The Operas of Rameau

Graham Sadler is a research professor at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Hull. Shirley Thompson is Interim Principal of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Jonathan Williams is a leading Rameau specialist in Britain and director of the Rameau Project based at St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Part I – Factions and Rivalry

1 A little-known contribution to the Lulliste-Ramiste dispute: Jean Galli Bibiena’s Mémoires et aventures de monsieur de *** (1735)
Francesca Pagani
2 Destouches and Collin de Blamont: two surintendants in the face of the Ramiste threat
Françoise Escande and Benoît Dratwicki
3 Rameau versus Mondonville: the construction of a post-Lullian musical identity in France
Thierry Favier

Part II – Librettos: Gestation, Attributions, Interpretation

4 Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Art d’aimer: music and eroticism in the Age of Enlightenment
Raphaëlle Legrand
5 Re-assessing attributions to Louis de Cahusac of the librettos of Rameau’s Io, Zéphire and Nélée et Mirthis
Thomas Soury
6 The Triumph of Generosity, or ‘Let’s Make an Opera-Ballet’
Roger Savage
7 New light on the genesis of the ill-fated opera Linus by La Bruère and Rameau
Marie Demeilliez

Part III – Borrowings and Creative Renewal

8 A cluster of allusions to Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni in Rameau’s ‘Anacréon’ (1757)
Graham Sadler
9 Recreating Rameau: J.-S. Mangot and his role in Parma
Margaret Butler
10 An anonymous Messe des morts on themes by Rameau and Mondonville
Thomas Leconte
11 ‘Objet d’étude et de curiosité’: Candeille’s Castor et Pollux and its audiences, 1791–1815
R. J. Arnold

Part IV – Production, Performance and Criticism

12 The impact of human and material contingencies on artistic creation: the case of Rameau’s Les Indes galantes
Laura Naudeix
13 Staging time and space in Rameau’s tragédies en musique
Lois Rosow
14 Stage sets and music in Rameau’s operas
Rémy-Michel Trotier
15 Do Rameau’s dances ‘impose physical movement’? A collaborative exploration
Rebecca Harris-Warrick and Hubert Hazebroucq
16 Through the Mercure’s lens: mid-eighteenth-century acting styles and vocal aesthetics at the Paris Opéra
Thomas Green

Part V – Discography

17 Rameau’s operas on disc
Patrick Florentin