Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764) was the towering figure of the French Baroque, both its greatest composer and its most important music theorist. Born in Dijon, he spent the first half of his life as a provincial organist, publishing in 1722 his landmark Treatise on Harmony, which laid the foundations of how we still understand tonal harmony today with its theory of the ‘fundamental bass’. Astonishingly, he was nearly fifty before he turned to the stage, and then he transformed French opera, succeeding Lully as its dominant figure with a series of dazzling tragédies lyriques and opéra-ballets: Hippolyte et Aricie, Les Indes galantes, Castor et Pollux, Dardanus, Platée and, at the very end of his life, Les Boréades. His operas are filled with some of the most inventive, colourful and rhythmically vital orchestral music of the eighteenth century, above all in their wealth of dances, and his orchestration was later admired by Berlioz.