Background
Jean Philippe Rameau was born in Dijon, France on September 25, 1683, the son of a provincial organist.
(Founder and conductor of period-performance orchestra the...)
Founder and conductor of period-performance orchestra the English Concert, as well as an outstanding harpsichordist, Trevor Pinnock's solo recordings include the complete keyboard works of Rameau, Scarlatti sonatas, Handel's harpsichord suites, and Bach's Goldberg Variations and complete Partitas.
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Jean Philippe Rameau was born in Dijon, France on September 25, 1683, the son of a provincial organist.
It is presumed that he studied with his father, no other formal training being known.
He was in Italy in 1701 and then served as organist for a time at Clermont-Ferrand. In 1706 he was in Paris, where his first collection of harpsichord pieces was published.
Rameau dropped out of sight for nearly a decade, returning sometime about 1715 to his former position at Clermont-Ferrand. Here he wrote his famous Treatise on Harmony Reduced to Its Natural Principles (1722). In 1731 Rameau came under the patronage of one of the wealthiest, most remarkable 18th-century French aristocrats, La Pouplinière. Rameau was active as a teacher, harpsichordist, conductor, and composer in his establishment until 1753. His patron provided the necessary arrangements for Rameau to attempt his hand at opera composition.
In 1733 Hippolyte et Aricie, to a libretto by the Abbé Pellegrin, was presented in Paris; it was Rameau's first major public success. Les Indes galantes followed in 1735, and Castor et Pollux, generally considered to be his crowning triumph in the music theater, in 1737. These works challenged the then-prevailing taste for simpler, more tuneful diversions and entertainments, as well as the belief that Jean Baptiste Lully was the only significant composer of French operas. The ensuing quarrels in French intellectual circles over the respective merits of Lully and Rameau and later over the merits of Italian versus French music assured Rameau of lasting fame.
In 1745 the King awarded Rameau a lifetime pension on the basis of his pleasure with La Princesse de Navarre, a comédie-ballet (a unification of stage play and ballet) composed for the marriage of the Dauphin to Maria Theresa of Spain. In his keyboard music Rameau followed in the steps of François Couperin.
Nearly 20 years elapsed between Rameau's first publications in 1706 and a second collection of orderly, elegant pieces for the harpsichord, Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode pour la mécanique des doigts (1726). The Pièces de clavecin en concert avec un violon ou une flûte et une viole ou un deuxième violon (1741) is generally acknowledged as his masterpiece of chamber music. He died in Paris on Sept. 12, 1764.
(Founder and conductor of period-performance orchestra the...)
(The Suites (exc.) by Jean-Philippe Rameau on a Fazioli pi...)
He claimed that melody must be subordinated to harmony and that harmonic considerations alone should dictate composition. He established the significant theoretical concept that the inversions of chords did not create new chords but were further manifestations of a single harmony. While Rameau's ideas were much debated and attacked, their importance for the future of theory and practice cannot be overestimated.
Throughout his life, music was his consuming passion. It occupied his entire thinking. Physically, Rameau was tall and exceptionally thin. He had a "loud voice. " His speech was difficult to understand, just like his handwriting, which was never fluent. As a man, he was secretive, solitary, irritable, proud of his own achievements (more as a theorist than as a composer), brusque with those who contradicted him, and quick to anger.
He was a secretive man, and even his wife knew nothing of his early life, which explains the scarcity of biographical information available.
On 25 February 1726 Rameau married the 19-year-old Marie-Louise Mangot, who came from a musical family from Lyon and was a good singer and instrumentalist. The couple would have four children, two boys and two girls, and the marriage is said to have been a happy one.
Financial security came late to him, following the success of his stage works. But he did not change his way of life, keeping his worn-out clothes, his single pair of shoes, and his old furniture.