(Hippolytus and Aricia) was the first opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It was premiered to great controversy by the Académie Royale de Musique at its theatre in the Palais-Royal in Paris on October 1, 1733. The French libretto, by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, is based on Racine's tragedy Phèdre. The opera takes the traditional form of a with an allegorical prologue followed by five acts. Early audiences found little else conventional about the work.
Background
Rameau was almost 50 when he wrote Hippolyte et Aricie and there was little in his life to suggest he was about to embark on a major new career as an opera composer. He was famous for his works on music theory as well as books of harpsichord pieces. The closest he had come to writing dramatic music was composing a few secular cantatas and some popular pieces for the Paris fairs for his friend Alexis Piron. Yet Rameau's eagerness to write an opera is shown by a letter he wrote in October 1727 to Antoine Houdar de La Motte asking for a libretto. It was a strange choice; once famous for providing the texts to such works as André Campra's L'Europe galante (1697) and Marin Marais's Alcyone (1706), Houdar de La Motte had written nothing for the musical stage for almost 20 years. Nothing came of the request and there is no record of any reply, but the fact that Rameau carefully preserved his own letter among his personal papers proves how much the project must have meant to him.
The turning point finally came in 1732. In February that year, Michel Montéclair's Jephté premiered at the Paris Opéra. Rameau was said to be so impressed by the opera that he approached its librettist, Pellegrin, for a of his own. The result was Hippolyte et Aricie. In spring 1733, the new opera was given a run-through either at the house of Rameau's patron, La Pouplinière, or at that of the Prince de Carignan. It went into rehearsal at the Opéra in July. Even at this stage, there were problems; Rameau had to cut the second Trio des Parques ("Trio of the Fates") in the second act, because the performers found it too hard to play. This was just a foretaste of the difficulties to come when Hippolyte et Aricie received its premiere on 1 October, shortly after Rameau's 50th birthday.
In 1744, Rameau recollected:
Performance history
Reception: versus
Tragédie en musique had been invented as a genre by Lully and his librettist Quinault in the 1670s and 1680s. Their works had held the stage ever since and come to be regarded as a French national institution. When Hippolyte et Aricie made its debut, many in the audience were delighted, praising Rameau as "the Orpheus of our century". André Campra was struck by the richness of invention: "There is enough music in this opera to make ten of them; this man will eclipse us all".
Others, however, felt the music was bizarre and dissonant; Hippolyte was the first opera to be described as baroque, then a term of abuse. They saw Rameau's work as an assault on Lullian opera and French musical tradition. As Sylvie Bouissou puts it:
Structurally, Hippolyte followed the model established by Lully: a French overture followed by a prologue and five acts, each with its own containing dances, solos and choruses. Musically, however, it was totally different, especially the orchestration. Rameau had rethought everything apart from the recitative and (short arias inserted into the recitative), from the (dances and descriptive music) to the accompaniments to the vocal music (arias, ensembles, choruses). The dominant feeling among those hostile to the opera was that there was an excess of music: too much accompaniment, too many and too many notes. The music was too difficult to perform, it was too "learned", it lacked true feeling and contained an abundance of dissonances and exaggerated virtuosity.
Audiences and music critics soon split into two factions: the traditionalist and Rameau's supporters, the or (a play on the French word for 'chimney-sweeps'). Cuthbert Girdlestone described the quarrel thus:
There continued to be heated controversy with each new Rameau opera in the 1730s, reaching a peak with the premiere of Dardanus in 1739. Thereafter, it died down as Rameau's reputation became more established, but there were still hints of the dispute as late as the 1750s.