Jean-Philippe Rameau, Les Paladins (1760)

Welcome to Rameau Ramblings. We're proud to be ranked among the top-ten English-language Rameau podcasts for the sixth straight year. Today we're look at JP's penultimate opera, Les Paladins. I guess that was fairly obvious from the title.

So Argie's in love with Atis. Unfortunately, Anselme is holding her captive along with her soubrette-y friend (servant?) Nérine; naturally, he wants to marry her. Fortunately, Argie frees them, easily overcoming the cowardly guard, Orcan. They flee, but Anselme is in pursuit. Fortunately, there's a faerie named Manto who's able to distract and seduce him and show that he's not really in love with Argie. Everyone's happy, except presumably Anselme and Orcan. Hooray!

That is all you get. It's definitely a bit scanty for two-hours-something, but who can complain. The music may be even more unbelievably gorgeous than anything I've heard prior from Rameau, and as expected, there's lots and lots of dancing. One thing I will say, though: I have no problem with any of this, but I feel that even taking it for what it is, Nérine and Orcan as characters really just kind of disappear in the mix. I would have liked to see more of them in the latter half of the piece.

One thing I found very interesting is the character of Manto. The role is sang by a tenor, but it's not clear to me whether the character is supposed to be male or female. In this production the character is pretty clearly coded as gay; whatever the case, I find this gender fluidity stuff we're seeing in Rameau interesting and surprising.

So speaking of this production...well, this, like all the Rameau operas I've seen thusfar, is a product of William Christie and his ensemble Les Arts Florissants. But while Les Indes galantes was a pretty straightforward production--heightened but probably more or less the sort of thing you'd expect from a traditional production--this is anything but. It's an unfathomably elaborate thing involving three separate tiers and extensive video footage mixed with live singers and dancers (not in period dress). For not-entirely-clear reasons, there's loads of humans turning into animals and vice versa, and just meeting giant transforming animals. Also, way more full-frontal nudity (male and female) than I would have expected. I mean, not a lotin absolute terms, and not lingering, but still--any was more than I was anticipating. It's all a lot of fun; at a certain point you've just gotta stop trying to think about it rationally and just let it wash over you. The cast of course is fine, with the highlight for me being Sandrine Piau as Nérine (which is part of the reason I wanted more of her).

Anyway, nothing about this production does anything to dissuade me from thinking that Rameau is opera's best-kept secret, at least outside the Francophone world. Expect more soon!