Jean-Philippe Rameau

Rameau's music is characterized by extraordinarily bold harmony, brilliant orchestral color, and a dramatic instinct that makes his operas feel almost modern. His dance music has an irresistible vitality and rhythmic snap, while his slow movements achieve an otherworldly beauty. His harmonic language is more daring than virtually any of his contemporaries — full of unexpected modulations, dissonances, and enharmonic surprises.

He was self-taught in many ways, absorbing Italian and French traditions before developing his own theoretical framework. His theoretical rivalry with the partisans of Italian opera (the Querelle des Bouffons) defined French musical life for a generation. He inherited Lully's operatic tradition and transformed it, and his ideas about harmony influenced everyone who came after — from the Classical period through modern jazz theory.

His early decades produced his theoretical masterworks and four magnificent books of harpsichord pieces. His operatic career exploded after age 50, producing a stream of operas and opéra-ballets that dominated the French stage for 30 years. His late works grew increasingly experimental and harmonically adventurous, as he pushed the boundaries of what French Baroque opera could express.

Rameau didn't produce his first opera until age 50. Before that, he was known primarily as a theorist and keyboard composer in relative provincial obscurity. When Hippolyte et Aricie premiered in 1733, it caused a sensation — and a scandal. Traditionalists called it too complex and Italian-influenced, while progressives recognized its genius. Within a decade, the same conservatives were defending Rameau against the next wave of Italian music.

Rameau's Treatise on Harmony (1722) is arguably the most influential music theory text ever written. He discovered the principle of chord inversion, the concept of the fundamental bass, and essentially created the foundations of tonal harmony that are still taught in every music school today.

Rameau is experiencing a golden age of revival. William Christie, Marc Minkowski, Raphaël Pichon, and others have made his operas a regular presence in the world's opera houses. The keyboard works are harpsichord recital staples. Les Indes galantes, especially, has become a crowd-drawing spectacle — Clément Cogitore's hip-hop-infused staging for the Paris Opéra went viral in 2019.