Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was the most important French composer of his century and one of the great theorists in the history of music. His Treatise on Harmony, published in 1722, founded modern harmonic analysis. He came to opera only at fifty and transformed the genre in France with works such as Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Indes galantes and Platée. His harpsichord pieces are among the most original of the Baroque.
Born in Dijon in 1683, Rameau spent much of his life as a provincial organist, in cities such as Clermont and Lyon. In 1722 he published in Paris his Treatise on Harmony, which explained chords from rational principles and made his name as a scholar before he had made it as a composer.
Settled in Paris, he found the support of the financier Le Riche de La Pouplinière, one of the great patrons of the age. In 1733, at the age of fifty, he presented his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie. The richness of his orchestra and the boldness of his harmonies split the public between partisans of Lully and defenders of the newcomer.
In little more than a decade, Rameau gave the French theatre some of its major works: the opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes in 1735, with its celebrated dance of the savages; the lyric tragedy Castor et Pollux in 1737, and Dardanus in 1739.
In 1745 he presented Platée, a lyric comedy about a marsh nymph convinced that Jupiter loves her, written for a royal wedding and now regarded as one of the finest comic operas of the Baroque. His last tragedy, Les Boréades, was never staged in the composer's lifetime.
Alongside his work for the stage, Rameau published three books of harpsichord pieces between 1706 and the late 1720s. Titles such as Le rappel des oiseaux, La poule and Les sauvages combine descriptive imagination with brilliant writing, and the gavotte with its doubles is one of the summits of the instrument. In 1741 he added the Pièces de clavecin en concerts, for harpsichord and two instruments.
As a theorist, he argued that all music rests on the fundamental bass and on the natural resonance of sounding bodies. His ideas fuelled debates with the Encyclopaedists and shaped the teaching of harmony to this day.
After his death in 1764, his operas disappeared from the repertoire for more than a century. The period-instrument movement brought them back to the stage: conductors such as John Eliot Gardiner, William Christie and Marc Minkowski recorded and staged his works from the 1970s and 1980s onwards.
Today Les Indes galantes and Platée are performed in the world's leading houses, and contemporary stagings, sometimes with street dance or present-day readings, confirm that Rameau's music is still living theatre.
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