After a silence of 270 years, Achante and Cephise, a mature opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, is revealed to us by conductor Alexis Kossenko in an Erato recording. At the same time, Unitel on video and Harmonia Mundi on audio publish the phenomenal Platée, directed by William Christie, and Naxos announces a DVD ofHippolyte and Aricie by Raphaël Pichon. Opportunity to recall the lyrical daring of a visionary composer.
To paraphrase the dialogue writer Michel Audiard: “If genius were measured, Rameau would be a yardstick. He would be in Sèvres. »Unlike Platée (1745), Achante and Cephise, a heroic pastoral of 1751 that had not been heard for 270 years, is not one of the greatest works in the history of lyrical art. But its rediscovery is no less fascinating.
Clarinets and horns
“From the opening, it is difficult to believe that it is a work of the XVIIIe century ”, Alexis Kossenko tells us. The successor of Jean-Claude Malgoire at the head of the Grande Écurie and the Chambre du Roy fought to resuscitate this score. “When 2014, the Rameau year, approached, a lot of performers wanted to engrave a large part of the works that remained to be recorded, but Achante and Cephise went through the cracks. However, it is one of the first scores of the complete short story Rameau that I had bought, and this opera immediately intrigued me, because it has a rather crazy ornamentation, the richest and the most particular of Rameau , due to the presence of clarinets and daring use of horns. “
Yes, clarinets in 1751, while Mozart, born in 1756, only used this instrument late in his work! As for the horns, Alexis Kossenko specifies that Rameau had discovered “the horn played in a very different way from what was done in France, because four horn players had just arrived from Bohemia and were playing unknown sounds”.
Kossenko found in the manuscript “repentances”, a few places where Rameau had reconsidered his first decisions. “Back then, the horn parts were performed by orchestral instrumentalists, often two violinists who knew how to ‘sound the horn’, but they were rather hunting calls with relatively rudimentary technique. When he saw the horn players from Bohemia disembark, Rameau got a little carried away, composing things which in difficulty exceeded what his instrumentalists could do. »Before changing his mind …
In his recording, Kossenko returned to the original intentions. The young chef, who was only able to give extracts during the Rameau year, has since made a name for himself. He was able to forge links with the Center de musique baroque de Versailles and succeed in convincing him that the project deserved to be set up.
Platée at Karl Lagerfeld
It is quite different for Platée, which has become an emblematic work of the genius of Rameau. Platée is the story of a frog, more precisely of a swamp nymph, ugly and gullible, the gods laugh at by making him believe that Jupiter is in love with her. This stratagem is intended to appease, through ridicule, the jealousy of Jupiter’s wife, Juno. History buffs will decode a satire on Louis XV (Jupiter) jumping on everything that moves. It is, even more, a vitriolic allegory on the bourgeois of the provinces (Platée who does not know “where is his place”), who, in this middle of XVIIIe century, pride themselves on coming to Paris to rub shoulders with the powerful.
More broadly, it is therefore a timeless opera on hubris, transposable to infinity, which the Canadian director Robert Carsen has not failed to do with his Platée, captured in December 2020 at the Theater an der Wien. Platée is no longer a frog here, but a rich and clumsy fifty-something (the Dutch tenor Marcel Beekman) who wants to break into the world of fashion. The elected members of this circle reject her with disdain, and Jupiter takes the features of Karl Lagerfeld. Everyone pushes each other off the collar, moves between mirrors and watches each other on TV, which itself is reflected in a mirror.
We commented when it premiered in 2014 at the Opéra comique de Paris this show, a different look from the reference version created by Laurent Pelly and Marc Minkowski. The Viennese cover brings back William Christie, whose orchestral reading (Minuets in fiddle taste, beach 32) alone is worth a visit. For those who reject Carsen’s scenography, Harmonia Mundi publishes this Platée on CD.
Prima the musica
Before the Rameau rebirth of the last quarter of a century, there was an eclipse. For Alexis Kossenko, “Rameau has suffered for two centuries from the idea that his librarians are bad. And this because after Quinault and Lully, practically no librettist found favor in the eyes of the critics in France ”.
Rameau in the circumstances did not help his cause, he continues. “He wanted so much to defend the preeminence of music over the text that he went to boast by declaring: ‘I could set the Dutch Gazette to music.’ The implication: “We don’t care about the text, the music can do anything.” He paid for it for two centuries. “
It’s in Platée that, for Alexis Kosseko, Rameau made the most flamboyant demonstration of his theory. “Rameau had fun proving this supremacy of music over text. In Platée, there are two arias de la Folie in which Rameau manages to infuse the exact opposite of the lyrics. The famous aria “Aux langueurs d’Apollon” is a sad and even funeral text set to music in a delirious, joyful, spicy way. There is another lesser known tune, a little further on, in which he puts tearful and sad music on a happy text. Madness allows itself to reverse the meaning of words thanks to the powers of harmony. Through Madness, it is Rameau himself who stages himself and proves what he is putting forward! “
Alexis Kossenko acknowledges that the argument ofAchante and Cephise “Is not the most interesting there is”. He also understands that directors and companies turn primarily to lyrical tragedies. ” With Achante and Cephise, work of circumstance, we are between the two. We have a dramatic pretext to celebrate a royal birth. “
As for the strength of the singularity of Rameau’s lyrical production, Alexis Kossenko sums it up by its “incredible modernity”. “We can listen to the“ Trio des Fates ”ofHippolyte and Aricie, so improbable by the modulation by enharmony that his contemporaries did not want to play it and which still today wins your heart. We can also talk about the beginning of the 5e act of Boreades, devoid of melody, like a snub to Rousseau, who advocated the supremacy of melody over harmony and rhythm. “
The conductor sees Rameau’s lyrical work as a “laboratory” where the composer pushes his research further forward each time. “I am in the habit of saying that Rameau is the first realist, the first impressionist and the first expressionist. It is enough to fly over the infernal scenes to see how he can force the line and therefore behave like an expressionist. The first impressionist, because no one in his time and for a long time will be able to move away from simple concepts (joy, sadness, levity) to manage to portray things of the order of the fugitive, of impression, of the ‘impalpable (moreover, with the musettes ofAchante and Cephise, we are spoiled). “
Alexis Kossenko, as part of a working residency at the Center de musique baroque de Versailles, is already planning to record the first, yet unpublished version of Zoroaster, then burn The Paladins. The only thing that will absolutely have to be changed will be to put the sound recording (here muddled, reverberated and too high a level) in tune with artistic quality.