Jean-Philippe Rameau, Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, ou Les dieux d'Egypte (1747)

This was written to celebrate the Dauphin's marriage--imagine being a big enough deal that a major baroque composer was writing an opera in your honor. It was popular in its time, apparently; according to wikipedia, "by the [sic] March 1776 it had been performed exactly 106 times," a weirdly specific statistic. Do you think they did things like those NFL promos they ran with the guys who had been to every super bowl? Difficult to say, for sure. In any case, thisis apparently the first modern-day production, which is pretty cool.

We can safely say that this has the least plot of any Rameau opera I've seen thusfar. It's structured similarly to Les Indes galantes--a prologue and then a series (there four, here three) of thematically-connected acts--but that one seemed intricately-plotted compared to this. The idea is that the gods of love and marriage have had a falling-out, but then they reconcile and--I guess--decide to watch some Egyptian-themed operatic vignettes to celebrate. The first concerns Osiris; there's an Amazon queen who thinks he's there to start a war, but then it turns out he comes in peace and they're going to marry and everyone's happy. The second is about Canopus, god of the Nile; he's courting a human woman, Memphis, in the guise of a mortal, but when his priests are going to sacrifice her, he reveals himself to save her. So that's good. Finally, we have Aruéris (Horus), who decides to have an arts festival and encourages his amour Orie to enter. She does and she wins. Huzzah!

So there you have it. Of course, in the eighteenth century people were interested in ancient Egyptian cosmology, but Egyptian hieroglyphs hadn't yet been translated, so they didn't know that much about it--just what they could get from comtempraneous accounts in Greek and Latin and whatnot (this is largely what John Crowley's Ægypt Cycle is about). So there's going to be some exoticism here, but don't expect much in the way of authentic atmosphere, if that means anything. This is fun, though, as long as you don't need too much plot. There's probably also more dancing here than in any other Rameau I've seen, which is good, especially because the music itself didn't quite engage me the way it does in his best (and honestly, the singers, while fine, didn't really have the opportunity to make that much individual impact). This production is actually from a DC-based company, Opera Lafayette, which specializes in the French baroque, and I'm certainly glad there's enough interest to support such an endeavor. The one thing I found a little bit odd--not good or bad, just...odd--is that in this production, there's no orchestra pit; the musicians are all at the back of the stage behind the other performers. I wonder how that affects the acoustics, but regardless, it sounded fine. Definitely worth seeing.