Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)
You have to salute the courage of those daring to stage Rameau’s Dardanus in Australia for the first time, thus taking a firm side in the dispute over what matters most in opera: the music, or the words. There is no question of the magnificence of Rameau’s music for Dardanus: ‘without doubt, one of Rameau’s most inspired creations’, writes Graham Sadler in New Grove Opera, ‘encompassing the widest emotional range of all his works’. Why then does Dardanus remain (as another Rameau authority, Cuthbert Girdlestone, admits) a musician’s opera? The same writer adds ‘operas that appeal only to musicians remain within their scores, where not even musicians often seek them out’? It seems that great music can transcend even the most inadequate libretto, and in the history of opera Dardanus must be one of the strongest proofs of that. Did not 18th century writers refer to Rameau as ‘the composer of Dardanus’? Only in a staged performance can the test of Rameau’s musico-dramatic powers be truly made.
'Ramoneurs' vs. 'Lullistes'
Dardanus’s first performances, in 1739, were greatly anticipated. The boxes were reserved far in advance, and people had to send their valets by 9 o’clock in the morning to be sure of securing a seat. Dardanus was Rameau’s fifth opera, and by this time a dispute was at its height between the conservative partisans of the operas of Lully, and the supporters of Rameau’s new musical approach. Rameau’s faction were known as the ‘ramoneurs’ (chimney-sweeps), and a thousand of them had pledged to attend every night to ensure that Dardanus lasted from autumn until the following Easter, for 40 performances – they failed, and the opera was taken off after 26 nights. The Lullistes complained about Rameau’s music. They said there was too much of it, echoing the old composer André Campra, who had exclaimed about Rameau’s first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, in 1733, that it contained enough music for ten operas!
Criticism of Le Clerc de la Bruère’s libretto
Dardanus’s detractors complained that it was so stuffed with music that for three hours no one in the theatre had time even to sneeze. This in itself would hardly have sunk Dardanus, if its libretto, to French minds at least as important as the music, had not seemed so inadequate, even laughable. Contemporary criticism of Le Clerc de la Bruère’s libretto has been endorsed by modern critics. As a play, says Girdlestone, Dardanus ‘is without an atom of interest’. For Sadler, the momentum generated by Rameau’s superb music is ‘continually checked by the plot’s ill-motivated twists and turns and by the increasingly puerile supernatural interventions’.
Even La Bruère himself, introducing his work, admitted that he had perhaps been too lavish of supernatural devices. Since, however, these gave Rameau dramatic opportunities he seized eagerly and masterfully, one shouldn’t be too hard on the librettist. Many of the elements of the plot were conventions of Baroque opera: the supernatural, the magician, the monster, the lovers kept apart by reasons of state, the ballet in every act. It was Le Clerc de la Bruère’s handling of these plot devices that caused a certain Dubuisson to comment ‘the libretto is worthless, even though the subject is well-chosen and the poetry felicitous’. One scene aroused particular derision, where Dardanus lies sleeping peacefully alongside the terrible monster, lulled by dancing Dreams. Rameau’s music here reminded some listeners of a lullaby, ‘le dodo des enfants’, and they did not refrain from pointing this out. This long ‘sommeil’ or slumber scene, in Act IV, made people yawn in the theatre, and a caricature appeared in the press of the composer put to sleep by his own music. Yet – such is the paradox of Dardanus – this is one of the most telling, haunting passages in the opera, where Rameau’s music, as Girdlestone points out, is at one and the same time an inducement to sleep, a berceuse, and an impression of a state of sleep.
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764), a portrait attributed to Joseph Aved
The trouble is that while Rameau’s great musical achievements support parts of the drama, he was seemingly unable to induce his librettist to give him a plot convincing as a whole. ‘Don’t you feel sorry for Rameau?… (Dubuisson again) Every time, he gets a dreadful libretto! And he brings it all on himself: … he has declared that he will only set poems whose authors are prepared to renounce all claims to payment, and of course as a result of this miserliness he will always get the most rubbishy of texts’. Whether the reason given was true and fair, it is typical of the comments attracted by Rameau’s prickly personality. And Dardanus’ librettist La Bruère was indeed an amateur, a nobleman with leisure for literary pursuits.
He should have been able to do better. Dardanus is set in ancient Phrygia. According to Greek legend, Dardanus was the son of the God Jupiter, and the founder of the royal house of Troy. He gave his name to the town on the Asiatic shore of Turkey after which the strait is named the Dardanelles (where Gallipoli is also found). When he founded Troy Dardanus had the support of the Phrygian king Teucer, whose daughter he married. La Bruère invented a pre-history for these events, in which Dardanus was at war with Teucer but already in love with his daughter, identified as the princess Iphise. Also in love with Iphise is Teucer’s ally Anténor, which sets up a love triangle. The trouble with Le Clerc de la Bruère’s treatment of what could have been a promising plot is his frequent resort to largely unmotivated magical, supernatural devices. These include the magician Isménor equipping Dardanus with a magic wand, enabling the hero to receive confidences from Iphise while disguised as Isménor, and especially the repeated appearances of the sea monster (a comparison with Rameau’s own Hippolyte et Aricie, based on Racine’s Phèdre, and with Mozart’s French-influenced Idomeneo, shows how such a sea monster can be handled with more dramatic point and credibility).
1744 - a baroque tragedy becomes a Rococo drama
Faced with the criticism of the original plot, Rameau and his librettist revised the opera drastically for its revival in 1744, providing an entirely new plot for the last three acts. Most of the music Rameau composed for these was new, so that, counting the prologue, he had written music for nine acts, and the two versions of Dardanus are almost two different works. The dramatic treatment in the 1744 version is more plausible, and more focussed on the main characters’ conflicting emotions, rather than relying on the supernatural. The monster scenes are gone – and Rameau’s new music, while just as fine and inventive as in the first version, is more careful not to overwhelm the audience with riches. What in 1739 was a baroque tragedy, writes Marc Minkowski, conductor of Dardanus’s most recent and only satisfactory recording, became in 1744 a Rococo drama.
Musically, as opposed to dramatically, the 1739 version is perhaps the richer, though it is going too far to suggest, as Girdlestone does, that the reason Rameau poured into it so much pure fine music was that it was impossible to be dramatic with such a libretto. And there is one scene in the 1744 revision which any performers, like Pinchgut Opera in their Sydney staging, would regret not including. This is the hero’s aria in prison, ‘Lieux funestes’, described by Minkowski as ‘the finest haute-contre aria ever written’. Taking the tenor high in his range (into the extended head voice the French call haute-contre) this aria deepens and extends the portrayal of the title role. In the 1739 version Dardanus (since he is in prison) does not appear at all in the third act, so this aria can be plausibly added. Thus we will actually see what Iphise describes with distress in her marvellous tragic monologue, ‘O dreadful day…’ Dardanus is a captive. His death is certain’, introduced by a dirge-like evocation of a burial march. This will be matched, later, by the intensity of Dardanus’s F minor prison aria, with bassoon obbligato, pungent dissonances and chromatic harmonies, wherein some have found anticipations of Beethoven’s Florestan in the dungeon scene of Fidelio. This is the scene, in the revival of 1760 (when Dardanus at last achieved some success) for which the sets were based on Piranesi’s engravings Carceri (Prisons), linked with Rameau’s opera ever since.
The shortcomings of Rameau’s librettos pose a major problem. Unlike in Italian opera, where the melodies have a free development of their own, for a composer of French tragédies lyriques ‘there is nothing more absolutely vital than faithfully to render and bring out every nuance of text, and to do so in such a way that not a single word is lost’ (Philippe Beaussant, in his Rameau dictionary, Rameau de A à Z). In many places in Dardanus, both in the orchestrally accompanied recitative and in the musically more elaborate airs and choruses, Rameau meets this standard. Inevitably his genius in doing so can only be appreciated in the original French, yet for those fluent in that language the quality of the text weighs against the music. Even so, the failure of Dardanus to establish itself as a successful work for the stage hasn’t prevented it from being one of Rameau’s most admired, for its music.
Dardanus has had few revivals in modern times. In 1907 it was given by the Schola Cantorum in Paris, in concert form, and that was followed the same year by a staged performance in Rameau’s native Dijon. It was staged in Algiers in 1934, and in 1983 the Paris Opéra presented an unsatisfactory conflation of the 1739 and 1744 versions, which issued in a recording conducted by Raymond Leppard. But with the revival of interest in Rameau encouraged by his bicentenary in 1983, music from Dardanus was prominent among the orchestral suites from Rameau stage pieces played by such as Frans Brüggen with the Orchestra of the 18th century, and Richard Tognetti with the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Saved by the Dance
All this music, with the exception of the Overture, is dance music, and ultimately it was his music for this very important danced element of French baroque opera that saved Rameau’s stage works from sinking along with their libretti. In 1912 Debussy could write ‘for many people [Rameau] is still merely the composer of the celebrated Rigaudon from Dardanus’, and Girdlestone compares that piece’s part in Rameau’s reputation to that of the C sharp minor Prelude in Rachmaninov’s! Perhaps some of those musicians who did delve further into Dardanus first discovered it in their childhood through a collection of ‘piano’ pieces.
Rameau’s dance music is not only fascinatingly inventive in its turns of melody and especially of harmony – it also suggests gestural equivalents. These gestures, in French dances of the period, are extremely stylised and would no doubt strike us as almost stilted. Among the dancers at Dardanus’s first performances were the famous Dupré and especially Mlle. Sallé, one of the first to give up wearing a mask, and who ‘dared to appear without a pannier, skirt or bodice, and with her hair down; she did not wear a single ornament on her head’ (in Pigmalion – not Rameau’s – 1734). Sallé was a pioneer of an expressive style of dancing, and Rameau’s music gave opportunities for that.
The dances in Dardanus are mainly in the ceremonies: in the Prologue (where Venus is put to sleep, then reawakened by Jealousy, so that the play can be acted under Cupid’s auspices) and in all the subsequent acts. The summit of all the dance music is the concluding Chaconne in Act V, the grandest in Rameau’s operas thus far, and a supreme example of his orchestral mastery, with its variety of expression, its extraordinary harmonic sequences – an almost symphonic piece which can stand on its own without the dance it originally accompanied. Nor was the unprecedented prominence Rameau gave to the orchestra limited to the dance pieces: among many highlights where the instruments play a major part are the grimly repeated chords to which Teucer and Anténor invoke divine aid in Act I; the reappearance of Rameau’s harpsichord piece Les Niais de Sologne as a duet and chorus in Act III; the monologues for Iphise with their anguished appoggiaturas and dissonances in a rich texture of voice and instruments; and the music associated with the magician Isménor, including the toccata-like symphonie introducing him, and the warning issued by his magicians to Dardanus to ‘Obey the laws of Hell, else thy loss is sure’, described by Girdlestone as one of Rameau’s greatest ‘passion’ choruses.
The same writer poses the rhetorical question, about many things in Dardanus, how any audience could ever have accepted such rubbish. His answer, of course, is the power of Rameau’s music, which blinds us to the nonsense in the words and action. It’s good that we will have the opportunity to test this, as did Rameau’s contemporaries, in the theatre. Will it make us latter-day Ramoneurs? At least let us hope that now, as then, there will be controversy. That, for music and drama, is always preferable to indifference.
First published in Opera~Opera, 2005