Jean-Philippe Rameau

Fifty years old when his first opera reached the stage, Rameau had by then spent a working lifetime as a provincial organist and a decade publishing theoretical work. The Traité de l'harmonie of 1722 sought the origins of harmony in the physical behaviour of sound, and its theory of the fundamental bass gave musicians a conceptual vocabulary they were still using a century later. Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 outraged the guardians of Lully's legacy and made him, belatedly, a man of the theatre; Castor et Pollux, Les Indes galantes, Dardanus and the comic Platée followed. His harpsichord pieces include La poule, Les sauvages and L'enharmonique. Born in Dijon into a family of organists, he died in Paris in 1764. From the 1730s until 1753 he worked as maitre de musique for Alexandre de La Pouplinière. His Pièces de clavecin en concerts of 1741 pair the harpsichord with violin or flute and viol or a second violin. The comédie-ballet La Princesse de Navarre, composed in 1745 for the dauphin's marriage, won him the favour of the king and a settled income, and after 1752 he produced fewer works and more theory.