Association Française pour le Rayonnement du Théâtre du Château de Drottningholm

Rameau's operas and their relation to stage

Gilbert Blin

In eighteenth century France Jean-Philippe Rameau was both the greatest composer and the greatest musical theorist. But despite the main part of his production being written for the stage, his theoretical works, paradoxically enough, contain nothing significant about opera as an art form. The lyrical dramatic art, just like the debates on the subject, was also based, according to the spirit of the times, on poetry and the theatre, that is to say the forms of the literary art. Its practice and theory seems, then, since the seventeenth century, to have been the realm of writers. Rameau, however, chose not just skilled craftsmen among the many librettists with whom he collaborated in his numerous works. In actual fact the poets to whom he stuck longest were also theorists, who wished to formulate their ideas on art according to the potential for putting them into practice in their own time. Among the great thinkers on dramatic art with whom Rameau collaborated may especially be noted Voltaire, this time as librettist. There is, however, a less famous author who can rightly claim to be Rameau’s favourite dramatist, namely Louis de Cahusac, the poet whose collaboration with the composer was most fruitful, both in practice & theory. [...]