Rameau - Dardanus - Leppard

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)

Dardanus

Tragédie lyrique en cinc actes
Paroles de le Clerc de La Bruère

Création à Paris à l'Académie Royale de Musique
le 19 novembre, 1739

Christianne Eda-Pierre, Soprano
Frederica von Stade, Soprano
Georges Gautier, Tenor
Michael Devlin, Bass-Baritone
Roger Soyer, Bass-Baritone
José van Dam, Bass

Orchestre et Choers du Théatre National de l'Opera de Paris
Raymond Leppard

(Erato, 1980)
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Below are excerpts from the extensive and clearly written notes for this excellent production of an opera of great beauty - which can also serve very well as an introduction to Rameau's music in general. In the section "Rameau - The Misconceptions", the author gives a detailed account of how Rameau has been highly misconceived as a composer from his own day up to ours.

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"Rameau seems to have the gift of inspiring misconceptions. People tend to impose their own prejudices on him not for what he is but for what he is supposed to be. His own contemporaries dismissed him as a learned pedant. To them anybody who could write a book as unreadably erudite as his Traité d'harmonie réduite à ses principes naturels ("A Treatise on the Natural Principles of Harmony") could not possibly be a real musician: he was too good at reasoning to be capable of being moved or, by extension, of moving anybody else. The writings of even the most favorable of Rameau's 18th-century critics show how difficult it was for people to accept the idea that this theorist might also be a sensitive musician. Furthermore I strongly suspect that much of Rousseau's opposition to Rameau was the result of his inability to overcome this very prejudice...

(...) It is a sad fact about Rameau (and perhaps also one element of his greatness, one explanation of the breadth and richness of his genius) that he has always lacked a definable niche in the history of music. When he was born (1683) Lully was at the height of his career at Versailles; before his death (1764) he may well have heard Mozart playing in Madame Adélaïde's salon there. Now Rameau did not begin writing operas until he was fifty, though fortunately for us he lived to be nearly eighty-one. He spent thirty years thinking about his music before actually writing it. But one of the lessons of history is that a man's tastes and sensibility, whether he is a genius or not, are formed in youth and alter little in manhood. Thus even though Rameau was a member of the avant-garde his roots lay deep in the past. His intelligence developed as the century progressed, but there was an element of sensibility within him that remained unchanging and remote from the age. For this reason he has always been regarded both as an advanced composer and as old-fashioned one....

(...) All these foolish verdicts, all these specimens of second-rate thinking, all these biased judgements - in some cases made by men of genius in their moments of aberration - are correct so long as they are taken all together. Rameau deserves every one of these labels, provided he is not given only one of them. He is both avant-garde and reactionary, both simple and complex, both lightweight and grandiloquent, both tender and intellectual; aristocratic, French, Italian: all this and much more.

For two centuries, then, Rameau has been smothered beneath a mountain of prejudice, petito principii, pretentious nonsense and sheer obstinacy. Is it possible for us to judge him today on the evidence of the music he actually wrote? Has enough time now elapsed for us to be able to assign him his true rank, when we study a work like Dardanus?"

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LP transfers of above material. Includes cover, label
and French / English notes and libretto.