Dramatic Expression in Rameaus Tragedie en Musique

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At the heart of the study are three scene types that occur in all of Rameau's tragedies: In tracing changes in Rameau's treatment of these, Verba finds that while he maintained an allegiance to the traditional French operatic model, he constantly adapted it to accommodate his more enlightened views on musical expression. What to Listen For in Music. Oxford History of Western Music: Lasker's Manual of Chess.

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Dramatic Expression in Rameau's Tragedie en Musique (eBook)

What Makes It Great? All You Have to Do is Listen. The meaning of music. The Infinite Variety of Music. The End of Early Music. Freedom and the Arts. The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Stravinsky and the Russian Period. Modern Ideas in Chess.

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The Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers: Opera in the Age of Rousseau. Olivier Messiaen and the Music of Time. Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues. The Songs of Henri Duparc. The Accompaniment in "Unaccompanied" Bach. Beethoven's Early Chamber Music: The cantata was a highly successful genre in the early 18th century. Cantatas were Rameau's first contact with dramatic music. The modest forces the cantata required meant it was a genre within the reach of a composer who was still unknown.

Musicologists can only guess at the dates of Rameau's six surviving cantatas, and the names of the librettists are unknown. Both composers made a decisive break with the style of the first generation of harpsichordists, who confined their compositions to the relatively fixed mould of the classical suite.

Rameau and Couperin have different styles. They seem not to have known one another Couperin was one of the official court musicians while Rameau was still an unknown; fame would only come to him after Couperin's death. Rameau published his first book of harpsichord pieces in while Couperin who was fifteen years his senior waited until before publishing his first "ordres. The suites are grouped in the traditional way, by key.

Rameau's three collections appeared in , and or , respectively. After this, he only composed a single piece for the harpsichord: Other works, such as "Les petits marteaux," have been doubtfully attributed to him. Adopting a formula successfully employed by Mondonville a few years earlier, these pieces differ from trio sonatas in that the harpsichord is not simply there as basso continuo to accompany other instruments the violin, flute or viol playing the melody but has an equal part in the "concert" with them.

Rameau also claimed that the pieces would be equally satisfying as solo harpsichord works—although this statement is far from convincing, since the composer took the trouble to transcribe five of them himself—those where the lack of other instruments would show the least.

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From , Rameau dedicated himself almost exclusively to opera. On a strictly musical level, 18th-century French Baroque opera is richer and more varied than contemporary Italian opera, especially in the place given to choruses and dances but also in the musical continuity that arises from the respective relationships between the arias and the recitatives. The Italian opera of Rameau's day opera seria , opera buffa was essentially divided into musical sections da capo arias, duets, trios, etc.

It was during the latter that the action progressed while the audience waited for the next aria; on the other hand, the text of the arias was almost entirely buried beneath music whose chief aim was to show off the virtuosity of the singer. Nothing of the kind is to be found in French opera of the day; since Lully, the text had to remain comprehensible—limiting certain techniques such as the vocalise , which was reserved for special words such as gloire "glory" or victoire "victory".

A subtle equilibrium existed between the more and the less musical parts: This form of continuous music prefigures Wagnerian drama even more than does the "reform" opera of Gluck. Rameau was the greatest ballet composer of all times. The genius of his creation rests on one hand on his perfect artistic permeation by folk-dance types, on the other hand on the constant preservation of living contact with the practical requirements of the ballet stage, which prevented an estrangement between the expression of the body from the spirit of absolute music.

After the interval of to , he became the official court musician, and for the most part, composed pieces intended to entertain, with plenty of dance music emphasising sensuality and an idealised pastoral atmosphere. His Zoroastre was first performed in According to one of Rameau's admirers, Cuthbert Girdlestone, this opera has a distinctive place in his works: Unlike Lully, who collaborated with Philippe Quinault on almost all his operas, Rameau rarely worked with the same librettist twice. Many Rameau specialists have regretted that the collaboration with Houdar de la Motte never took place, and that the Samson project with Voltaire came to nothing because the librettists Rameau did work with were second-rate.

Not one of his librettists managed to produce a libretto on the same artistic level as Rameau's music: But this was standard for the genre, and is probably part of its charm. The versification, too, was mediocre, and Rameau often had to have the libretto modified and rewrite the music after the premiere because of the ensuing criticism.

This is why we have two versions of Castor et Pollux and and three of Dardanus , , and By the end of his life, Rameau's music had come under attack in France from theorists who favoured Italian models. However, foreign composers working in the Italian tradition were increasingly looking towards Rameau as a way of reforming their own leading operatic genre, opera seria.

Tommaso Traetta produced two operas setting translations of Rameau libretti that show the French composer's influence, Ippolito ed Aricia and I Tintaridi based on Castor et Pollux , Gluck's three Italian reform operas of the s— Orfeo ed Euridice , Alceste , and Paride ed Elena —reveal a knowledge of Rameau's works.

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For instance, both Orfeo and the version of Castor et Pollux open with the funeral of one of the leading characters who later comes back to life. Rameau had used accompanied recitatives, and the overtures in his later operas reflected the action to come, [44] so when Gluck arrived in Paris in to produce a series of six French operas, he could be seen as continuing in the tradition of Rameau. Nevertheless, while Gluck's popularity survived the French Revolution , Rameau's did not. By the end of the 18th century, his operas had vanished from the repertoire. For most of the 19th century, Rameau's music remained unplayed, known only by reputation.

Dramatic Expression in Rameau's Tragédie en Musique (ebook)

As Rameau biographer J. Rameau, like so many others, was flung into the enemy's face to bolster our courage and our faith in the national destiny of France. Among the audience was Claude Debussy , who especially cherished Castor et Pollux , revived in Rameau's Treatise on Harmony initiated a revolution in music theory.

Heavily influenced by new Cartesian modes of thought and analysis, Rameau's methodology incorporated mathematics, commentary, analysis and a didacticism that was specifically intended to illuminate, scientifically, the structure and principles of music. With careful deductive reasoning, he attempted to derive universal harmonic principles from natural causes. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Between Tradition and Enlightenment by Cynthia Verba.