Jean-Philippe Rameau - Biography
Jean-Phillippe Rameau was born in Dijon France in September 25th 1683 and died in Paris on September 12th 1764. Rameau along with Lully and Couperin form the great triumvirate of French Baroque composers. We know very little about Rameau’s formative years. He was the middle class son of a French Organ maker who in all probability gave him his first musical instruction at an early age. He had some training in Italy during his teen years returned to Dijon where he performed with various ensembles though his father wanted him to study the law he decided to become a professional musician and moved to Paris in the first years of the eighteenth century .His first compositions for the harpsichord come from this period. He eventually returned to Dijon to take over his father’s position as organist in its most prominent church. He had a period where he went to Lyon and Clermont to fill similar church posts composing his first major church compositions and some secular choral works he eventually moved to Paris permanently in 1722. In this period he wrote the theoretical work that was to make him famous his Treatise on Harmony. He wrote further theoretical work in the 1720’s that became the foundation of French musical pedagogy .In 1726 Rameau married a nineteen year old Marie-Louise and eventually had a family of four children.
Rameau’s career as an opera composer didn’t start until he approached fifty. He was to become Lully’s successor as the most prominent composer for the French theatre. The first of the operas was to be Hippolyte et Aricie. During this period he got his first prominent musical position in Paris as the conductor of the private orchestra of the wealthy financer Poupeliniere a position he would keep for the next thirteen years. Rameau in 1737 was to compose his famed opera ballet Les Indes Galantes the tragic Castor et Pollux, Dardanus and the opera ballet Les Fetes d’Hebes. After this prodigious output in a few years not much was seen from Rameau except for a revised version of Dardanus in 1744. Rameau’s next opera commission which occurred in 1745 was for the comic opera Platee and he was soon to collaborate with the great writer Voltaire on two opera ballets Le Temple de la Gloire and La Princesse de Navarre. The success of these pieces garnered for Rameau a pension from the crown. He got into a tiff with the celebrated philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau who was also a composer and claimed that Rameau stole the ideas for projects from him. Rameau was to become involved in an intellectual battle when the Italian Opera Bouffa (comic opera) was introduced in mid- century and was championed by some French writers as a more natural theatre then Rameau’s grand and highly stylized works. This controversy known as the Querelle de Bouffons resulted in Rameau becoming a character in the French Encyclopediest Diderot novella Rameau’s Nephew.
Rameau was to lose his position as the leader of the orchestra at Poupeliniere to the Bohemian composer Stamitz when he was closing in on seventy but his pension was able to cover the loss and he retired to a room of apartments with his wife in a fashionable part of Paris. One aspect of Rameau’s genius we have not touched on is harpsichord music where he often reaches the heights of his near contemporary Francois Couperin. Rameau published three collections of harpsichord pieces in 1706, 1724 and 1726. The works are often highly virtuosic and programmatic and often imitate the sounds of nature like the celebrate dLa Poule (The Hen).In the 1740’s he wrote his best known chamber work Pieces de Clavecin in Concert for Harpsichord and continuo (accompaniment). Rameau’s opera ballets also establish him as one of the first and greatest of ballet composers.
Rameau lived a long and amazingly productive life and died just a few weeks short of his eighty first birthdays on September 12th 1764. Rameau’s portraits often show him as a severe looking man and indeed he was a very quarrelsome man who was well aware of his self worth.
Rameau whilst a much respected name in the nineteenth century especially for his theoretical works was not often performed and when played they were often “improved” in heavily arranged versions. As the twentieth century dawned his reputation was vitalized by the well known French composer D’Indy and the circle of composers around him. Debussy and Ravel were also fervent admirers and musicians who explored early music like the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and scholar conductor Nadia Boulanger As we come into the 1970’s and 1980’S the French label Erato has recorded many of his operas and opera ballets in distinguished performances often under the conductor John Elliot Gardiner . The Harmonia Mundi label added many distinguished recordings to the Rameau discography. We can now hear a good swath of Rameau’s works (and see them on DVD) and can confirm that he is a great master who is also very entertaining with a great grasp of the lyric theatre.
