Musician of the week: Jean-Philippe Rameau

Originally from the city of Dijon, Jean Philippe Rameau studied with the Jesuits at the College des Godrans while learning the organ with his father. Alongside the extensive ballet-operas in four or five stage pictures by Jean Philippe Rameau, a select place in his copious oeuvre must be reserved for ballet acts, single-motif compositions that contain Rameau’s best.

Some of them, composed for festive occasions and particular circumstances, were later integrated in the form of entrances in larger opera-ballets; such was the case with The Sybaritesfrom 1753, added to the second version of Les Surprises de l’Amourfrom 1757.

However, the most celebrated and certainly the most accomplished ballet act composed by Rameau remains Pygmaliondating from 1748: in addition to the fantasy environment created by Ballot de Sovot’s text, in which Pygmalion’s inordinate love for his sculpture of Galatea widens his life, which allows him to become a character who sings and dances, one must admire in it, above all, the splendid role of the countertenor, written for the incomparable Pierre Jélyotte, which begins in a heartbreaking French style (Fatal amour) to conclude in the most exuberant Italian style (Règne, amour, la arieta of Rameau which makes higher demands).

The instrumental pages are also very evocative: the fugato of the overture, with its repetitions of notes, perhaps describes the sculptor’s hammer blows, while the divertissement ordered by Love organizes a contrasting panorama of the various dance characters.

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In addition to being a composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau was a great musical theorist who tried to derive musical laws from natural elements, harmony being for him the foundation of music. His main work is The Treatise on Harmony Reduced to Its Natural Principlespublished in Paris in 1722.

With the Harpsichord Pieces in Concert, Rameau went even further in his musical deepening of the harpsichord by publishing in 1741 a collection made up of five concerts in which the harpsichord dialogues with a violin, a flute or a second violin or a viola da gamba. . This new experience was suggested to him by the collection published by his colleague Mondonville in 1737.

Rameau gives the harpsichord a dominant role, while the other two instruments merely accompany it, even going so far as to lower its sound intensity so as not to overshadow it. Rameau himself wrote a solo harpsichord arrangement of four titles from that sixteen-piece set: La Livri, L’Agaçante, La Timide Y L’Indiscrete.

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French harpsichord music first gained European renown for the work of chambonnieres. Both this composer and his disciple, Louis Couperin, wrote series of dances in the same key, among which the Allemande, the Courante and the Sarabande were first cultivated.

What was characteristic of the work of these masters, as well as of the following generation, was not only their preference for allusive titles of all kinds, particularly dedications to female beings, but also the rich ornamentation of their harpsichord style, ornaments or manners; its abundance can be explained not only by the tendency towards long duration and animation of the sound of the harpsichord, which then still faded quickly, but also and first of all by the fundamental tendency of the baroque towards a rich ornamentation of the play of lines. The culminating point of this art is the production of François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

You can listen to the works of the master Jean-Philippe Rameau from next Monday, August 12 at 3:00 p.m. HJCK live signal.

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Musician of the week: Jean-Philippe Rameau