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PPNo 350 | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Les Paladins by Jean-Philippe Rameau |
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Rameau has long been recognized as one of the greatest figures in French musical history. A music theorist of truly European stature, he was also France's leading eighteenth-century composer. Although he made important contributions to the development of keyboard music and other genres, his finest and most ambitious compositions are in the field of dramatic music, where they stand alongside those of Lully and Gluck as the pinnacles of pre-Revolutionary French opera. To his contemporaries, Rameau's operas at first seemed revolutionary. With hindsight, they now appear firmly rooted in French operatic tradition, not only in their choice of subject matter and overall dramatic structure but in many musical details as well. Rameau's achievement was to invigorate the native tradition by bringing to it a musical imagination of unrivaled fertility, a harmonic idiom of greater richness and variety than that of any French predecessor, and a forcefulness of expression that can still seem astonishing or even overpowering. Les Paladins had its premiere at the Academie Royale in February of 1760 and was revived in Lyons in 1967. This facsimile edition includes an introduction by R. Peter Wolf and a biography of the composer by Graham Sadler. |
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| Subjects | MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Opera |
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