Posted by alastair on June 11, 19102 at 11:25:51:

In Reply to: Greater than Bach. posted by y on November 06, 19100 at 08:40:55:

I think Rameau has been relatively neglected as compared to Bach. Among the possible reasons for this I would guess at the following:

1. Much more of Bach's work was published and survived than Rameau's
2. Bach got revived much earlier than Rameau (I think it was Mendelsohn who revived Bach and Saint Seans who revived Rameau) so possibly more stuff got recovered and catalogued, plus the scholarship has been that much longer
3. As Murray Perahia and many others have demonstrated, Bach's keyboard music transfers pretty respectably onto the piano, whereas I feel this is less the case with Rameau
4. The French themselves have always overrated Lully at the expense of Rameau. Since practically nobody has eveer sen a Lully opera I suspect this ismore to do with national pride ('our' Lully inveted the opera' etc. than with real musical appreciation)
5. So much of Rameau's work is operatic and his operas have only very recently attracted interest, so there has been little awareness of his enormously rich musical palette. Bach did not write opera and his pions etc. have been unsurped in their genre and have thus survived better. Rameau's opera has been a victim of changes in taste.
6. Rameau lived too long. Byt the time he died he was known mostly as a cantankerous old crank who had fallen out with just about everybody and his music, though much loved in its time, had had it's day. There was no rush to gather his work and publish posthumous editions - he was a sort of musical Andrei Gromyko - from the 1940s through to the 1980 one kept being surprised to find he was still alive.
7. Rameau's operas were designed to be dramatic (his overtures are marvellous works in themselves whereas Handels', for example, are not). Musicology favours structural and formal perfection which is more susceptible to scholarship; Rameau's composition is more susceptible to changes in taste. Likewise his keyboard works are more often genre pieces which can be erroneously charactersied as rococco trivia than Bach's which are earnest, worthy and structurally dense in a way which Rameau's are not.

Well 30 years ago Handel's operas were all but unknown - now that the great revival in Handelian opera has paved the way perhaps Rameau's operas will become better known and his status as a composer will rise correspondingly.

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• Re: Greater than Bach. GregWoll 21:42:58 10/27/102 (0)

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