Behind the Musik: Rameau & The Art of Dance

Program

Overture from Zoroastre (1749)

Dances from Castor & Pollux (1737)

Déscente de Venus et de Mars
Premier Air pour les Athlètes
Air très gai pour les Athlètes
Air pour les Ombres heureuses [for the happy shades]
Gavotte pour trois Ombres heureuses
Loure pour trois Ombres heureuses
Passepieds I & II pour deux Ombres heureuses
Chaconne pour les Génies

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Overture from Les fêtes de Polymnie (1745)

Dances from Dardanus (1739)
Choreography by Caroline Copeland

Air gracieux pour les Plaisirs et la Jalousie [for the Pleasures and Jealousy]
Air vive pour les Plaisirs
Air gracieux pour les Peuples de différents nations
Menuets I & II pour les Phrygiens et Phrygiennes
Tambourins I & II pour les Peuples de différents nations
Chaconne pour les Jeux et les Plaisirs [for the Games and the Pleasures]

INTERMISSION

Overture from Zaïs (1748)

Dances from Les Indes galantes (1735)

Menuets I & II pour la suite d’Hébé [for the followers of Hebe]
Musette pour la suite d’Hébé
Rigaudons I & II pour les Matelots provençaux [for the Provencal sailors]
Orage [Storm]
Tambourins I & II pour les Matelots provençaux
Chaconne

**

Overture from Naïs (1749)

Dances from Naïs
Choreography by Julian Donahue

Gavotte pour les Zéphyres
Air gai pour les Divinités de la mer [for the Deities of the sea]
Sarabande pour les Dieux et Déesses de la mer [for the Gods and Goddesses of the sea]
Menuets I & II pour les Divinités de la mer déguisées [for the Deities of the sea in disguise]
Tambourins I & II pour les Divinités de la mer déguisées
Entrée des lutteurs [Entrance of the wrestlers] — Chaconne — Air de triomphe

Program Notes

By Robert Mealy

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s life had one of the most remarkable second acts of any composer. After a modest career in the provinces, he moved to Paris at the age of 40 and astonished his contemporaries with his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733, which premiered when he was 50. Critics exclaimed that there was enough invention for 10 operas in its score. Rameau went on to write more than 30 large-scale theatrical works over the next three decades; he died just before his 81st birthday.

Rameau brought a unique mix of theoretical and practical experience to his opera scores. In the decade before Hippolyte was premiered, he had been busy publishing enormous harmonic treatises and working as a composer for the Théatre de la Foire, the street fairs of Paris. (It’s a little as if Milton Babbitt, after teaching music theory at Princeton and writing Broadway shows, had started a new career writing hugely popular full-length operas for the Met.)

Tonight’s program celebrates Rameau’s spectacularly theatrical overtures and his dances, which are some of the most addictively kinetic music written before Stravinsky. No other baroque dance music seems so clearly to invite its own choreography. As the famous ballet master Claude Gardel admitted, “Rameau perceived what the dancers themselves were unaware of; we thus rightly regard him as our first master.” In this week’s concerts we’ll see the same pair of dancers interpret Rameau’s music using baroque choreography in Dardanus and modern choreography in Naïs.

Rameau often uses some of the most straightforward baroque dance forms to create his endlessly inventive effects. The simple menuet, for example,is full of surprising textures in his hands, while the tambourin and the rigaudon offer other, earthier pleasures of sheer rhythmic propulsion. The great chaconnes that end each opera, with their repeating phrases conveying a sense of order restored, become occasions for displays of theatrical gesture in the music. Note the amazing scale that disappears into nothing at the end of the chaconne in Castor et Pollux, for example, or the moment when time simply stops in the Dardanus chaconne, with everyone silent for several beats at a time.

Along with the classic French dance forms, Rameau also exploited the new possibilities of ballets d’action, where actions could be depicted in pantomime, an art he had learned at the Foire. This gave him the opportunity to explore quirky and irregular phrasing with moments that could be comic, or charming, or violently dramatic—sometimes all in the same dance.

Rameau’s orchestral effects in these operas are achieved with the most economical of means, using only the usual strings and winds, with occasional appearances by trumpets and percussion. One of his favourite instruments was the bassoon, which he often uses for high tenor obbligatos. A contemporary remarked that “thanks to Rameau, an instrument formerly appreciated only for its force has become pleasant and touching, capable both of pleasing the ear and affecting the heart.”

We open our program with the ferocious overture from Rameau’s great magic opera of 1749, Zoroastre. Rameau was constantly exploring how to rework the traditional slow-fast overture of Lully, and in the 1740s, he began making its music part of the plot. Here, as one 18th-century score explains, “the first part is a vivid picture of King Abramane’s barbarous rule and the groans of his oppressed people. A gentle calm follows, as hope is born again.” The overture ends with “a bright and joyous image of Zoroaster’s powers of good, and the happiness of people freed from oppression.”

We follow this with a suite of dances from Castor et Pollux. Written in 1737, this was Rameau’s second big tragédie lyrique after Hippolyte, and became his most popular opera. According to one contemporary, Rameau was overwhelmed by the applause at its revival in 1754, “weeping for joy and drunk with the welcome that the public had given him.” It continued to be revived as late as 1792, during the Revolution.

Our first air encapsulates the story of its Prologue: the flutes and violins of Venus subdue the warlike trumpet of Mars. After two dances for some very elegant athletes, we move to the Underworld. French operas almost always went to Hell at some point, to show off the Opéra’s excellent grotesque stage sets. In this case we visit Hell’s pleasant suburbs, the Elysian Fields (literally the Champs-Élysées), where the Happy Spirits attempt to console Castor. The opera’s final chaconne celebrates “la fête de l’Univers”—the party of the universe—where the stars and planets all dance together.

The overture to Les fêtes de Polymnie (1745) is another of Rameau’s striking conceptions. The Rameau scholar Graham Sadler commented that “the piled-up dissonances of the first section have the character of a magnificent organ improvisation (in fact, Balbastre later arranged it for organ), while the second section would not seem out of place in a contemporary German symphony.” Next come a series of dances from Dardanus of 1739 in baroque choreography, ending with its great chaconne, where time itself stands still.

Our second half begins with the dramatic overture of Zaïs from 1748. Rameau declared that he wanted to “paint the unravelling of chaos” and the creation of the world, as the various elemental spirits are awoken. Its striking opening proved too much for some contemporaries, and Rameau’s original version (which we play tonight) quickly got revised during rehearsals. Even so, one reviewer wrote that Rameau made such an effective depiction of chaos “that it was unpleasant … happily Adam was not around to hear the creation of the world, and God spared the first man from an overture which would have burst his ear drums.” Today we can revel in Rameau’s vision of radical disorganization.

Rameau followed up his first tragedy, Hippolyte, with a lighter work. Les Indes galantes is an opéra-ballet, an exploration of international love through a series of unconnected scenes. Its very name reveals its fashionably up-to-date agenda. Galant is a difficult word to translate, meaning about as much (and as little) as “cool” does today: chic and sophisticated, but also simple and direct—and above all, elegant. It was the word that marked the Régence after Louis XIV’s death in 1714, when the Duc d’Orléans, regent to the young Louis XV, moved the court from Versailles back to Paris, and a light urban style replaced the elaborate rituals of the previous regime. 

The new century had been inaugurated with André Campra’s L’Europe galante, and now Rameau and his librettist provided an international response. The setup is simple: since all the young men of Europe want to go to war, Love himself has decided it’s time to emigrate. (“Les Indes” really just means anywhere far away: the Ottoman Empire, Peru, North America …). Our suite tonight focuses on the Prologue’s dances for Hebe, the goddess of youth, and the festivities of young Europeans before the Goddess of War takes them over. The opera’s final chaconne, set in an arcadian America, celebrates the victory of love over war: you can hear the warlike trumpets and drums gradually being overtaken by the sweeter sounds of strings and winds.

We close with a suite from Naïs, the 1749 opéra pour la Paix [opera for Peace]which celebrated the end of seven years of European war. Its prologue re-casts the war as the assault of the Titans on Olympus, and the overture depicts this literally titanic battle: a bruit de guerre [noise of war]with drums thundering and trumpets blaring in ferocious offbeat syncopations. After a suite of colourful dances, we finish our celebration of Rameau with a huge and virtuosic chaconne for the Ithsmian Games, a slightly unpronounceable version of the Olympic Games in honour of Neptune.

Notes on the Dances

Dardanus Suite of Dances: Notes by choreographer Caroline Copeland

There are no extant dance notations from the opera-ballets of Jean-Philippe Rameau. The surviving theatrical dance repertoire closest to this period are notated choreographies for the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, whose ballet music, its phrasing and character, are completely different from Rameau, and thus not interchangeable. 

For me, the ballet music of Rameau signals a change of ballet technique. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why there are no extant theatrical dance notations: the notation system created by Pierre Beauchamps in the late 17th century did not adapt to the new style of ballet emerging that blended pantomime and pure dance virtuosity. We do know that in the latter half of the 18th century the Italian “grotesque” style of ballet became dominant. Similar to our current ballet practices, the Italian style of ballet was athletic and virtuosic, and included a lot of jumping, “batterie” of the legs, higher leg gestures, and endless amounts of pirouettes. 

For these choreographies, I took advantage of the long lens of history to create a hybrid of the known and the speculative. Inspired by the writings and engravings of the English dancing master Kellom Tomlinson, I exaggerated the spiral and bend of the torso, utilized higher and more dynamic arm movements, and finished each gesture with the delicate gathering of the fingertips. The existing costume designs and paintings of professional dancers from this era support this aesthetic approach. As for the steps, we used the theatrical choreographies of Louis Pécour and Anthony L’Abbé as guides, and from that base we manipulated, ornamented, and expanded the technique in the hopes of achieving a blend of the earlier ballet technique with what we know is coming later in the 18th century, a more galant-style ballet.

Naïs Suite of Dances: Notes by choreographer Julian Donahue

Approaching contemporary choreography to baroque music for a baroque program can feel like a conundrum. There are certain expectations, in style and in form, that one associates with baroque dance that we might not follow in contemporary choreography. Throughout the contemporary dance suite I try to stay true to one important baroque dance tenet: to provide a visualization of the music, to treat the body like a musical instrument that appeals to the kinesthetic senses, visually keeping time while describing and deepening the music for the audience.

I decidedly did not strictly adhere to symmetry conventions, but I did play with symmetry as a way to recall the baroque style and show my departure from it. As the piece goes on, I play more with counterpoint, which ironically is an essential concept in baroque music, but is not common in baroque dance. Counterpoint in dance means that two dancers are doing completely different phrases of movement that hold similar attentional and compositional weight. The last tambourin is almost completely in counterpoint: Caroline and I don’t do any of the same steps at the same time until the very end. Additional ideas that guided me were the use of pedestrian movement typical of contemporary dance, and different body parts leading movement instead of always being led by the feet as in baroque dance.

For tickets, visit: tafelmusik.org/rameau

Meet Robert Mealy, Caroline Copeland, and Julian Donahue here.