Rameau's galante orgy

The Rameau opera omnia has made an apparently seamless transition from Gérard Billaudot, its first publisher, to Bärenreiter. The editorial team remains in place, and the general appearance of the publication is unchanged. The latest volume to appear contains one of several one-act operas the composer wrote for celebrations at the royal court, in this case the lavish entertainments at Fontainebleau in autumn of 1754. The ballet héroïque Anacréon, set to a libretto by Louis de Cahusac, is a charming exercise in galanterie. The ancient poet Anacréon amuses himself by allowing two of his poetic subjects, Chloé and Batile, to imagine that his creative plans for Chloé will take her away from Batile. Ultimately he assures them that Batile is the partner he has had in mind for her all along, and a troupe of young Theonians and minor deities join the three in celebrating. This story is enacted in minimal recitative and a profusion of charming airs, ariettes, choruses, and dances.

Anacréon had two performances at the Fontainebleau celebrations, in October 1754 (each time paired with a full-length spoken comedy). At some later time it was revised by the composer for production at the Paris Opéra. Unfortunately such a production did not actually take place until 1766, two years after Rameau's death, so the inevitable final revision process that occurred during preparation and rehearsals was carried out by the music directors at the Opéra without the composer's concurrence. To a large degree this process had to do with shortening the work, especially its final divertissement, to suit the requirements of a triple bill. (Anacréon was the second of three one-act operas brought together as an evening's entertainment.) The revised version, which had a healthy run of 36 performances in this format, was revived briefly in 1771.

While we are fortunate to have autograph scores of several of Rameau's brief operas from the late 1740s and 1750s, Anacréon is not among them. The only sources surviving from the 1754 production are the libretto, the choral parts and two of the three principal solo roles. These are complemented by a pair of fragmentary scores patched together for the late 18th-century Rameau enthusiast Jacques-Joseph-Marie Decroix (who clearly had access to at least one early score that is no longer extant, probably the autograph). Faced with this situation, Jonathan Huw Williams had little choice but to make the later version the goal of his critical edition. Instead of presenting it in its much shortened condition of 1766, however, he chose to restore it to the form in which Rameau apparently left it at his death. Thus this edition aims to give us the work in a form that was never performed: the composer's ideal version. A series of score appendices give the 1754 versions of several passages along with the abridged version of the chaconne from Rameau's Platée that was added to Anacréon in 1766.

With the autograph and production score both lost, the principal source for the transcription was the set of parts copied in 1766 and re-used in 1771. (Williams assumes that the extant parts for Batile and Chloé, which bear names other than those of the singers who performed those roles, belonged to individuals who subsequently replaced those performers on stage. It is more likely that these parts belonged to understudies.) Williams had to infer the desired chronological state of the work by working backward from the revisions in those parts to the text originally copied into them. Of course, he realizes that it is possible, even likely, that the first layer of the parts reflects some revisions made by the editor, Pierre Montan Berton, as well as those made earlier by Rameau. In the absence of the production score, there is no way to sort those out. Stage directions from the printed libretto have been inserted into...