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Arguably France’s first native composer to make a name for himself on the global stage, Jean-Philippe Rameau was a Baroque-era musician, organist, and theorist.

Born in Dijon, Rameau was exposed to music at a very early age thanks to his father, who served as organist to the town’s own Notre Dame cathedral. At fifteen, Rameau was already working as an organist himself and would assume his father’s Notre Dame title a few years later in 1709. The composer’s career would follow a similar path for the next dozen years or so, during which time he mostly performed as a church musician at various provincial posts.

By the 1720s, Rameau’s musical interests had expanded to include harmonic studies, and he began to solidify his reputation as a progressive music theorist, most notably through his 1722 Traité de l’harmonie (Treatise of Harmony), which explored the sonic relationships within the tapestry of Western chords.

In 1723, Rameau took his theories to Paris, where he enjoyed moderate success as a composer and tutor, crafting smaller works for music theatre as well as cantatas and performance books for the clavecin (or harpsichord) while also giving organ lessons to local students. Still, it appeared as though Rameau’s more academic approach to harmonic composition was failing to connect with audiences in the same way as the music of Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), whose suave, elegant style continued to loom large over the French public.

Happily, Rameau was thrown a creative lifeline when, in 1731, he secured a position with Alexandre-Jean-Joseph Le Riche de la Pouplinière (1693-1762), an eccentric aristocrat and patron of the arts who funded his own private orchestra and produced weekly concerts as well as a rotating calendar of operas, ballets, festivals, and plays. Rameau’s avant garde take on harmony would win him employment as the conductor and composer-in-residence at La Pouplinière’s famous château outside Paris, which played host to many leading artists and thinkers of the day, including Marie-Louise Mangot, a talented harpsichordist and Rameau’s wife.

La Pouplinière’s patronage allowed Rameau to pursue a new career in opera, which was perhaps the most prestigious musical genre in France at the time as well as the quickest path to composer glory. Indeed, his first operatic work, Hippolyte et Aricie (Hippolytus and Aricia, 1733) set off a musical firestorm and sparked heated debate among loyal followers of the Lully tradition (“Lullistes”) and admirers of Rameau’s experimental blend of what he called musical “colors” (“Ramistes”). Yet despite the objections of the Lullistes, Rameau’s popularity soared, enabling him to write several more operas and opera-ballets, including Les Indes galantes (The Gallant Indians, 1735), Castor et Pollux (Castor and Pollux, 1737), Platée (1745), and Zoroastre (1749).

In his later years, Rameau found himself at the center of yet another musical controversy that pit champions of French music against proponents of Italian opera, as exemplified by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s (1710-1736) La serva padrona (The Servant Mistress, 1733), performed in Paris in 1752. Yet Rameau’s contributions to Western music managed to rise above such artistic disputes. Today, the composer is remembered as a pioneering figure in the field of opera whose studies of harmonic language provided the building blocks for more than two centuries of future composition.

Written by Eleni Hagen

Sources:

Buckley, Jonathan (ed.). Classical Music on CD: The Rough Guide. London: Rough Guides Ltd., 1994.

Grout, Donald Jay and Claude V. Palisca. A History of Western Music. 6th Edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Riding, Alan and Leslie Dunton-Downer. DK Eyewitness Companions: Opera. New York, NY: DK Publishing, 2006.

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