Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) - Suite (Re majeur) pour Trompettes et Cordes (1760)
Performers: Roger Delmotte (trumpet); Orchestre de chambre de Jean-Louis Petit; Jean-Louis Petit (conductor)
Further info: Rameau - Suite pour Trompettes et Cordes
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French composer and theorist. Details about his life before 1722, when he moved permanently from Dijon to Paris, are sketchy, partly owing to his own reticence. He was the seventh child and eldest surviving son of Jean Rameau, organist in Dijon, and Claudine Demartinécourt. He may have studied music with the organist at the Sainte Chapelle in Dijon, Claude Derey, and he eventually enrolled in the Jesuit Collège des Godrans, where he first encountered musical theater. In 1701 or 1702, he spent a brief time in Italy and then took up the post of organist of the Clermont Cathedral in May 1702. Next, he moved to Paris in 1706, became organist at the Jesuit Collège Louis-le- Grand and to the Pères de la Merci, and published Premier Livre de Pièces de Clavecin. In 1709, he returned to Dijon to succeed his father as organist of Notre Dame and then to Lyons in 1713 to be chief organist of the city. In 1715, he was reappointed at Clermont Cathedral, where he began work on the Traité de l’Harmonie. His first decade in Paris was consumed with publishing his new book, which would become famous all over Europe, two more collections of keyboard music in 1724 and 1729, and teaching. Oddly, he was not able to secure a major position as organist anywhere in Paris until 1732, when he became organist at Sainte Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie. He married a talented singer, 19-year-old Marie-Louis Mangot, on 25 February 1726. She would bear him four children and sing in some of his operas. Rameau’s first attempt at a full-scale opera, 'Hippolyte et Aricie', opened in 1733 and immediately ignited that kind of intellectual controversy that could only happen in France. His proponents, the ramistes, admired the opera’s adventurous harmonies and more realistic dramaturgy, while the opposing lullistes, motivated perhaps by jealousy and fear that their namesake might be eclipsed, railed against its Italianisms and harmonic complexity. The controversy persisted through the 1730s and encompassed Rameau’s second opera, 'Les Indes Galantes', which saw 64 performances in two years, and especially his fifth, 'Dardanus'.
From sometime in the mid-1730s until 1753, he was attached to the household of one of the richest men in France, Alexandre Le Riche de La Poupelinière. La Poupelinière, a financier, was a great patron of the arts and all manner of writers, actors, and cultural figures would meet at his house. The attachment advanced Rameau’s operatic career considerably, since he met some of his many librettists there. After a fallow period in the early 1740s, he seems to have caught the attention of the French court. In 1745, he received three commissions for theater works, including the opera for the Dauphin’s wedding, 'La Princesse de Navarre', with a libretto of Voltaire. On May 4, he was rewarded with an annual pension of 2.000 livres and the title 'compositeur de la musique de la chambre du roy', a singular honor for a musician not officially appointed at the court. These commissions began a train of nine works for the stage composed between 1745 and 1749. Rameau’s operas so dominated Paris at this time that the management of the Paris opera felt compelled to restrict the offerings of Rameau to only two operas per year, in order to give younger composers a chance. Despite his fame as a thinker about music, Rameau was never elected to the Académie Royale des Sciences, a disappointment. Five months before his death, however, he did receive a patent of nobility from the king, and he died a comparatively wealthy man three weeks after falling ill with a fever. Many memorial services in Paris, Dijon, and other provincial cities followed. The first, at the Pères de l’Oratoire on 27 September 1764, included as many as 180 musicians and was attended by over 1.000 mourners. Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the greatest figures in French musical history, a theorist of European stature and France's leading 18th-century composer. He made important contributions to the cantata, the motet and, more especially, keyboard music, and many of his dramatic compositions stand alongside those of Lully and Gluck as the pinnacles of pre-Revolutionary French opera.
