The Operas of Rameau ― Genesis, Staging, Reception

In recent years, interest in Rameau’s operas has grown enormously. These works are no longer regarded as peripheral by performers and audiences but are increasingly staged in the world’s major opera houses and festivals, while the production of first-rate recordings on CD and DVD continues to flourish. Such welcome developments have gone hand in hand with an upsurge in research on Rameau and his period. The present volume, devoted solely to the composer’s operas, reflects this scholarly activity. It brings together a substantial group of essays by an international team of scholars on all aspects of Rameau’s operas. The individual essays are informed by a variety of disciplines or sub-disciplines - literature, economics, archival studies, musical analysis, gender studies, ballet and choreography, dramaturgy and staging. The contents are addressed to a wide readership, including not only scholars but also practical musicians, stage directors, dancers and choreographers.

Graham Sadler is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Hull, Professor in Music at Birmingham Conservatoire and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His many publications on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music include critical editions of two Rameau operas, Zoroastre and ZaA¯s, published as part of the Opera Omnia Rameau, of which he is a member of the editorial committee. He is co-author, with Caroline Wood, of French Baroque Opera: A Reader (Ashgate, 2000). His most recent book, The Rameau Compendium, was published by The Boydell Press in 2014. Shirley Thompson is Director of Postgraduate Studies at Birmingham Conservatoire. Her doctoral thesis on performance practice in Charpentier (1997) has been followed by numerous articles on this composer (in Early Music, Basler Jahrbuch fA?r Historische Musikpraxis, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music and other publications) and her edited book, New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, was published by Ashgate in 2010. Her current projects include the editing of Rameau’s opera La Naissance d’Osiris for the Opera Omnia Rameau, and a volume of Charpentier’s petits motets for the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. Jonathan Williams, Director of College Music at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and a research fellow at Oxford’s Music Faculty, enjoys a wide-ranging freelance career. His doctoral work on Rameau’s Anacreon (1754) was published in Opera Omnia Rameau (2004) and came to fruition with the modern premiere by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in 2012. The success of this performance has led to the Rameau Project, a collaboration between Oxford University, the OAE and scholars, musicians and dancers. He has recorded Anacreon for Signum Records and, with Edith Lalonger’s dance troupe Les Plaisirs des Nations, given the British premiere of Rameau’s ZaA¯s at London’s Southbank Centre.