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Jean-Philippe Rameau: Music
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Jean-Philippe Rameau enjoyed a spot in the sun only toward the end of his life. He wrote most of his finest music between the ages of 50 and 56. Until he reached middle age, and for nearly two centuries after his death, Rameau was just another name in the deep musicological murk.
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Rameau and Couperin have a very different style anyway and Rameau cannot be considered the follower of the older composer. They seem not to have known one another (Couperin was one of the official court musicians while Rameau was still an unknown; fame would only come to him after Couperin’s death). Besides, Rameau published his first book of harpsichord pieces in 1706 while Couperin - who was fifteen years his senior - waited until 1713 before publishing his first “ordres”. Rameau’s pieces seem less intended to exploit the particular qualities of the harpsichord than Couperin’s; they place less importance on ornamentation and are more satisfying when played on the piano. When the respective size of their contributions to the harpsichord repertoire is taken into consideration, Rameau’s music perhaps shows more variety: it includes pieces in the pure tradition of the French suite, imitative (“Le rappel des oiseaux“, “La poule“) and character (“Les tendres plaintes“, “L'entretien des Muses“) pieces, and works of pure virtuosity which resemble Scarlatti ((“Les tourbillons,” “Les trois mains“), as well as pieces which reveal the experiments of a theorist and musical innovator (“L'Enharmonique“, “Les Cyclopes“) which had a marked influence on Daquin, Royer and Jacques Duphly. The suites are grouped in the tradional way, by key.
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Rameau's early years are obscure. His father Jean worked as an organist in several churches around Dijon. His mother, Claudine Demartinécourt, was the daughter of a notary. The couple had eleven children, of which Jean-Philippe was the seventh to be born. Rameau was taught music before he could read or write. He was not a good school pupil and disrupted classes with his singing.
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Along with François Couperin, Rameau is one of the two masters of the French school of harpsichord music in the 18th century. Both composers made a decisive break with the style of the first generation of harpsichordists, who confined their compositions to the relatively fixed mould of the classical suite. This reached its apogee in the first decade of the 18th century with successive collections of pieces by Louis Marchand, Gaspard Le Roux, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, Jean-François Dandrieu, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Charles Dieupart and Nicolas Siret.
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Rameau had various patrons, notably the financier La Pouplinière; he moved in intellectual circles and counted Voltaire among his friends. He continued his theoretical work in the 1740s and was embroiled in several controversies. In 1745 he was appointed a royal chamber music composer; thereafter several of his works had their premières at court theatres. Nine new theatre works followed in the mid-late 1740s beginning with La princesse de Navarre and the comedy Platée; but from 1750 onwards only two major works were written, for Rameau was increasingly involved with theory and with a number of disputes, with Rousseau, Grimm and even former friends, pupils and collaborators such as Diderot and D′Alembert. When Rameau died, in 1764, he was widely respected and admired, though he was seen too as unsociable and avaricious.
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Rameau produced his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), at the age of 50. The work wasn't well received initially, but the opera Castor et Pollux (1737) was much more successful, and Rameau gradually became known as one of France's leading composers. For the rest of his life, he divided his time between composing and writing further theoretical works like Nouveau système de musique théorique (1726), Dissertation sur les differents méthodes d'accompagnement pour le clavecin ou pour l'orgue (1732), and Démonstration du principe de l'harmonie (1750). He felt his theoretical works were at least as important as his music, and defended his theories in extensive correspondences and debates with many of the leading musical thinkers in Europe.
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