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Jean-Philippe Rameau (September 25, 1683, Dijon – September 12, 1764) was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François Couperin. Little is known about Rameau's early years, and it was not until the 1720s that he won fame as a major theorist of music with his Treatise on Harmony (1722). He was almost 50 before he embarked on the operatic career on which his reputation chiefly rests. His debut, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), caused a great stir and was fiercely attacked for its revolutionary use of harmony by the supporters of Lully's style of music. 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 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 the scarcity of
biographical information available.
He was born on September 25, 1683 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
which Jean-Philippe was the seventh. Rameau was taught music before he
could read or write. He was educated at the Jesuit college
at Godrans, 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 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. Here, 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 the main church. The contract was for six years, but Rameau left
before then and took up similar posts in Lyon and Clermont. During this
period, he composed motets for church performance as
well as secular cantatas.
In 1722, he returned to Paris for good, and here he published his most
important work of music theory, Traité
de l'harmonie (Treatise
on Harmony). This soon won him 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; none of the music
has survived. On
February 25, 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 would have 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 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 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 the Académie Royale de Musique on October 1, 1733. It was
immediately recognised as the most significant opera to appear in
France since the death of Lully,
but audiences were split over whether this was a good thing or a bad
thing. 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, the so-called Lullyistes
and the Rameauneurs, fought a pamphlet war over the issue for the rest
of the decade. Just
before this time, Rameau had made the acquaintance of powerful financier Alexandre Le
Riche de La Poupelinière,
who became his patron until 1753. La Pouplinière's mistress (and
later, wife), Thérèse des Hayes, was Rameau's pupil and a
great admirer of his music. In 1731, Rameau became the conductor of La
Pouplinière's private orchestra, which was of an extremely high
quality. He held the post for 22 years; he was succeeded by Johann Stamitz and then Gossec. La Pouplinière'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,
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 these operas of the 1730s are among Rameau's most highly
regarded works. However, the composer followed
them with six years of silence, in which the only work he produced was
a new version of Dardanus (1744).
The reason for this 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 watershed in Rameau's career. He received several
commissions from the court for works to celebrate the French victory at
the Battle of
Fontenoy and the
marriage of the Dauphin to a Spanish princess.
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 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 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,
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 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, Rameau became a
character in Diderot's then unpublished dialogue, Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew). In
1753, La Pouplinière took 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
Pouplinière engage the services of the Bohemian composer Johann Stamitz,
who succeeded Rameau after a breach developed between Rameau and his
patron; however, by then, Rameau no longer needed La
Pouplinière's financial support and protection. Rameau
pursued his activities as 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 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. This was due to be followed by a final tragédie en
musique, Les
Boréades; but for unknown reasons, the opera was
never produced and had to wait until the late 20th century for a proper
staging. Rameau died on September 12,
1764 after suffering from a fever. He was buried in the church of St. Eustache,
Paris the following 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 was his consuming passion. It occupied his
entire thinking; Philippe Beaussant calls him a monomaniac. 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 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
Pouplinière's salon; his music 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 part
of his character, because he could also be generous. We know that he
helped his nephew Jean-François when he came to Paris and also
helped establish 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
also ennobled and made 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 only possessed one dilapidated single-keyboard
harpsichord in his rooms in Rue des
Bons-Enfants, yet he also had a bag containing 1691 gold louis. |