Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau was baptised in Dijon on 25 September 1683. His father, Jean, was organist of several churches in the city. The seventh of eleven children, young Jean-Philippe learned music before he could read, but he was a poor pupil at the Jesuit college, where he spent lessons singing and scribbling music. His father intended him for the law, but soon realised that music was his only vocation.

At eighteen, in 1701, he left for Italy but got no further than Milan, where he stayed a few months. He later regretted it, saying he could have refined his taste there. For twenty years he then led the life of a travelling organist: Avignon; Clermont-Ferrand, where in 1702 he was appointed cathedral organist; Paris, where in 1706 he published his first book of harpsichord pieces; then Dijon and Lyon. In 1715 he returned to Clermont, signing a twenty-nine-year contract… which he broke in 1722.

For Rameau had an ambition: to make his ideas on music theory known. In 1722 he published in Paris his Treatise on Harmony Reduced to its Natural Principles, a work that revolutionised the understanding of music. In it he explained that chords are built on a “fundamental bass” and can be inverted without changing their nature. These ideas, based on the physics of sound, still underlie the teaching of harmony today. The treatise made him a respected scholar throughout Europe.

Settled in Paris, he published in 1724 and around 1728 new harpsichord suites containing pieces that became famous: Les Tourbillons, Le Tambourin, La Poule, which imitates a clucking hen, and Les Sauvages, inspired by Native American dancers from Louisiana he had seen in Paris. In 1726 he married Marie-Louise Mangot, a nineteen-year-old singer, with whom he had four children. He became organist at several churches and gave lessons.

The wealthy tax-farmer and patron Le Riche de La Pouplinière welcomed him into his house and entrusted him with his private orchestra. Thanks to him Rameau could at last turn to opera. In 1733, aged fifty, he premiered Hippolyte et Aricie, which sparked a quarrel: Lully’s supporters, the “Lullistes”, found his music too learned and complicated, while his admirers, the “Ramistes”, hailed his genius. The composer André Campra is said to have declared there was enough music in this opera to make ten.

Masterpieces followed within a few years: Les Indes galantes (1735), an “opéra-ballet” whose every act takes place in a distant land — Turkey, Peru, Persia, North America — with its famous Dance of the Great Peace Pipe, then Castor et Pollux (1737) and Dardanus (1739). In 1745 he composed Platée, a hilarious comic opera about a vain and ugly marsh nymph, and became composer of the Chamber music of King Louis XV.

During the Querelle des Bouffons (1752–54), which pitted supporters of French music against those of Italian comic opera, Rameau became, despite himself, the symbol of French tradition and quarrelled with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes. Ennobled in 1764, he died in Paris on 12 September that year, aged eighty, while rehearsing his last opera, Les Boréades, which was not staged until 1982. He is regarded as the greatest French composer of the eighteenth century.