Rondeau (Les Indes galantes)

Les Indes galantes was Rameau's second stage work, an opéra-ballet of 1735 in which four exotic entrées — Turkey, Peru, Persia, North America — hang from a prologue about love driven out of Europe by war. The rondeau belongs to the dance music that carried the piece, written for a Paris audience that came for the spectacle and stayed for the orchestra. Rameau's contemporaries found the harmony difficult; the dances they took to at once, and they are what has kept the work alive on modern stages.