Rameau: A Life

New paperback edition, revised, corrected and updated, with illustrations. The previous edition was consulted by Donald Macleod and referenced during his episodes on Rameau for BBC Radio 3’s Composer of the Week in 2022. Graham Sadler, Shirley Thompson and Jonathan Williams, editors of The Operas of Rameau, published by Routledge in 2022, cited it as a ’substantial biography’.

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764) was both the greatest French composer and the most influential scientist of music of the 18th century. His personality was as complex and as singular as his music and his ideas. When he finally achieved fame as an opera composer he polarised Parisian society like no other artistic figure of his time.

Simon Trowbridge’s book is the first general study of Rameau’s life and work to be published in English in over half a century. It is both an elegant introduction to Rameau and an exploration of his significance as a major figure in the cultural and intellectual life of Paris during the middle decades of the 18th century.

Rameau emerges as a musician who was politically as well as artistically radical, an often paradoxical figure who worked within the official realms of the Opéra and the court but who remained his own man.