# Your Personal Favorite Opera by Rameau



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Cuthbert Girdlestone, who contributed the Rameau entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, counts the composer's three early lyric tragedies, "Hippolyte et Aricie," "Castor and Pollux" and "Dardanus," as his finest achievements. He feels they capture Rameau at his freshest, most original and least willing to compromise to fashionable taste.

And here are 3 scattered commentaries on Castor and Pollux, Dardanus and Hippolyte et Aricie:

*Castor and Pollux*

The crowning achievement of French baroque opera, Castor and Pollux is a work of ethereal beauty, rich in affecting airs, elegant dances, subtly flowing syllables and powerful choruses [.....] Castor and Pollux is Rameau's finest creation. His style of melodic writing was more flexible if less lyrical than Italian composers, but retains its own style of lyricism which derives from the French language, a sort of wandering melodic line (which Debussy mirrored), the French version of the speech song originally advocated by the Camerata in the late 16th century [.....] In the face of the so called supremacy of Italian music, Castor and Pollux displayed the assets of French art: the expressive power of declamation and the efficiency of choirs *and ballets* endow the tragic fate of 2 heroic brothers with novel emotion.

(As an aside, the critic Harold Schonberg disagreed with all of the above):

Quote:

Rameau composed little that seems to mean much to 20th century listeners. The trouble is that most modern tastes tend to find his music rather bloodless. Last night the Concert Opera Association restored his opera "Castor et Pollux," in what was claimed to be the first American performance. It is a long and ambitious opera with a subject curiously akin to the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. Rameau's music to all this is stately, dignified and often beautiful. What it lacks, au fond, is imagination -- harmonic and melodic. Hardly a trace of passion ruffles its prevailing serenity. Melodies rise and fall, but are curiously unmoving. The rhythms tend to run along in unvaried manner. The recitatives are rather monotonous. Whatever beauty the score has lies in its intelligence and clarity, its Gallic "point." Obviously the work of a superior musician, "Castor et Pollux" just misses greatness for want of breadth.

*Dardanus*

Dardanus contains more first rate music, and of greater variety, than any other work of Rameau except perhaps "Les Fetes d'****." It is regrettable that so alien a plot should overshadow such riches and should lock them up in a prison which not even Venus can open. "Castor et Pollux" and "Hippolyte et Aricie" have in their themes enough dramatic stuff to make revivals possible, but "Dardanus" is a MUSICIAN'S OPERA, and operas that appeal only to musicians remain within their scores where not even musicians often seek them out. [.....] Another general feature that remains in one's mind after studying "Dardanus" is its emotional range. From the extreme dreaminess of the original act 4, the tragic laments of Iphise and, in 1744, of Dardanus, on the one hand, to the martial or demonic power of the duet in act 1, the magicians' chorus, the fury chorus 'Dardanus gemit' and Antenor's 'Le despoirs et la rage' in the new act 3, on the other, there runs a tremendous range of feeling and all points along the scale are marked by first rate music [.....] It is deplorable that so much life and beauty should lie unknown, and one wonders whether a modern version, based on that of 1744 but incorporating some of the best parts from the earlier score (1739) which Rameau omitted, could not be put together.

*Hippolyte et Aricie*

Is "Hippolyte et Aricie", as William Christie declares, indeed 'the most powerful and engaging' of all his (or anyone else's) tragedies-lyriques? To my mind there is more profound expression of loss and despair in both Castor et Pollux and Dardanus, a more radiant combination of solo and choral voices in Zoroastre, instrumental refinement yet more exquisite and varied in Les Indes galantes, melding of dance and drama still more innovative in Les Boreades: but the sum total of "Hippolyte" --- in which a meeting was contrived between the Racine-inherited plot and a musico-dramatic form descended from Lully that brought renewal and reinvigoration to both --- is a cohesiveness of style and subject-matter, form and content that *no other Rameau opera can equal.*

No other divertissement of Rameau [in Act 3 of "Hippolyte et Aricie"] presents music so strong, so broadly conceived and so varied. It consists in a chorus, two danced airs and two rigadoons, the second of which is repeated by a singer. The chorus "Que ce rivage retentisse" is unique in his operas. It is not his most dramatic chorus but his most spacious and most sustained, and the most highly developed example of contrapuntal writing in them. The dramatist gives way to the pure musician and the result is some hundred and sixty bars of choral writing recalling Handel at his biggest, with a rhythm firm and square from start to finish.

If I were asked to point out a portion of Rameau's work which gave the fullest picture of his musical powers I should not hesitate to name this act. We have in it a masterpiece of each of the three sides in which he excels: arioso, chorus and dance. The greatest depth of feeling, not only in Rameau but in all French classical opera, is found in its soliloquies, "the final and most organic development of recitative. The French are unwilling to give dramatic airs a purely musical rhythm. The secret ideal is that the melody of these airs should draw as near as possible to the movement of impassioned speech."[.....] Of the chorus I have spoken at length. The first sailors' air and the rigaudons though less outstanding than chorus and monologue, are nevertheless examples of Rameau's dances at their best, in their union of compelling rhythm and emotional strength. For sheer splendour and might no divertissement surpasses the fete with which Theseus' unhappy return is welcomed..... All Rameau, of course, is not there, but what is present is so essential and so superb that it is *the finest summary of his work that one can find*

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Question:

Do you have a personal favorite Rameau opera?


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## Speranza (Nov 22, 2014)

Unfortunately I haven't seen the ones you're referring to, I have only seen Les Boreades, Zorastre, Les Paladins and Les Indes galantes and this was all awhile ago due to Rameau not coming round on TV much. My favourite being Les Indes galantes which I admit could have been influenced by the fact it was a brilliant production from Opera de Paris from 2004. It is my favourite because it has absolutely beautiful music and it held my attention all the way through, which with baroque ,though I do love it and Rameau in particular, can be a problem whether it is the slightly formulaic plots or occasionally the dry music and lets not forget the length! 

Sorry my reply is no way near as informed as yours but it is the best I can do, you really made me miss Rameau I am going to go listen to some on youtube when I can.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

I wouldn't even bother to nit-pick over the finest when it comes to Rameau, so much of it is, imho, ravishingly beautiful music with a very strong (i.e. "not just pretty") pith.

I find him, musically, at least on a par with Bach, if not actually 'rating him' as much greater than

When you're talking that level of quality, it is all, pretty much, seriously good / great stuff.

The later *Platée*, a comic opera not without its poignant aspects, is simply terrific.









_*Les Indes Galantes*_ is terrific, and again, a pretty much nonstop great all the way through score: Ditto _*Dardanus*_.

Then there are those smaller and less theatrical spectacular pieces more the length and dimensions of a one-act -- I'm thinking of _*La Guirlande*_, which has only two principal singers (soprano and tenor), no chorus, and orchestra, which is also a mighty fine, again 'beautiful' and moving piece.


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## schigolch (Jun 26, 2011)

My favorite is also _Hippolyte et Aricie_.


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