Rameau: College Dropout

Jean-Philippe Rameau is said to have been the greatest French opera composer between Jean-Baptiste Lully and Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck. Since Lully was Italian and Gluck was German, you may think that it was not difficult for Rameau to become what he became. But he really became more than that: he is, in fact, one of the towering figures in the history of the lyric stage. It is comforting for some of us, however, to recall that Rameau was not born to such eminence. He was, in fact, a college dropout at sixteen, and, by forty, had amounted to little or nothing. Rameau was, in fact, fifty, when his first opera was staged.

I think a few issues back I ventured the opinion that the great musico-cultural difference between the Italians and the French is that the former are singers and the latter are dancers. Despite the guy who keeps writing to chastise me for immodesty ill suiting my professional status, evidenced in the expression of what I think, I am still stuck with this notion, for history supports it. Opera is not native to France; ballet is. The vast spectacles of nineteenth-century Meyer­beerean grand-opero are, in many ways, directly traceable back to the ballets de cour of the late Renaissance. These were not the equivalent of Mikhail's entrechots and Gelsey's plies, and there was not a tutu to be seen. Rather they were excuses for the king and courtiers to play dressups (umpteen costume changes over a long evening), strutting around and generally making fools of themselves. When, in the middle of the next century, the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, court eninence rouge, imported some Italian operas, the French were appalled at all that noise and rude emoting, and Lully hastened to fill in between the acts with decorous French dance-music. When Lully took over as France's official musical dictator, French opera, as he devised it, was at least as much dance as song. A generation later, a bastard form called opera-ballet, which was more dance than song, virtually took over.

Rameau's master-stroke, perhaps, lay in restoring (or achieving) a balance. He was one of those very rare composers who understood that an opera is not mere music and not just a play, but a fusion of all the arts and crafts of the stage, to produce what Wagner termed a Gesamtkunstwerk (or, in the newer phrase, "total theater"). The tradition, however askew, provided him with what he needed: song, recitative, dance, orchestra, action, scenery, special effects-- the works. Given the neo-classical conventions (serious opera had to be about gods and heroes), he brought his immense musical learning and his instinctive genius to every aspect of his creations, and made them work as theater. Shortly after World War II, though he had long been little more than a name in the history books to most people, the Paris Opera dared produce Rameau's spectacular opera-ballet Les Indes galantes (roughly "The Indies a-Courting"), Incas, erupting volcanoes, and all, and found itself with a smash hit that had nothing to do with "camp."

Before that, however, French musicians, recognizing Rameau as a national treasure, had begun to mine his music and restore it to life as best they could, and Camille Saint-Saens was entrusted in 1895 with the editing of the complete works. But nothing was more amenable to being resurrected than the dance music. To this Rameau brought his "seemingly inexhaustible in­vention,'' mingling court dances, like the minuet and gavotte, with more plebeian types, such as the tambourin and rigaudon. The works from which they are drawn, in these suites, were written between Rameau's fifty-fourth (Castor et Pollux) and eightieth (Les Paladins) years. Of the arrangers, Dukas and d'lndy need no introduction. Francois Auguste Gevaert (1828-1908) was a Belgian, a successful opera composer, administrator, and teacher in Paris, who tirelessly mined the musical archives. Roger Desormiere (1898-1963) was one of the most brilliant conductors of his generation, whose career was tragically ended in 1950 by incapacitating illness. Georges Marty (1860-1908) also conducted and wrote operas; he was one of Massenet's best pupils. (The conductor of this record, Mme. Aviva Einhorn, is a former child prodigy, who is now winning applause all over Europe. I assume that Musicholiers is a telescoping of the words for music and scholars.)