Rameau at Fontainebleau

Paul Rice's engagement with Fontainebleau and theatre extends back to a 1982 dissertation and to The performing arts at Fontainebleau (Ann Arbor, 1989). His research revealed the overall strategy of displaying royal performance 'at home' to an élite public, on a seasonal basis, between 1661 and 1786. Except in periods of crisis, the court stayed at the royal château for several weeks every September, October and early November, at various times. As far as opera was concerned, regular cultural promotion at Fontainebleau lagged behind spoken drama, until improvements were made to the theatre space (a long, narrow adaptation in a wing adjacent to the Cour de la Fontaine) in 1753.

At this point a group of new Rameau operas was scheduled for staging (Lisis et Délie never saw the boards, however), and they provide in this book an ideal focus for parallel discussions of Rameau's art (together with their librettos by Cahusac, Collé and Marmontel) alongside the particular circumstances that surrounded the composer at the time. On the one hand, Rameau's celebrity had reached a high pitch of public recognition by 1749. On the other, as Rice argues, Rameau was the victim of complex plotting by power-brokers such as Mme de Pompadour, the marquis d'Argenson and one or more of the team of aristocrats whose responsibility it was to book the court entertainments and co-ordinate their staging and rehearsing. In this scenario, Pompadour is presented as Rameau's nemesis, whose feigned support of his work at the Opéra was calculated to induce a policy in 1749 that had the reverse effect: d'Argenson's brother, influential over the Opéra programming, reputedly decided to limit Rameau's operas there to a maximum of two per year. The reader is half left with the impression that Rameau's exposure was constrained until 1753–4. Indeed, 1750 was a rather leaner year: after Zoroastre closed in February, only Platée was seen at the Opéra. Yet the queen's concert operas at Versailles included both Zoroastre and Les Indes galantes. In 1751 two Rameau premieres were given at the Opéra, plus revivals of his Les Indes galantes and Pygmalion, the latter two finding no mention in Rice's book at this point in the narrative (p.25).

In a world where élite opera was seen at more than one court, pragmatic deductions about fashion and influence surely require consideration of Paris and Versailles too. Rice's account of the year 1753 is a careful and convincing assemblage of evidence centred on the extraordinary way that, at Fontainebleau, last-minute cancellations of opera and drama suggest the highest-level imbrication of subtlety and subversive intentions. But in the same voyage two of Rameau's earlier entrées were seen alongside the new works that Rice analyses in this book and, at Versailles earlier in the summer, the queen's concert performances included two other Rameau operas, from 1739 and 1747. Parisians also got Les fêtes de Polymnie and Pygmalion.

In a different part of the equation, as we know, Rameau's music at this time became newly polemicized in the conflicts between 'French' and 'Italian' styles; made to look old-fashioned by comparison with opera buffa importations, Rameau was also manœuvred into competition with Mondonville, whose opera career had taken wing with Le carnaval du Parnasse in 1749. Rice is certain that Mondonville assiduously cultivated Pompadour; although the former had no lack of supporters among the concert- and opera-going public, Pompadour's star waned in the 1750s and Rameau's genius reasserted itself.

Rice's book then moves into source and style studies, making a clear distinction between Rameau's output of 1753 and 1754. Referring to detailed archival work by Tom Green (1992) in particular, he paints a picture of Rameau between Zoroastre and Les Paladins, freeing up earlier structural demarcations, rethinking aria forms and functions, responding to the fresh vogue...