Music About Fireworks, Day 4 – Overture from Acante and Cephise by Jean-Philippe Rameau

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 4 – Overture from Acante and Cephise by Jean-Philippe Rameau

The primary export of Jean-Baptiste Lully was the French overture.  No other element of his overly formal, even stiff, conservative operas (see this post) designed to glorify the French monarchy, and its monarch Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, were able to travel outside of France so well.  Collaborating with Philippe Quinault, one of the nation’s finest dramatists, during the 1670s and 1680s, Lully forged an unbending mold which guided the shape and content of his operas and those of his successors for a half century following his death.  In an opera by Lully you can count on exactly the same features again and again, allowing listeners who come to know them to predict the sound and dramatic flow of specimens they have not even heard.  Lully was inventive enough to vary them somewhat, but his 14 tragedies lyrique are cut from precisely the same unyielding cloth.

Every one of Lully’s operas develops over the course of 5 acts an episode based on a lofty mythological subject derived from the Greeks, Romans, or Christian epics in which a central hero must reconcile his competing desires for love and glory – this is always a thinly veiled allegory indicating the impeccable character of the Sun King.  Less thinly veiled was the text of the prologue in which other mythological characters, often personified virtues, sung the literal praise of their “hero”, again the Sun King.  Flanking the Prologue on either side was one of Lully’s hallmarks, a distinctive brand of overture which opened the show and marked the boundary between the prologue and the drama proper.  Lully’s model of the overture came to represent the entire nation and culture, eventually branded as the “French overture” and Europeans everywhere loved them.  It is hard to imagine a more effective composition to announce the pomp and splendor of Lully’s allegorical operas which glorified the French Monarchy.  Here’s how they work…

Every French overture has two major sections.  The first section is typically ponderous and homophonic with heavily dotted rhythms, the overall effect of which is dramatic and even imposing.  After a minute or two of that a quicker section follows with busy counterpoint passing between the numerous independent voices; the typical feeling of this section is severe in minor keys and splendorous in major keys, an effective illustration of the virtues of an imposing monarchy.  After the quick, busy section the slow dotted music returns to close the movement.  Lully’s French overtures are dramatically effective and well-wrought, if somewhat dry and formulaic.  Still, it is worth becoming acquainted with at least one or two.  Here is a major key example, from Lully’s Phaeton of 1683 (a little less than two centuries later Camille Saint-Saens would compose a Lisztian symphonic poem on the same story; see this post):

And here is the overture from Atys of 1676:

These overtures, composed to convey a very specific impression on their audiences, did the job for which they were designed, and also effectively framed the prologues, signaling the main drama.  It is also significant to note that they did not pertain specifically to the dramas that followed.  While Lully’s overtures are associated with specific dramas, and at times they even feel unified with them in terms of mood and tone, they are essentially interchangeable.

Lully’s French overture format became widely imitated during his lifetime and beyond.  Germanic composers like Bach and Handel loved them and wrote their own personally distinctive essays in the genre.  Bach opened every one of his four surviving Orchestral Suites with French on a grand, sweeping scale, easily five times the length of Lully’s.  Handel wrote a French overture to raise the curtain before each of his 40 operas, as well as many of his oratorios.  His end up being just a little longer than Lully’s and exhibit his well-wrought and sturdy contrapuntal writing.  His most famous French overture is found at the beginning of his most famous work, Messiah of 1742, composed a little more than half a century after Lully’s works:

 

Like Lully’s overtures, Handel’s are interchangeable, bearing no specific relation to the ensuing drama.

It was a near contemporary of Handel’s who finally advanced the state of French opera beyond the stagnant dominance of Lully’s strong legacy.  Beginning in the 1730s Jean-Philippe Rameau, the second great composer of French operas, began to create dramatic works with a personal flair and adventurous harmonic palette.  He flirted with controversy as he began to do this, inviting conservative factions in French society to criticize his advancements (see this post).  But once the kerfuffle calmed French audiences of all types began to acknowledge the beauty, dramatic power, and graceful, if sometimes radical, music of Rameau’s operas.

The overtures of Rameau’s early operas are very Lullian, albeit not without their distinctive character.  Here is the overture from Hippolyte and Aricie, Rameau’s very first opera.  Notice how close it is to Lully’s concept:

 

Gradually, though, Rameau began to make his overtures colorful and innovative.  He was one of the first composers to make overtures specific to the drama, often treating them like dramatic summaries.  The overture from Zoroaster works this way; it begins with the groans of people oppressed by a tyrant and gives way to the benevolent rule of the title character:

 

Sometimes Rameau’s overture would lead directly into the drama, as it does in his final opera, The Descendants of Boreas.  The overture, one of the first orchestral compositions to feature clarinets (they really fit Rameau’s orchestral color palette like a glove) concludes with a musical hunt which is essentially the first number in the drama:

 

This technique was copied by Gluck decades later, and I have to figure that this particular overture served as inspiration for Berlioz when he composed a hunt in his operatic masterpiece (see this post).

One of the most colorful and entertaining overtures by Rameau is that from Acante and Cephise.  Composed in 1751 for the occasion of the birth of Louis Joseph Xavier, a duke of the House of Bourbon and elder brother of the ill-fated future King Louis XVI (Duke Louis died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 9).  Rameau’s inventive overture features a fireworks display right in the middle!  In the third and final section fanfares prompt instrumental statements of “Vive les Roi!”  Can you hear it all?  No one could have composed a royal festival in the gallant style as well as Rameau:

 

Lully’s legacy was of crucial importance to the cultural establishment of France.  But perhaps it overstayed its welcome.  I can’t think of any musical style that hasn’t advanced or faded away of its own accord after just a decade or two, so for the conservative enforcers of France to have kept the style static for 50 years must have seemed stifling.  Fortunately Rameau balanced his strength of conviction with tact and moved just fast enough to prompt change, but also slowly enough to ease the transition and keep important feathers unruffled (as much as possible, anyway).  The overtures of his operas remain inventive and entertaining microcosms of the greater stylistic changes he prompted.  They contain wonderful music, abundant with very clever touches.

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!

Sublime Stillness, Day 5 – “Tristes Apprets” from Castor and Pollux by Jean-Philippe Rameau

This week’s theme is…Sublime Stillness!  The mysterious art we call music refers merely to frequencies that fill the air around us, controlled in a specific way by its performers.  Technically this may be true, but we sense feelings and motions of intense clarity.  Sometimes the incredibly high density of musical events creates furious, busy textures.  And at other times achingly long-breathed sustained notes create a sublime impression of meditative stillness that seems to suspend time itself.  This week we look at some examples of this.

Sublime Stillness, Day 5 – “Tristes Apprets” from Castor and Pollux by Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean Baptiste-Lully had done the impossible, and something that was unprecedented and hence unrepeated in the history of Western music: the Florentine had single-handedly created a national musical style for a foreign country and secured a practical monopoly on the art in the process.  I first learned of Lully’s story decades ago and it still fascinates me, both for his character and relationship with the powerful monarch known as the Sun King, and also for the lovely, sumptuous and dramatic music that came of it.  I happily listen to the great fruits of Lully’s collaboration with Louis XIV, his tragedies lyriques, produced annually during the last decade and a half of his life.  This superb, balanced, and colorful form was the result of decades of preparation spent writing for the French in other forms, learning and perfecting the art of ballet, and intense study of the rhythms and melodic tendencies of the French language.  And once all of this had been digested, Lully proceeded to create a form of opera, based on Italian dramatic models and infused with a healthy measure of French dance and spectacle, that fit the French language like a comfortable glove and also managed to pay obsequious tribute to the Sun King as a bonus.  For more about this story you can see this post and this one.

Lully’s muscular music, his perpetually successful creative process, and his close relationship with the powerful monarch allowed him to leverage his influence and create what was essentially a monopoly over French opera during his lifetime.  No one besides him could write or stage operas in France without his permission under the threat of crippling financial damages.  As a result, no operas could be produced in France without his approval.  Lully was in complete control.

And not only during his lifetime.  Lully’s creative legacy was so strong that even half a century after his death, the highly conservative musical culture that flowed from his power discouraged the creation of any operas that too extravagantly broke the mold of his tragedies lyrique.  Even operas newly composed during this time were required to comport with the standards of Lully’s operatic forms, spectacles, manner of text setting, and the lovely but quite conventional harmonic language which governed the music found within.  And it’s certainly not an insult to call Lully’s harmonic style “conventional”.  It is most serviceable to its purpose and represents a hearty and pleasing expression of tonality in its early maturity.  Lully grew up as the tonal system was getting its legs, coalescing from the modal system of harmony which governed the polyphony of the Renaissance; he and all of the other early opera composers were discovering this new language.  You can read about some of the others here, here, and here.

This solid, serviceable tonality, cast in Lully’s sturdy and rather vanilla-sounding 5-part string textures (of which he wrote only the outer voices and left their filling out to his apprentices), allowed for hours of music to be written in faithful imitation.  Although beautiful and quite elegant, none of it is all that extraordinary for its orchestral imagination or depth of feeling.  The next great composer of France would achieve results in both of these areas, and initially experience a bit of blowback for it.

There are countless minor French composers who wrote operas during the generation right after Lully, but only one of them possessed a combination of traits necessary to make his mark in a way that still interests historians, namely the traits of technique, imagination and the courage of his convictions.  Jean-Philippe Rameau had spent the first half of his career immersed in the theoretical study of music, summarizing his observations in a great Treatise on Harmony which is still worthy of study for the insights it reveals about the construction of tonal music.  Much of the science of chord progression and inversion still taught today finds its roots (so to speak) in Rameau’s theories.  Rameau’s theoretical work won him early fame and then, in a move that few expected, he turned his ambitions to writing French operas.

Superficially they were written according to the form and text-setting model of the elder Lully, but below the surface, Rameau saturated his operas with exciting new orchestral textures and harmonic statements which would never be at home in one of Lully’s operas.  Perhaps Rameau suspected that his artistry would be met with controversy.  But he was emboldened by the patronage of a wealthy customs official, Alexandre Jean Joseph Le Riche de La Poupeliniere.  

Poupeliniere, a product of the Enlightenment, delighted in staffing his household salon with artists, writers, poets and musicians.  Voltaire was a frequent guest.  Rameau directed Poupeliniere’s own personal high-quality orchestra, with which he was able to test many of his progressive musical works before releasing them to the Parisian public.  Perhaps he tinkered with his first opera, Hippolyte and Aricie in this setting until he felt that it was just right, and then let it out to play among the opinionated listeners of the French old guard.  Listen to this excerpt, sung by a trio of Fates, a justifiably famous example of Rameau’s intensely forward-looking harmony from Hippolyte and Aricie:

 

The sharp rhythms and gestures of the opening are Lullian, but twice as jagged.  The harmonic progression in the middle made many conservative Parisians, loyal to Lully’s old style, hot and bothered.  But Rameau had his instant supporters too, and the scandal and resulting pamphlet war is a pattern that would play out among the commentators of the French musical scene numerous times over the course of the ensuing centuries.

After the initial controversy of his first opera had died down, Rameau felt at liberty to write operas more or less as he pleased and settled into a personal style that, even if not quite as biting as that found in the Trio of the Fates, was always affecting and imaginative with regard to harmony and orchestration.  Where Lully was writing in grey, Rameau always wrote in color, precisely selecting his instrumental textures with flair.  One of his most sublime feats of emotional painting is the placid aria from his second opera Castor and Pullox.  In this aria, found in the first act, the heroine Telaire sings out her grief over her beloved Castor’s recent death.  Rameau haunts us with a calm ocean of string sound through which the melancholy waves of bassoon arpeggios ripple.  These are the only instruments supporting Telaire’s plaintive lament and the choice is inspired.  Moment by moment we hear Rameau’s masterful inversions and control of dissonance, honed through his years of theoretical work.

 

Tristes Apprets is, to me, the most pointed example of the imagination and emotional mastery of Lully’s most important artistic successor, a successor who gave French listeners some vivid new colors just when they were ready, even if they didn’t all realize it at the time.  Rameau is unmistakably French, looking ahead to Berlioz, Saint-Saens, and beyond, foreshadowing their customarily suave melodies and orchestration.  Rameau was crucial in overcoming the primacy of Lully’s tasty but vanilla flavors which dominated the French musical imagination for just a little too long, and later generations are indeed indebted to the boldness of his vision and his courage to release it to what he knew was a rather conservative public, still stuck in adoration of a powerful figure who had made his considerable mark and died long ago.

—

Would you like Aaron of Smart and Soulful Music to provide customized program notes especially for your next performance?  Super!  Just click here to get started.

Want to listen to the entire playlist for this week and other weeks?  Check out the Smart and Soulful YouTube Channel for weekly playlists!

Do you have feedback for me?  I’d love to hear it!  E-mail me at smartandsoulful@gmail.com

Do you have a comment to add to the discussion?  Please leave one below and share your voice!

Subscribe to Smart and Soulful on Facebook and Twitter so you never miss a post!