Baroque star: how French composer Rameau went from ridicule to canonical

The music of Jean Philippe Rameau has come a long way in the 250 years since he died – operas that once made Louis XV yawn are now beloved parts of the canon.

A scene from the Berlin production of Castor et Pollux, directed by Barrie Kosky. Courtesy Iko Freese / drama-berlin.de

The life of the 18th-century French composer Jean Philippe Rameau shows just how tough a musical career can be. An obscure no-mark until he neared 40, Rameau saw his first opera Hippolyte et Aricie damned by critics as bizarre and over the top – in the first use of the word for music, it was called "baroque", which wasn't meant as a compliment.

To make things worse, Rameau soon became the sworn enemy of France's greatest philosopher, the brilliant but spiky Jean Jacques Rousseau, who attacked him throughout his career. A probable quarrel with France's music academy struck him silent for six years, while in later life Rameau's once avant-garde style was damned (by Rousseau) as stuffy and unnatural, the composer nothing but an establishment bore. To cap it all, the Versailles premiere of his opera-ballet Les Surprises de l'Amour received the ultimate insult from King Louis XV: he yawned.

What a difference two and a half centuries can make. The 250th anniversary of Rameau's death falls this year, and the composer's sun could hardly be higher. His operas are performed across the world – once-obscure tragedy Castor et Pollux continues to play in Berlin this month, while his comedy Platée has just proved a hit in Vienna, Paris and New York. The composer has even returned this year to the Palace of Versailles for a series of splendid spring concerts and it was his work that was chosen to open the Sheikh Khalifa Theatre at the Palace of Fontainebleau in May.

His posthumous success is well deserved – standing at a distance, we can see that not only is Rameau’s music some of the baroque’s most poignant, but that he was a linchpin in the history of opera. And Louis Bourbon, Rameau’s yawning critic? He’s chiefly remembered now either for his brilliant mistress Madame de Pompadour or because his family gave its name to a British biscuit. It just proves how fickle posterity can be.

It’s easy to see why Rameau is now so loved. While he first gained fame as a musical theorist, his work is anything but dry or academic. Certainly, it has a masterful grace and sophistication to it – it always amazes me that music of such exquisite, courtly elegance could come from a time when life remained nasty, brutish and short. But it’s also gutsy and fun, often possessing a powerful drive, a certain pastoral folksiness that comes from its regular use of popular dance rhythms. It’s this tension between the music’s elegant architecture and its dynamic jauntiness that gives Rameau’s instrumental music much of its interest. At times it sounds like a grand procession of bewigged courtiers at Versailles, at others like a peasant hoedown on the village green – and sometimes both.

That 250th anniversary has brought an interesting crop of new Rameau albums. As he's been back in vogue for some time, these are arguably more about exploring Rameau's byways than tackling the core of his work. The biggest name to bring something out is Normandy's Les Arts Florissants, who with their Franco-American conductor William Christie have probably done more to popularise the French baroque than anyone else. Their new collection of 18th-century songs, Le Jardin de Monsieur Rameau [Amazon.com], is a niche delight. Take the album's closing piece, for example, the quartet Tendre Amour from the opera Les Indes Galantes. It shows Rameau at his best, creating a sophisticated, resonant mesh of sound with the four voices. The sweet-sad, sunlit atmosphere these voices evoke isn't unlike that of a painting by Rameau's contemporary Watteau – decorative, courtly but also full of wistful feeling. Elsewhere, Rameau's brilliance with orchestral arrangement is on view, such as the dark sea of strings accompanying the tenor Victor Sicard when he sings of the terrible monster from the opera Dardanus.

That said, Rameau’s music only takes up a third of the album, the rest filled by now little-known contemporaries such as Montéclair and Campra – attractive, but not quite on the same level. The approach makes sense – good ensembles are always trying to broaden the repertoire – but it makes the album more for the baroque obsessive than the casual listener.

Next up is a new recording by the ensemble Les Nouveaux Caractères of Rameau's Les Surprises de l'Amour [Amazon.com] – the very opera that made Louis XV yawn. At two-and-a-half stately hours, it's possible to have some sympathy with him, despite the many moments of loveliness. Thematically, the opera-ballet is actually quite racy stuff, charting three erotic stories cribbed from classical literature. Its opening lines – the goddess Venus singing "for the love of Adonis, I abandon heaven" – announce a commitment of earthly pleasure that fits with the piece's origin as a commission from Louis's mistress Madame de Pompadour. The singing here is fresh and charming enough, but it's really Rameau's writing for orchestra that sparkles. In the final act, for example, when the whole cast falls under a sleeping spell (don't ask why – we haven't got all day), the orchestra drops to a hush for a whispered serenade of flutes and pizzicato strings, atmospheric and agreeably creepy.

Far better known than Les Surprises de l'Amour is Rameau's blockbuster opera Castor et Pollux, which opened last month at Berlin's Komische Oper in a production already staged in London. The story of ancient Greek twins divided when one is murdered by a jealous love rival, it has some stunning music in it – the post-murder lament Tristes Apprets, Pales Flambeaux is for me one of the greatest baroque arias, for all its sobriety. Would-be producers are still met with a serious problem if they want to stage it – the plot.

Their music may often be exciting and easy to love, but many baroque operas have plots that come across as stiff and cobwebbed nowadays. There's something about their declamatory treatment of love and devotion, and their stop-start-stop dramatic rhythms, that makes them feel jerky and long-winded. There are some exceptions to the rule, of course – Handel's witty Agrippina feels like an 18th-century Noël Coward play – but breathing life into the storylines can be tricky.

Castor et Pollux is by no means the worst in this regard. Its story of heroic twins and the woman they love roaming the underworld actually has some dramatic meat on it. But its central theme of filial love remains a hard sell to a modern audience. In the London-Berlin production, the director Barrie Kosky tries to get round this by unofficially drafting in Sigmund Freud as co-director. The underworld to which one twin descends to look for his murdered brother is not real, but a psychosexual one. It's a bare wooden dreamscape where operatic extras walk around unclothed and hands thrust out from mounds of earth to grab at the singers. I see why Kosky does this: he wants to shake the dust off the story. Still, the overall effect is rather like putting huge bunny ears on Michelangelo's David – it's striking at first, but once you get used to them, the idea seems a bit thin.

Lucky then, that the music here is so wonderful, demonstrating why Rameau was such a breath of fresh air. As the composer's work shows, French opera worked on a very different model from that of Italy. While Italians were happy to let words be masked by endless dramatic trills and ornaments, French audiences expected to understand every word of an aria, creating a style that was more minimal and less showy. Perhaps to compensate, Rameau and his contemporaries injected more fantasy into the forms they used – Castor et Pollux is packed with duets, trios, quartets and choruses, pushing the focus away from exciting vocal acrobatics towards exciting, complex harmonies. French audiences also loved a bit of dancing and Rameau's operas always have ballet interludes, which slow the action but let the composer show his deft hand with instrumental music.

This inventive, shape-shifting brilliance creates enough variety to sweeten any number of courtly love triangles explored at backside-numbing length. Talking to fellow opera-goers after watching the London production of Castor et Pollux, the overall impression seemed to be "that was a bit silly, but wasn't the music wonderful?" Rameau's voice may show every one of its 250 years at times, but it still somehow rings out fresh, tender and alive.

Feargus O’Sullivan is a regular contributor to The National.