Jean-Philippe Rameau

As France’s leading 18th-century composer, Rameau had a strangely unbalanced career. Born in Dijon in 1683, he matured slowly, finding fame only in his early forties as a music theorist and keyboard composer. Then, at the age of 50, he launched a theatrical career which produced around 30 outstanding entertainments, covering a range of stage forms from opera to ballet; by 1749, his works dominated the Paris Opera. His originality came as a shock but he also had great breadth, finding a comic style for the opera-ballet Platée (1745) about a frog-like nymph who thinks she’s irresistible to men, and painting deep and complex characters in his final tragedy, Les Boréades (1763). Throughout these works, Rameau emerges as one of the greatest orchestrators of the Baroque. His only chamber music—the Pièces de Clavecin en Concerts (1741)—experiments with the trio sonata, making the harpsichord the center of attention by granting it a fully written-out part. In his harpsichord pieces, he excelled at colorful, atmospheric effects, as well as characterizing famous personalities and depicting exotic images, like the swirling dust storm of “Les Tourbillons.” He died in 1764.