Rethinking Rameau: On Bringing Two Rarely Seen Opera-Ballets to the Stage

Photo: Philippe Delval

By Sophie Daneman

Daphnis et Églé and La naissance d’Osiris—two unfamiliar titles, two works that have rarely seen the light of day. Setting them alongside Rameau’s immense tragédies-lyriques one might be tempted to dismiss them as flimsy entertainments, but on closer inspection they reveal a world full of charm, humanity, sensuality, and grace—products of a genius in his 70s with all the wealth of his life and art behind him. These are not pieces written for the opera houses of Paris but for the private, more intimate, court performances at Fontainebleau. Away from the glare of the Paris critics at a time when the musical world was in the throes of the tumultuous Querelle des Bouffons (a battle of musical rivals France and Italy), Rameau was able to experiment with more European styles and, despite the obvious constraints of space (possibilities for “les merveilles” being somewhat limited), there is a great sense of freedom that emanates from these scores—Rameau making his own journey through the culturally diverse world of the Age of Enlightenment.

Campra's Festive Prologues & Entrées

Photo: Vincent Pontet

By Christopher Corwin

Before William Christie and Les Arts Florissants performed the Paris Opera’s production of Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Atys to BAM for the first time in 1989 (it returned with Opéra Comique’s production in 1992 and 2011), those in the US curious about French Baroque opera had to be content with a handful of recordings, as live performances were few. LAF’s visits have since revealed further gems from this late-17th to early-18th century repertoire by Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Jean-Philippe Rameau. In April the group returns to the Howard Gilman Opera House for three performances of a well-known, yet rarely performed work from that era, André Campra’s Les Fêtes Vénitiennes, in a production by Opéra Comique.

Opera as an art form began to first coalesce in Italy in the late 16th century; the French had a later start. Pomone by Robert Cambert, considered the first French opera, appeared only in 1671. But soon Lully established its proscribed form—the tragédie en musique, a complex five-act musical drama proceeded by a mythological prologue. The opera’s serious dramatic action, however, was regularly interrupted by divertissements, extended “entertainments” that were often pastoral in nature.

David et Jonathas Opening Night Party

William Lach and Kivlighan de Montebello who play Young David and Jonathas (don't worry, that's water!) with their parents at the Opening Night Party of David et Jonathas (Photo: Elena Olivo)

Renowned conductor William Christie and early music group Les Arts Florissants returned to BAM with David et Jonathas, a rarely staged opera by composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. BAM was excited to welcome these remarkable artists back to the Opera House following their spectacular production of Atys in 2011.

William Christie (center) with guests (Photo: Elena Olivo)

Following the opening performance, BAM members at the Sustainers level and above joined the company for a French-themed reception in the Lepercq space. Delectable catering by Great Performances charmed guests with pomme frites in individual cones, Brooklyn Gin provided a specialty cocktail "Le Maudit," along with an assortment of Brooklyn Brewery beer. It felt like springtime with Fleurs Bella's magnificent cherry blossom arrangements.

We have many more exciting events coming up this Spring! Be sure to check them out.

Click below for more photos from the event.

In Context: David et Jonathas

Marc-Antoine Charpentier's David et Jonathas—conducted by William Christie and performed by Les Arts Florissants—runs at BAM until Sunday, April 21. Context is everything, so get even closer to the production with this curated selection of articles, videos, and original blog pieces related to the show. For those who've already seen it, help us keep the conversation going by telling us what you thought below.

Gardens Fit for a Sun King: William Christie's Jardins de Thiré

by Jean Frisbie

If William Christie equals the rediscovery of French Baroque opera, then Christie's Jardins de Thiré in Vendée should equal a garden where Louis XIV would feel at home. Although Christie is best known for 17th and 18th century French music, the gardens that have encircled his home since 1986 in western France, Le Bâtiment, are another of his passions. It’s no coincidence that his early music ensemble is called Les Arts Florissants (even though the name derives from a pastoral chamber opera by Charpentier).

Charpentier's David et Jonathas: A Tragedy of Love

by Marina Harss

If you think Salieri had it bad, imagine poor Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643—1704), a composer whose career was thwarted at every turn by his over-ambitious rival, the colorful Jean-Baptiste Lully. By 1674, Lully, music master to Louis XIV, had secured an ironclad monopoly over all operatic spectacles in France. Any performance even vaguely resembling opera—using more than a certain number of performers, for example—other than those staged by his Académie Royale de Musique was banned. This, just as Charpentier had entered into a fertile collaboration with Molière at the Comédie Française.

According to Catherine Cessac, author of a 1988 biography of Charpentier, his music for Molière’s
Le Malade Imaginaire was repeatedly vetoed by the courts and had to be rewritten three times, each version reducing the orchestration and number of voices. Finally, Charpentier gave up and entered the household of Mademoiselle de Lorraine, Duchess of Guise (in the Marais), for whose private company he composed a series of allegorical and pastoral chamber operas. One of these, Les Arts Florissants, would inspire the name of William Christie’s Baroque ensemble three centuries hence.

BAM Atys Opening Gala

The Atys Opening Gala on Sunday, September 18th, followed the matinee performance of Jean Baptiste Lully's French Baroque opera, Atys, and marked the very beginning of BAM's 150th anniversary season!

Please click below for more details and photos of the evening. In addition, be sure to look out for more information on BAM's 2011 Next Wave Gala on December 6th, following a production of Krapp's Last Tape with two-time Oscar nominee John Hurt!

Presented generously by Ronald P. Stanton and The Delancey Foundation, this colorful recreation of the original 1987 Opéra Comique production of Atys returned to BAM's Howard Gilman Opera House for the second time since 1989! Conducted by William Christie and directed by Jean-Marie Villégier, Atys featured the choral and orchestral genius of Les Arts Florissants, as well as several fabulous vocalists, including Ed Lyon, Anna Reinhold, and Emmanuelle de Negri.

Gala attendees on Sunday had the opportunity view the sensationalset and costumes and listen to beautiful music, after which they were also invited to two champagne intermissions in the Dorothy W. Levitt Lobby and a post-performance dinner in the Lepercq Space with excellent hors d'oeuvres and dinner prepared by BAM's caterer Great Performances and with dazzling event decor, provided by Fleurs Bella. In attendance at the gala dinner were the gala chairs, Joe Stern and Nora Ann Wallace and Jack Nussbaum, as well as members of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, representatives from the Comité Régional de Tourisme de Normandie, William Christie and other members of the company! After the delicious French-inspired meal, guests were given a complete wine set to take home with them, courtesy of American Express.

Guests of American Express enjoying the wine and food at the Atys Opening Gala with their table centerpiece by Fleur Bella.

William Christie, musical director of Atys, and Ronald P. Stanton, giving remarks during the gala meal.

Joseph V. Melillo, BAM's executive producer, with Judy and Alan Fishman.

Beth Rudin DeWoody and guests following the performance of Atys.

All photos by Elena Olivo.

Early Music, New Sound (or, Why Atys Will Sound Awesome)

It doesn't take much to be seduced by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. Play this for a five-year old, a Greenwich financier, and a jaded teenager alike and dare them all not to feel at least a little French Baroque wind in their hair.

 William Christie: French Baroque Jedi.  

What's a bit more difficult to appreciate is how different―gloriously different―that sound is relative to what came before it. While Christie's innovations have largely been with specifically French music―unearthing rarely-performed works like Atys, restoring the place of classical French declamation in singing and whatnot―he's also a member of a more general club of early music reformers whose stripped-down approach to the music now largely dominates the scene.

This wasn't always the case. As recently as a few decades ago, it was still somewhat easy to find 100-piece orchestras (that's big) sawing their way through baroque works on decidedly non-baroque instruments, imbuing them with the kind of sweaty-browed romantic pathos fit for razing Valhalla itself. A classic example is Leopold Stokowski's famously elephantine transcription of Bach's D-minor toccata. Suddenly, Bach is Richard Wagner, returning the ring to the Rhine:

Leopold Stokowski, transcription of Bach Toccata & Fugue in D-minor, BWV 565

This example is a little unfair, since it's a transcription and not a faithful attempt at the original. But it still symbolizes the general impulse that early music reformers like Christie helped to displace: a preference for the big and bloated at the expense of the stylistic delicacies of the original scores.

These days, conductors are more likely to save their effusive outpourings of romantic subjectivity for guys with beards rather than powdered wigs. Go into a record store looking for those Bach transcriptions and you'll quickly find yourself in the historical section. So what replaced it? In a nutshell, history. Christie and crew researched, resulting in the use of period instruments (instruments built or emulating those built during the time when the music was written), pared-down ensembles, and an obsessive attention to the nuances of historical performance practices like declamation (the relationship between musical and linguistic accents) and ornamentation.

We could get into the minutiae of all of these things, from the use of gut strings (lamb intestines; think of that while you're soaking up Atys) to the more selective use of vibrato, to the arcane details of how ornamentation is supposed to be married to the consonants of the French language. But I'd rather you not jump off a bridge. It's best to just listen.

Here's a clip from the Shall-Remain-Nameless European Philharmonic:

Jean-Philippe Rameau, Zoroastre, Act 3, Scene 3

Molasses, anyone?

Now Christie and Les Arts Florissants:




The same, performed by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants

That's what rejuvenated French Baroque music sounds like.

Atys Returns

For the record, BAM frowns upon the absolute monarchy as a tenable form of government. But whatever our grievances with autocrats, it doesn’t mean that, on the occasion of our 150th anniversary, we can’t celebrate with an opera fit for a king. A real king. But more on that in a second.

Jean-Baptiste Lully’s stunning French Baroque jewel Atys (1676) comes to the opera house in just a few days. This isn’t its first visit; the 1989 BAM incarnation provoked such a barrage of superlatives from The New York Times that the paper ran out of adjectives for a week. In 1992, there was another ecstatically-received run.

Photo: Atys, by Pierre Grosbois

The reason was largely conductor William Christie and his nimble period band, Les Arts Florissants. Balanced perfectly between scholarly historian and laissez faire musical poet, Christie is a craftsman of  furious elegance. Ask him to muse over Lully's original manuscripts in the Bibliothèque de l'Opéra de Paris and he will, but then cock an eyebrow when he confesses that the notion of authenticity—a buzzword for early-music types—is "really a rather silly idea." In other words, Christie is refreshingly pragmatic, never pedantic. Attending one of his performances is like being at a refined courtly happening at which everyone knows that everyone else is naked under their clothes. Or imagine an elegant Parisian library in which 17th century treatises come to life and get tipsy together behind the librarian's back. That’s Christie’s sound. Sensuality within studied order. Please go see Atys.

I wish I could tell you to see the Atys gala as well, but I can't; regrettably, it's sold out. But consider that a good thing, since there are 16 months of anniversary celebrations left to go, and it would be a shame to get winded after just the first week. That said, the gala—which features a celebratory dinner with Christie and members of the Atys cast following the Sunday performance—does mark the official beginning of our 150th anniversary celebrations, and suffice it to say that it, too, will be fit for a king.

   Henri Gissey, Louis XIV as Apollo, 1653
Courtesy of Biblioteque Nationale, Paris

So about this king: it’s the “Sun King” king—Louis XIV. Known in its day as “the king’s opera” because of its reputation as Louis’ favorite, Atys had the royal seal of approval several times over. And not because Louis XIV was an easy sell, either; both an avid musician and an obsessive dancer—he earned his “Sun King” nickname after dancing the role of Apollo in a 1651 work by Benserade, and later in Lully’s own Ballet de la Nuit—Louis was hands-on in all matter of courtly arts. No plié—to say nothing of Atys’ flying zephyrs, winged furies, and goddess-piloted chariots—went without scrutiny.  He even required his court servants to study ballet as a symbolic expression of national unity.

We promise we won’t make you do any dancing. But be moved to vigorous applause and we'll love you for it.

Performance History: Atys

Atys, William Christie/Les Arts Florissants, 1989. Photo: Michel Szabo

The vocal and instrumental ensemble Les Arts Florissants was founded by William Christie in 1979, nearly three centuries after the creation of the chamber opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier from which it takes its name. Dedicated to the performance of Baroque music on original instruments, Les Arts Florissants has been largely responsible for the resurgence of interest around the world in 17th-century French repertoire as well as in European music of the 17th and 18th centuries more generally. This was repertoire that had, for the most part, been neglected—much of it unearthed from collections in the Bibliothèque nationale de France—but which is now widely performed and admired.

William Christie and Les Arts Florissants made their BAM debut in 1989 with Jean-Baptiste Lully’s enchanting Atys, (click on this link to download the program from the 1989 BAM performance). This 1989 was presented by BAM as part of its premiere season of BAM Opera and the American debut of Atys. Read more about Les Art Florissant and William Christie at BAM here.