Notes for: July 13, 2010
Rameau was the composer of the French Enlightenment – the friend of Voltaire, who wrote opera librettos for him, and as a musical theorist the musical counterpart of Diderot and the Encyclopedists, who promoted the advancement of science and secular thought. He was also one of the two leading French composers of harpsichord music, the other being François Couperin. Starting in 1706, he published three collections of harpsichord pieces, which circulated widely throughout Western Europe. In fact, they were brought to the U.S. by Thomas Jefferson and became part of his library at Monticello.
From 1733, Rameau dedicated himself almost exclusively to composing stage works – opera and ballet. Along with Lully and Gluck, Rameau was one of the principal masters of pre-Revolutionary French opera, composing five tragedies, two comedies and four pastorales héroïques (evocations of rural life). He was also the most prolific ballet composer of all times, producing a dozen ballet scores and five hybrid opera-ballets.
In 1722, Rameau achieved fame as well as notoriety in the scholarly world with the publication of his Treatise on Harmony. This was an attempt to analyze the new harmony then emerging to replace traditional counterpoint in terms of the philosophical principles of “natural order” and the physical properties of sound. While the Treatise’s concepts are now accepted, the book was attacked by Rousseau and the Encyclopedists who contended that “natural order” applied only to science and abstract philosophy and was irrelevant to the emotional nature of music.
Hippolyte et Aricie, Rameau’s first opera, also generated controversy at its first performance in October, 1733, at the Academie Royale de Musique. In the 1670s and 1680s, the Italian-born and -trained Lully had established a French opera tradition that was conservative in its libretto plots and its harmonic language. Rameau’s opera was hailed by some for its richness of invention and criticized by others as bizarre and dissonant, and the controversy dogged Rameau throughout the 1730s.
The plot of the opera is a complicated tale of two lovers, Hippolyte and Aricie. Their marriage is opposed by Hippolyte’s father, Theseus, King of Athens, because Aricie is the daughter of Theseus’s enemy, Pallas. Eventually, the situation is cleared up by the intervention of the goddess Diana, and the opera ends with a general rejoicing and praise for Diana.
In the opera’s closing scene, a shepherdess sings this arietta (miniature aria) summoning the nightingales to pay homage to Diana through “the sweetness of its warbling”. The arietta is cast in the Italian da capo form – an extended first section, a contrasting middle section, and a repeat of the first section. To suggest the nightingale’s response, a flute and a violin or cello ornament the vocal line, and this is the first of three works on the evening’s program in which a flute impersonates a bird.