Lully built up the orchestra, and used the different groups of instruments in entirely new ways.

Lully died in 1687 as the result of having dropped the stick with which he directed his orchestra on his foot. This does not sound possible, but the baton used in his time was very large and heavy, and the accident caused blood poisoning. He was very much missed, for there was no one with his talent for conducting and disciplining the singers and dancers to replace him.

Rameau

In 1683, was born another French composer who carried on the work that Lully had begun, a work so much loved by the French public, that Jean Philippe Rameau found as strong a rival in the dead Lully as his contemporaries had in the living. Rameau’s father was organist of a church at Dijon, and although the family was very poor, the father was determined to give his three children a musical education, and began to teach them before they could read. As a result of this early training little Jean Philippe, when he was only seven years old, could play at sight on the harpsichord any music put before him, and when he was sent to school, he was very unruly and sang out loud in class or scribbled music all over his papers instead of doing his lessons.

When he was eighteen, he went to Italy, but as he did not like the music, he left. He was always headstrong and self-willed, and this was one of the hasty decisions for which he was afterwards sorry. He traveled from place to place on this journey, playing his way as he went, on the organ in churches and the violin in a band of traveling musicians. In the south of France, old Provence, the home of the troubadours, he became organist at Clermont, and lived quietly for six years. Here he wrote his first pieces for clavecin (spinet) and three cantatas. (The cantata was a new form which came from Italy, and was a small opera to be sung in a drawing-room.) When Rameau grew tired of his work as organist at Clermont, he showed his discontent by playing as badly as he possibly could, by using untuneful organ-stops and by playing fearful discords. An attempt was made to shut him off but he paid no attention until a choir boy was sent to him with a message, whereupon he left the organ and walked out of the church. He finally succeeded in making the directors give him his release, but before many years he returned to his old post, and was taken back in spite of his disagreeable temper, and so proud was Clermont of its organist, that his chair is still kept and exhibited.

From Clermont he went to Paris where he studied with the organist Marchand, and read the old books of musical theory such as Zarlino’s, for Rameau during his career wrote five important books on musical theory and harmony. He was the first to establish definitely the classic principles of harmony, and to put them into a form that for many years was used by all students. You must remember that up to the 17th century, counterpoint was the chief study, but when Italian opera succeeded in breaking down the polyphonic habit, a new science had to be made to explain the new system of chords that had been gradually built up by the Italians and also by Luther and his chorals. This was the science of harmony, and Rameau’s Treatise of Music, containing the Principles of Composition (1722), was one of the first books of its kind.

Until Rameau was fifty, he was known as an organist, a teacher of composition and a writer of many charming works for harpsichord and clavecin. He married a young singer when he was 43, and the year after, he made the acquaintance of a wealthy patron of the arts, at whose house he met artists, literary men, princes and embassadors. Rameau taught his patron’s wife, and had the use of his organ and private orchestra. Here he first found himself among friends who understood and appreciated his talents; here he met the great French writer, Voltaire, and the Abbé Pellegrin, both of whom wrote librettos for his operas. There is a tale that the Abbé made the composer sign an agreement about payment for the use of his book but after hearing the first rehearsal he tore it up—so pleased was he with Rameau’s first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733). Now Rameau met the jealousy of Lully’s followers, who tried to prevent the success of the work. They hissed it and wrote slighting verse about it:

If difficulties beauty show,

Then what a great man is Rameau.

If beauty, though, by chance should be