Jean-Philippe Rameau, Revolutionary Conservative
Christie Tolstoy
The MHS Review 237 Vol. 3, No. 3 March 26, 1979
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was one of the leading composers of the first half of the eighteenth century. As an opera composer he was extraordinarily successful: for over thirty years his works dominated the French operatic stage to such an extent that a decree was issued forbidding the production of more than two Rameau operas a year. Rameau was also well known to the Parisian public. Admiring reviews and enraged criticism of his operas furnished copy for the Paris press for forty years, and the controversy was found so generally interesting that it continued unabated for many years after his death. Rameau was so celebrated, so notorious, even, that it is hard to believe that until almost the age of fifty he was a nonentity, a minor composer who attracted very little attention of any kind.
Rameau was born into a family of solid middle class pretentions, son of a father who was organist of two important churches in Dijon and a mother who was a member of the lesser provincial nobility. The bourgeois respectability of the family, however, was diluted by a strong strain of quirky individualism and erratic ·genius. Rameau's brother Claude, for example, joined. the army, was hanged for looting, saved when the noose failed to tighten, and fled clad only in a torn shirt which he had the wit to fashion into marionettes so that he could earn enough money to return to Dijon, where he settled down as organist of Notre-Dame: Rameau's nephew Lazare was an organist at the cathedral of Autun by the age of nine. By the age of seventeen he had already launched himself upon a promising musical career in Paris, but his cheerful debauchery and other personal peculiarities ruined his prospects, and he. ended his life as a wandering actor and organist. The eccentricities of another nephew, Jean-Francois, were so pronounced that they were immortalized by Diderot in his book Le neveu de Rameau.
Rameau was forty and organist of the cathedral of Clermont in the Auvergne when his individualism first asserted itself in a positive way. In 1772 he published his Traite de l'harmonie which, together with subsequent volumes, propounded a system of harmonic theory describing the most advanced compositional practices of his day in terms radically different from all previous thinking in the field. Since the Middle Ages theorists had conceived of music as linear, the sum of several simultaneous horizontal melodies. It was Rameau who first clearly understood that music may also be seen as a succession of vertical structures, or chords. For a hundred years before Rameau, Baroque musicians thought of music as a dialogue between a soprano melody and the written bass line. By an astounding leap of the creative imagination Rameau perceived that the expressively shaped bass line so characteristic of Baroque music was really only another melody, and that the functional bass was a theoretical entity which he termed the "fundamental bass" and which we today would call the roots of the chords. Rameau was the first to define harmonic inversion, cadence types, and tonic, dominant, and subdominant function. It was he, in a word, who outlined the harmonic system which was to be the basis of European art music for the next two hundred years.
Theoretical advances of such magnitude are rare, and Rameau seems to have had some idea of the importance of his discoveries. Soon after the publication of the Traite he broke a twenty-nine year contract with the church fathers of Clermont by the simple expedient of playing abominably in church (a contemporary remarked that "he put so much art into the mixtures of his stops and the assemblage of the most rending discords that connoisseurs confessed that only Rameau could play so unpleasingly"), and set out for Paris. Within a year he was composing comic operas for performance at the big Parisian agricultural fairs, and between 1724 and 1728 he produced the music for which he is probably best known today, two books of harpsichord pieces of great originality.
Rameau belongs to the last generation of the classic period of the great French school of harpsichord composers, and at first glance his music for harpsichord seems cast in a traditional French mold. As might be expected of the man who had just published the Traite, however, Rameau is in fact the most experimental and revolutionary of all French clavecinistes. The mind of Rameau the harmonic theorist may be seen at work in "L'Enharmonique," which modulates boldly through a series of sounds so strange to eighteenth century ears that the composer felt obliged to mention in the preface that the music "may not be to everyone's taste right away; one can nevertheless grow ... to awareness of all its beauty once the initial aversion, which in this case might result from lack of familiarity, has been overcome."
Descriptive music is also a distinctive feature of Rameau's keyboard writing. It is true that in Rameau's time an important segment of thought held that the imitation of nature ought to be the primary objective of all art, that "music which depicts nothing is insipid;" in accordance with this dictum French harpsichord music almost from its beginning had painted portraits of emotions and situations and imitated actions and sounds. Nevertheless, Rameau's descriptive keyboard music passes beyond the usual limits of the French genre pieces and suggests choreographic movement and dramatic action in a manner which borders upon the operatic.
Rameau himself, in trying to convince a famous author to furnish him with a libretto for his first serious opera, cited his keyboard music as an instance of his talent as a dramatic composer:
"It is desirable that there should be found for the stage a musician who has studied nature before painting her and who. through his learning. knows how to choose the colours and shades ... related to the required expressions ... You have only to come and hear how I have ... rendered the titles "Les Soupirs." "Les Tendres Plaints." "Les Cyclopes." "Les Tourbillons," "L'Entretien des Muses," a "Musette," a "Tambourin," etc.
One of Rameau's harpsichord pieces of this period, in fact. is an early sketch for the famous "Danse des sauvages" from Les lndes go/antes. Rameau had spent the first half of his life as a keyboard player. His harpsichord music of the 1720's reveals him as a composer with his eye on a much more prestigious field.
As it happened, the French operatic style was badly in need of a new composer with an independent cast in mind. French opera had been more or less at a standstill since 1672, when Louis XIV granted Jean-Baptiste Lully a royal patent naming him as the only composer privileged to produce opera in France. The prestige of Lully's operas was such that his own works remained in the repertoire long after his death (Thesee ran for 104 years). and succeeding French opera composers such as Campra and Destouches, though they made what concessions they dared to the newer trends of Italian opera, did not venture to depart from the Lullian format. It seemed that Lully' s stylistic monopoly could be challenged only by a composer well versed in the French classic tradition but endowed with a stubborn originality. That composer was Rameau.
The operatic formula which Rameau inherited from Lully was, in fact. an excellent one, a knowing blend of all the most popular features of seventeenth century court entertainments. From court ballet and ballet comedy Lully had borrowed the French overture. instrumental "symphonies," huge choruses. and. of course. ballet. From Italian opera he copied his magnificent divertissements. magical transformation and apparition scenes engineered by set designers and architects. His lilting arias or "airs" were modeled upon a variety of successful French song forms. including the aristocratic air de cour and popular drinking and love songs; his flexible. emotion-laden recitative preserved all the nobility, poetry. and drama of the French classic theatre.
Rameau. a professional admirer of Lully, had no intention of altering this time-tested formula. but the large body of theory which he had codified and his strongly independent musical personality led him to interpret it with freedom and vigor. His overtures, for example. are often musically or dramatically linked to the opera. His instrumental "symphonies" are sometimes descriptive of atmosphere or action in the Lullian manner, but at other times depict earthquakes, thunder storms. and monsters with a sensationalism which was quite new. His choruses are integrated into large-scale forms. dramatic harmonies and novel orchestration add an entirely new dimension to his Lullian airs and recitatives. In accordance with his theory that every chord which is not cadential should be dissonant and that melody is merely a derivative from harmony. Rameau underlined his vocal music with a harmony whose violent emotionalism left his audience stunned; he developed Lully's old fashioned contrapuntal orchestration into a much more modern style marked by idiomatic string writing and expressive woodwind solos.
Rameau was fifty years old when his first serious opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, was produced at the Paris Opera in 1733. His fame dates from that moment. His second opera. Les Indes galantes, was a popular success. and this, and every succeeding work. stirred a storm of controversy. At the beginning of his career as an opera composer. a pro-Lullist faction found his style too Italian; toward the end of his life, pro-Italian critics found him too French. Conservative music lovers objected to his innovations:
"Nothing flowed naturally, no genius inspired them, they turned their backs on nature and feeling ... Most of the spectators exclaimed that the instruments were out of tune: their sounds wounded the least refined of ears: they were told point blank that the discords had been made on purpose and were the height of art ... All keys were traversed at high speed, discords were strewn incessantly: sometimes two notes were obstinately repeated for a quarter of an hour: much noise. many scraps of melody; when by chance two bars occurred which might have made a pleasing tune, key mode, and beat were quickly changed. Always sadness instead of tenderness: what was singular became baroque; fury became shindy: instead of merriment, turbulence; never any prettiness; never i;lnything to go to the heart."
The Marquis d' Argenson expressed it more succinctly: "Am I fated to hear nothing but this foreign, hateful, baroque, inhuman music?''
Though his music was attacked as too learned. too noisy. too orchestral, qnd non-melodic. Rameau accomplished an important revolution in opera and in music. His operatic works reinterpreted the Lullian prototype in terms of the latest advances of the French rococo and the Italian High Baroque. and looked ahead to the new classic style and to Gluck. He was the first French composer to adopt orchestral technique as an integral part of his style, the first theorist to verbalize the harmonic system which was to be the basis of the musical language of Mozart. Beethoven. and Wagner. Bound by ties of respect and affection to the French classic tradition but driven by a congenitally independent and original nature, Rameau both summed up France's musical past and forged its future.
Christie Tolstoy is a Ph.D candidate at CUNY. a harpsichordist. and an editor of be/ canto operas. ____________ _
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was one of the leading composers of the first half of the eighteenth century. As an opera composer he was extraordinarily successful: for over thirty years his works dominated the French operatic stage to such an extent that a decree was issued forbidding the production of more than two Rameau operas a year. Rameau was also well known to the Parisian public. Admiring reviews and enraged criticism of his operas furnished copy for the Paris press for forty years, and the controversy was found so generally interesting that it continued unabated for many years after his death. Rameau was so celebrated, so notorious, even, that it is hard to believe that until almost the age of fifty he was a nonentity, a minor composer who attracted very little attention of any kind.
Rameau was born into a family of solid middle class pretentions, son of a father who was organist of two important churches in Dijon and a mother who was a member of the lesser provincial nobility. The bourgeois respectability of the family, however, was diluted by a strong strain of quirky individualism and erratic ·genius. Rameau's brother Claude, for example, joined. the army, was hanged for looting, saved when the noose failed to tighten, and fled clad only in a torn shirt which he had the wit to fashion into marionettes so that he could earn enough money to return to Dijon, where he settled down as organist of Notre-Dame: Rameau's nephew Lazare was an organist at the cathedral of Autun by the age of nine. By the age of seventeen he had already launched himself upon a promising musical career in Paris, but his cheerful debauchery and other personal peculiarities ruined his prospects, and he. ended his life as a wandering actor and organist. The eccentricities of another nephew, Jean-Francois, were so pronounced that they were immortalized by Diderot in his book Le neveu de Rameau.
Rameau was forty and organist of the cathedral of Clermont in the Auvergne when his individualism first asserted itself in a positive way. In 1772 he published his Traite de l'harmonie which, together with subsequent volumes, propounded a system of harmonic theory describing the most advanced compositional practices of his day in terms radically different from all previous thinking in the field. Since the Middle Ages theorists had conceived of music as linear, the sum of several simultaneous horizontal melodies. It was Rameau who first clearly understood that music may also be seen as a succession of vertical structures, or chords. For a hundred years before Rameau, Baroque musicians thought of music as a dialogue between a soprano melody and the written bass line. By an astounding leap of the creative imagination Rameau perceived that the expressively shaped bass line so characteristic of Baroque music was really only another melody, and that the functional bass was a theoretical entity which he termed the "fundamental bass" and which we today would call the roots of the chords. Rameau was the first to define harmonic inversion, cadence types, and tonic, dominant, and subdominant function. It was he, in a word, who outlined the harmonic system which was to be the basis of European art music for the next two hundred years.
Theoretical advances of such magnitude are rare, and Rameau seems to have had some idea of the importance of his discoveries. Soon after the publication of the Traite he broke a twenty-nine year contract with the church fathers of Clermont by the simple expedient of playing abominably in church (a contemporary remarked that "he put so much art into the mixtures of his stops and the assemblage of the most rending discords that connoisseurs confessed that only Rameau could play so unpleasingly"), and set out for Paris. Within a year he was composing comic operas for performance at the big Parisian agricultural fairs, and between 1724 and 1728 he produced the music for which he is probably best known today, two books of harpsichord pieces of great originality.
Rameau belongs to the last generation of the classic period of the great French school of harpsichord composers, and at first glance his music for harpsichord seems cast in a traditional French mold. As might be expected of the man who had just published the Traite, however, Rameau is in fact the most experimental and revolutionary of all French clavecinistes. The mind of Rameau the harmonic theorist may be seen at work in "L'Enharmonique," which modulates boldly through a series of sounds so strange to eighteenth century ears that the composer felt obliged to mention in the preface that the music "may not be to everyone's taste right away; one can nevertheless grow ... to awareness of all its beauty once the initial aversion, which in this case might result from lack of familiarity, has been overcome."
Descriptive music is also a distinctive feature of Rameau's keyboard writing. It is true that in Rameau's time an important segment of thought held that the imitation of nature ought to be the primary objective of all art, that "music which depicts nothing is insipid;" in accordance with this dictum French harpsichord music almost from its beginning had painted portraits of emotions and situations and imitated actions and sounds. Nevertheless, Rameau's descriptive keyboard music passes beyond the usual limits of the French genre pieces and suggests choreographic movement and dramatic action in a manner which borders upon the operatic.
Rameau himself, in trying to convince a famous author to furnish him with a libretto for his first serious opera, cited his keyboard music as an instance of his talent as a dramatic composer:
"It is desirable that there should be found for the stage a musician who has studied nature before painting her and who. through his learning. knows how to choose the colours and shades ... related to the required expressions ... You have only to come and hear how I have ... rendered the titles "Les Soupirs." "Les Tendres Plaints." "Les Cyclopes." "Les Tourbillons," "L'Entretien des Muses," a "Musette," a "Tambourin," etc.
One of Rameau's harpsichord pieces of this period, in fact. is an early sketch for the famous "Danse des sauvages" from Les lndes go/antes. Rameau had spent the first half of his life as a keyboard player. His harpsichord music of the 1720's reveals him as a composer with his eye on a much more prestigious field.
As it happened, the French operatic style was badly in need of a new composer with an independent cast in mind. French opera had been more or less at a standstill since 1672, when Louis XIV granted Jean-Baptiste Lully a royal patent naming him as the only composer privileged to produce opera in France. The prestige of Lully's operas was such that his own works remained in the repertoire long after his death (Thesee ran for 104 years). and succeeding French opera composers such as Campra and Destouches, though they made what concessions they dared to the newer trends of Italian opera, did not venture to depart from the Lullian format. It seemed that Lully' s stylistic monopoly could be challenged only by a composer well versed in the French classic tradition but endowed with a stubborn originality. That composer was Rameau.
The operatic formula which Rameau inherited from Lully was, in fact. an excellent one, a knowing blend of all the most popular features of seventeenth century court entertainments. From court ballet and ballet comedy Lully had borrowed the French overture. instrumental "symphonies," huge choruses. and. of course. ballet. From Italian opera he copied his magnificent divertissements. magical transformation and apparition scenes engineered by set designers and architects. His lilting arias or "airs" were modeled upon a variety of successful French song forms. including the aristocratic air de cour and popular drinking and love songs; his flexible. emotion-laden recitative preserved all the nobility, poetry. and drama of the French classic theatre.
Rameau. a professional admirer of Lully, had no intention of altering this time-tested formula. but the large body of theory which he had codified and his strongly independent musical personality led him to interpret it with freedom and vigor. His overtures, for example. are often musically or dramatically linked to the opera. His instrumental "symphonies" are sometimes descriptive of atmosphere or action in the Lullian manner, but at other times depict earthquakes, thunder storms. and monsters with a sensationalism which was quite new. His choruses are integrated into large-scale forms. dramatic harmonies and novel orchestration add an entirely new dimension to his Lullian airs and recitatives. In accordance with his theory that every chord which is not cadential should be dissonant and that melody is merely a derivative from harmony. Rameau underlined his vocal music with a harmony whose violent emotionalism left his audience stunned; he developed Lully's old fashioned contrapuntal orchestration into a much more modern style marked by idiomatic string writing and expressive woodwind solos.
Rameau was fifty years old when his first serious opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, was produced at the Paris Opera in 1733. His fame dates from that moment. His second opera. Les Indes galantes, was a popular success. and this, and every succeeding work. stirred a storm of controversy. At the beginning of his career as an opera composer. a pro-Lullist faction found his style too Italian; toward the end of his life, pro-Italian critics found him too French. Conservative music lovers objected to his innovations:
"Nothing flowed naturally, no genius inspired them, they turned their backs on nature and feeling ... Most of the spectators exclaimed that the instruments were out of tune: their sounds wounded the least refined of ears: they were told point blank that the discords had been made on purpose and were the height of art ... All keys were traversed at high speed, discords were strewn incessantly: sometimes two notes were obstinately repeated for a quarter of an hour: much noise. many scraps of melody; when by chance two bars occurred which might have made a pleasing tune, key mode, and beat were quickly changed. Always sadness instead of tenderness: what was singular became baroque; fury became shindy: instead of merriment, turbulence; never any prettiness; never i;lnything to go to the heart."
The Marquis d' Argenson expressed it more succinctly: "Am I fated to hear nothing but this foreign, hateful, baroque, inhuman music?''
Though his music was attacked as too learned. too noisy. too orchestral, qnd non-melodic. Rameau accomplished an important revolution in opera and in music. His operatic works reinterpreted the Lullian prototype in terms of the latest advances of the French rococo and the Italian High Baroque. and looked ahead to the new classic style and to Gluck. He was the first French composer to adopt orchestral technique as an integral part of his style, the first theorist to verbalize the harmonic system which was to be the basis of the musical language of Mozart. Beethoven. and Wagner. Bound by ties of respect and affection to the French classic tradition but driven by a congenitally independent and original nature, Rameau both summed up France's musical past and forged its future.
Christie Tolstoy is a Ph.D candidate at CUNY. a harpsichordist. and an editor of be/ canto operas. ____________ _