RAMEAU : PYGMALION

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 14th of August 2011 at 3.03 - 4.55 pm

RAMEAU: Anacréon; Pygmalion, two one act operas
Anacréon
La Prêtresse de Bacchus …Emmanuelle de Negri
L’Amour………………… Hanna Bayodi-Hirt
Agathocle………………... Ed Lyon
Anacreón………………... Alan Buet
Euricles………………….. Jean-Yves Ravoux
Pygmalion
L’Amour………………… Emmanuelle de Negri
La Statue…………………Hanna Bayodi-Hirt
Pygmalion……………….. Ed Lyon
Céphise…………………...Virginie Thomas
Les Arts Florissants/William Christie  
(recorded in Salle Pleyel, Paris by Radio France)

Anacréon
INTRODUCTION 
RECORDING (Christie)
LIBRETTO (French)

Pygmalion
INTRODUCTION 
BACKGROUND
RECORDING (Christie)
LIBRETTO (French)

These two brief pieces are both operas, from our point of view (listening without seeing), but the French term is "acte de ballet". As we know, and as Wagner learned with his French version of Tannhäuser, French operas must include ballet, at least in the second act. These two music-drama ballets have only one act each, and the dancing is interspersed throughout (we will know from the music and the silence of the singers that there is pantomime and movement taking place). 

Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683-1764)  a contemporary of Bach and Handel, was an important figure in music history, being not only a composer but also a theorist of music (a veritable Newton of music). Beginning as violinist, organist, and harpsichordist, he did not have an opera performed till 1733 (1733 minus 1683 = 50 years!).

Pygmalion dates from 1748. It is based on a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses (10.234ff), and is also the basis for Shaw's Pygmalion (alias My Fair Lady when set to music). The original Pygmalion sculpted a woman out of ivory (it must have been a mammoth's tusk he worked on?!), fell in love with her, and by the will of the goddess of love she came alive (and became pregnant, and in due course gave birth to a child, but Rameau omits these details, since it is hard enough fitting 24 hours into 45 minutes, so 9 months does not fit in the frame of the picture).

Anacréon (the 1757 version) is devoted to the subject of love and wine (a dangerous concoction, an inflammable mixture, I would say) and the deity involved is Bacchus (Dionysios). I have recently seen a thesis (devilishly and diabolically plausible) arguing that Dionysios was a Greek version of Hebrew Yahweh, both being basically associated with metallurgy.