his thriftiness was the result of long years spent in obscurity, when his income was uncertain and scanty, rather than being part of his character, because he could also be generous. He helped his nephew Jean-François when he came to Paris and also helped establish

9696-526: Was inappropriate for the French language, he and his librettist, Philippe Quinault , a respected playwright, employed the same poetics that dramatists used for verse tragedies: the 12-syllable " alexandrine " and the 10-syllable "heroic" poetic lines of the spoken theater were used for the recitative of Lully's operas and were perceived by their contemporaries as creating a very "natural" effect. Airs, especially if they were based on dances, were by contrast set to lines of less than 8 syllables. Lully also forsook

9797-417: Was mediocre, and Rameau often had to have the libretto modified and rewrite the music after the premiere because of the ensuing criticism. This is why we have two versions of Castor et Pollux (1737 and 1754) and three of Dardanus (1739, 1744, and 1760). By the end of his life, Rameau's music had come under attack in France from theorists who favoured Italian models. However, foreign composers working in

9898-468: Was more conscious of the gap which separated them." French humiliation in the Franco-Prussian War brought about a change in Rameau's fortunes. As Rameau biographer Jean Malignon wrote, "...the German victory over France in 1870–71 was the grand occasion for digging up great heroes from the French past. Rameau, like so many others, was flung into the enemy's face to bolster our courage and our faith in

9999-596: Was one of the official court musicians; Rameau, fifteen years his junior, achieved fame only after Couperin's death. Rameau published his first book of harpsichord pieces in 1706. (Cf. Couperin, who waited until 1713 before publishing his first "Ordres".) Rameau's music includes pieces in the pure tradition of the French suite: imitative ("Le rappel des oiseaux", "La poule") and characterful ("Les tendres plaintes", "L'entretien des Muses"). But there are also works of pure virtuosity that resemble Domenico Scarlatti ("Les tourbillons", "Les trois mains") as well as pieces that reveal

10100-507: Was reserved for special words such as gloire ("glory") or victoire ("victory"). A subtle equilibrium existed between the more and the less musical parts: melodic recitative on the one hand and arias that were often closer to arioso on the other, alongside virtuoso "ariettes" in the Italian style. This form of continuous music prefigures Wagnerian drama even more than does the "reform" opera of Gluck . Five essential components may be discerned in Rameau's operatic scores: Rameau

10201-477: Was the greatest ballet composer of all times. The genius of his creation rests on one hand on his perfect artistic permeation by folk-dance types, on the other hand on the constant preservation of living contact with the practical requirements of the ballet stage, which prevented an estrangement between the expression of the body from the spirit of absolute music . During the first part of his operatic career (1733–1739), Rameau wrote his great masterpieces destined for

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