French Opera - Rameau

Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau was the most important opera composer to appear in France after Lully. He was also a highly controversial figure and his operas were subject to attacks by both the defenders of the French, Lullian tradition and the champions of Italian music. Rameau was almost fifty when he composed his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733. Until that point, his reputation had mainly rested on his works on music theory. Hippolyte caused an immediate stir. Some members of the audience, like Campra, were struck by its incredible richness of invention. Others, led by the supporters of Lully, found Rameau's use of unusual harmonies and dissonance perplexing and reacted with horror. The war of words between the "Lullistes" and the "Ramistes" continued to rage for the rest of the decade. Rameau made little attempt to create new genres; instead he took existing forms and innovated from within using a musical language of great originality. He was a prolific composer, writing five tragédies en musique, six opéra-ballets, numerous pastorales héroïques and actes de ballets as well as two comic operas, and often revising his works several times until they bore little resemblance to their original versions. By 1745, Rameau had won acceptance as the official court composer, but a new controversy broke out in the 1750s. This was the so-called Querelle des Bouffons, in which supporters of Italian opera, such as the philosopher and musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused Rameau of being an old-fashioned, establishment figure. The "anti-nationalists" (as they were sometimes known) rejected Rameau's style, which they felt was too precious and too distanced from emotional expression, in favour of what they saw as the simplicity and "naturalness" of the Italian opera buffa, best represented by Pergolesi's La serva padrona. Their arguments would exert a great deal of influence over French opera in the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly over the emerging form known as opéra comique.