1683–1764 · France · Baroque
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) was a Baroque-era composer and music theorist from France. Born in Dijon, he worked as an organist in the provinces and from 1722 lived in Paris, writing operas and harpsichord pieces. His Tambourin and other character pieces have made their way into the piano repertoire of children's music schools.
Jean-Philippe Rameau was born in Dijon on 25 September 1683 and received baptism that very day. His father, Jean, played the organ in a number of churches near the town; his mother, Claudine Demartinécourt, came from a notary's family. There were eleven children in the family, six boys and five girls, and Jean-Philippe was the seventh.
Music came to him before he could read. His schooling was at the Jesuit college of Godrans in Dijon, where he proved a poor pupil and disturbed lessons with his singing. He later said that his love of opera began when he was twelve. The family had meant him for the law, but he decided to become a musician.
When he was eighteen, his father sent him to Italy to continue his musical education. Rameau got no further than Milan and stayed there only briefly. After coming back he played the violin, and later held organ posts in cathedrals outside Paris. The towns where he served included Dijon, Clermont-Ferrand and Lyon.
In 1706 Rameau, who had by then already been to Paris, brought out the earliest of his works known today, the first book of harpsichord pieces, in which a friend, Louis Marchand, left his mark. In 1709 he went back to Dijon to take over the post of organist at the main church that his father had held before him. The contract ran for six years, but Rameau left sooner and found comparable work in Lyon and Clermont-Ferrand. Over this period he composed motets for church services as well as secular cantatas.
From 1722 Rameau settled in Paris for good. That same year he published his Treatise on Harmony, the most important of his theoretical works, which quickly made his name. In 1726 he added the Nouveau système de musique théorique.
Rameau introduced the idea of an imagined fundamental bass, separate from the actual bass part, which can be used to analyse and explain the chord progressions in a piece. Many of the concepts he developed in his writings, among them the fundamental sound, chord inversion, tonic, dominant, subdominant and leading note, became part of the vocabulary of musical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Rameau's first steps in stage music came at the request of the writer Alexis Piron, who needed songs for the popular comedies staged at the Paris fairs. The first project was L'endriague (1723). There were four such collaborations in all, but none of the music has survived.
On 25 February 1726 Rameau married Marie-Louise Mangot, then nineteen, who belonged to a family of Lyon musicians and sang and played well. The couple went on to have four children, two sons and two daughters, and the marriage was reportedly a happy one. For all his fame as a theorist, Rameau found it hard to get an organist's post in Paris.
Rameau made up his mind to take opera seriously only when he was approaching fifty. As early as 1727 he had approached Antoine Houdar de la Motte, a writer, about a libretto, but nothing came of it; what pushed him on was Montéclair's Jephté, which he saw in 1732.
Hippolyte et Aricie was first given on 1 October 1733, at the Royal Academy of Music. People saw at once that no more significant opera had appeared in France since Lully died, yet it caused a dispute. The composer André Campra was struck by how original and inventive it was, while others found its harmonic novelties harsh and took the work as a blow against France's own musical tradition. The two camps, the followers of Lully and the supporters of Rameau, fought a war of pamphlets until the decade ended.
Rameau became acquainted with Alexandre Le Riche de La Poupelinière, an influential financier, who stayed his patron until 1753. The financier's mistress, later his wife, Thérèse des Hayes, took lessons from Rameau and loved his music. Rameau took charge of La Poupelinière's private orchestra in 1731; it was an ensemble of very high quality, and he directed it for twenty-two years. Johann Stamitz and then François-Joseph Gossec came after him.
La Poupelinière's salon brought Rameau together with leading figures of the day, Voltaire among them. Their first joint project, the tragedy Samson, was dropped, since the authorities would most likely have forbidden a religious opera from the pen of Voltaire. In the lighter genre of the opéra-ballet, though, Rameau showed his new style with great success in Les Indes galantes. Next came two tragedies in music, Castor et Pollux (1737) and Dardanus (1739), together with a second opéra-ballet, Les fêtes d'Hébé (1739). These operas of the 1730s are counted among his finest works. A pause followed, in which the only new thing was a revised Dardanus (1744); the reason for the gap is unknown.
The year 1745 was a turning point. The court ordered several works from Rameau to celebrate the French win at Fontenoy and the wedding of the Dauphin and the Spanish infanta Maria Teresa Rafaela. This is when Platée, Rameau's most important comic opera, was written, and a pair of joint works with Voltaire, an opéra-ballet (Le temple de la gloire) and a comédie-ballet (La princesse de Navarre). Rameau was made a court composer and given a substantial pension.
The year 1745 also marked the beginning of a long hostility between Rameau and Rousseau. Rousseau, known today mainly as a thinker, had ambitions of his own to be a composer. He wrote an opera, Les muses galantes, influenced by Les Indes galantes, but Rameau was unmoved by this musical tribute. Late in 1745 Voltaire and Rameau, busy with other works, asked Rousseau to rework La princesse de Navarre as a new opera, Les fêtes de Ramire, with recitatives linking the numbers. Rousseau later claimed that Rameau and Voltaire had taken the credit for words and music that he had contributed, although musicologists have found almost nothing in that piece that can be identified as his. Rousseau kept his resentment all his life.
Rousseau was also a major figure in the second great quarrel over Rameau's work, the Querelle des Bouffons of 1752–1754, in which French tragédie en musique faced Italian comic opera. Critics called Rameau old-fashioned and his music too intricate. In the mid-1750s he found fault with the musical articles that Rousseau wrote for the Encyclopédie, and this brought him into conflict with d'Alembert and Diderot. Diderot mentions Rameau in his work Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew).
Rameau kept working as a theorist and composer to the end. Until the end he shared a spacious apartment in the Rue des Bons-Enfants with his wife and two of their children, and each day he went out, deep in thought, to walk alone in the gardens close by, the Palais-Royal or the Tuileries.
He wrote a great deal in the late 1740s and early 1750s and less afterwards, probably because of age and ill health. Even so, Les Paladins appeared in 1760. It was to be followed by a final tragedy, Les Boréades, but for reasons nobody knows it was not put on, and a full staging had to wait until the late twentieth century.
Rameau died in Paris on 12 September 1764 after a fever and was buried the same day in the church of Saint-Eustache. Some months before he died he was ennobled and became a knight of the Order of Saint Michael. In 1883 the society of composers put up a bronze bust and a red marble tombstone in the church, but the exact place of his burial is still unknown.
Very little is known about Rameau's private life: he kept things to himself, and his wife and children alike knew nothing of his youth. Sketches show him as tall and exceptionally thin. In company he was reserved, and his music stood in for social graces. His enemies exaggerated his faults, his supposed miserliness for one, but his thrift seems to have come from the years when his income was small and uncertain; he could be open-handed too. When his nephew Jean-François arrived in Paris he helped him, he supported the career of Claude-Bénigne Balbastre, and he paid a pension to a sister who had fallen ill.
Rameau's output can be sorted into four groups of very uneven weight: some cantatas, some motets for a big choir, music for the harpsichord alone or with other instruments, and, last, music for the theatre, which took up nearly all of his final thirty years as a composer.
Together with François Couperin, Rameau is regarded as a master of French harpsichord music of the eighteenth century. Some of his harpsichord pieces have reached the piano repertoire of children's music schools; the best known are Tambourin, La poule, La Dauphine, Les petits marteaux and Le Rappel des oiseaux. Alongside them stand five concerts for harpsichord, violin and viola da gamba (the 1741 collection), which combine suites with vivid character pieces.
Rameau's harpsichord pieces are very varied. Some are imitative, like Le Rappel des oiseaux and La poule, and some are characterful, like Les tendres plaintes; there are virtuoso pieces that recall Domenico Scarlatti. Others are the experiments of a theorist: L'Enharmonique is one of the first examples in the history of music of an enharmonic modulation, while Les Sauvages and Les Cyclopes unfold their tonal world with unusual inventiveness. For Rameau such pieces were a testing ground for new things in harmony, rhythm and texture.
Our site has three Rameau pieces for piano: Tambourin (level Intermediate), Les Sauvages and Les Tendres Plaintes (both Intermediate+). Tambourin is the sensible place to begin.
Operas take up the most room in Rameau's output. He created a new operatic style, seen in the tragedies in music Hippolyte et Aricie and Castor et Pollux, in the opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes and in the lyric comedy Platée. The dance numbers in the operas, gavottes, minuets, passepieds, tambourins and musettes, gave free rein to his sense of rhythm and melody, and his overtures are extremely varied.
After Rameau's death his legacy was long overshadowed by the fame of Gluck. In the nineteenth century he was hardly performed, although Berlioz and Wagner studied his music closely, and in 1895 Camille Saint-Saëns edited and published his pieces. Around the turn of the twentieth century Rameau's importance began to grow again. Claude Debussy dedicated the second piece of his piano set Images to him, Hommage à Rameau. Today Rameau is recognised as the greatest French composer and the leading figure in the music of the first half and middle of the eighteenth century.