Pierre Rameau

Pierre Rameau, Le Maître à danser , Paris, 1725.
Minuet figure.

Pierre Rameau (* 1674 in Cirea ; † January 26, 1748 in Nanterre ) was a French dance master and choreographer.

To date, almost nothing is known about Rameau's private life. Unusual for his time, his writings contain scant biographical information. In the last few years, research has struggled to reconstruct a few key dates of his life from archives.

He was born in Cirea in 1674 . His parents were Georges Rameau, a wine seller, and Jeanne Thiersault. Nothing is known about his education and most of his career. The first trace can be found in the Lyons Opera Archives. Here is his signature in 1703 together with forty other colleagues under the privilege of performing operas in Dijon. In Lyon he married his first wife, Elisabeth La Haye, in 1705, who gave him his son Jean Baptiste Rameau, who would later become dance master in La Rochelle. In 1705 the opera company in Lyon collapsed for financial reasons, with the collapse Rameau also disappears from the files. In 1709 he married his second wife Catherine Muffat.

Around 1710 a dancer 'Rameau' appears in the files of the Académie Royale de musique in Paris for a few years, but it cannot be said whether he is identical with Pierre Rameau. Official documents of the time call him 'dance master in Paris'. Since the foreword to his Maître à Danser contains precise knowledge of the dancers at the Paris Opera, participation in the opera cannot be ruled out, even if, strangely enough, it is not mentioned in his book. In 1716 he took part in the performance of the Jesuit ballet Le Tableau Allégorique des Moers , in which he played the role of Dieu du Temps alongside dancers from the Paris Opera. Contrary to popular belief, he was never 'Dance Master of the Queen of Spain', a post held by Michel Blondy (c. 1675–1739), a famous dancer and choreographer at the Paris Opera, but Maître à danser des Pages de Sa Majesté Catholique de Reine d'Espagne . In his Abrégé (1725) he calls himself maître à Danser Ordinaire de la Maison de Sa Majesté Catholique, la Reine Seconde Douairriere d'Espagne . This designation creates clarity, since it can only be in the Louise Élisabeth de Bourbon-Orléans , called Mademoiselle de Montpensier (1709–1742), to which his Abrégé is also dedicated.

Louise Élisabeth had married Louis I of Spain , Prince of Asturias and thus Spain's heir to the throne, on January 20, 1722 . He took over the throne from his father in 1724, but in August of the same year Louise Élisabeth was widowed and returned to Paris. So Rameau could only have held his position for a short time when he wrote his famous font Le Maître à danser in 1725 . Qui enseigne la maniere de faire tous les differens pas de Danse dans toute la regularité de l'Art, & de conduire les Bras à chaque pas appeared in Paris. This book was extremely successful and appeared in two further editions in 1734 and 1748. It quickly became the standard work in Europe and in 1728 it was translated into English by Essex . Numerous publications after Rameau mention him, lean on him or copy him almost word for word.

In the same year, probably inspired by the great success of his Maître à Danser , his Abrégé de la nouvelle methode dans l'art d'écrire ou de tracer touts sortes de danses de ville , an improvement and adaptation of the choreography by Raoul-Auger Feuillet, appeared (Paris 1700), to which two further editions c. 1728 and c. 1732 followed. In the second edition, the only choreography he received, La Nouvelle Bourée des Princesses , appeared, which was given to the daughters of Louis XV. is dedicated and of below average quality and originality, which probably has something to do with the infancy or toddler age of the dedicatee. This writing was banned by the Académie de Danse in August 1732 , as it threatened to undermine the existing order. Rameau's Abrégé also became the model for other fonts, but it did not receive the same amount of attention. His autre Traité qui enseignera la maniere de faire tous les differens pas de balets, tant serieux que comique , as he announced at the end of the Maître à Danser , seems never to have been published or is to be regarded as lost.

In 1736 he married his third wife, Marie-Anne Courbe. In 1745 he moved from Paris to Nanterre. Two wills have been received from him: one dated May 6, 1745, in which he bequeathed all his goods to his son Jean, and one dated January 20, 1748, in which a daughter is mentioned and in which he gave his son an annual pension of one hundred livres suspended. Six days later, on January 26, 1748, Rameau died in humble circumstances in Nanterre. His Maître à Danser , already a success during his lifetime, became the most important script for understanding and reconstructing the art of French dance around 1700, without which the c. 350 traditional choreographies in Feuillet notation could not be brought back to dance-like life.

The introductory chapters by the Maître à Danser give the rules for standing, walking and sitting in society. This is followed by several chapters on the various révérences for both women and men. One chapter is devoted to the process of a royal ball in the Palace of Versailles . This is followed by explanations of the courante and the minuet . This is followed by explanations of all the necessary steps, as they can be found in La Belle Danse . In a second book the author explains the basics of the port de bras and the arm movements for the steps in the first book.

In his Maître à Danser , Rameau precisely describes the various basic building blocks of the dance of that time (the five positions , the mouvement, the step elements such as sauté and pointé ) in order to combine them into step units. This system of combining basic elements with one another and laying down the rules for their combination also makes it possible to reconstruct step material that is not explicitly recorded in Le Maître à Danser . This applies above all to the extremely complex stage choreographies.

Since the 1950s, the Maître à Danser has again experienced an intense reception, as it is the basis for any reconstruction of the so-called baroque dance . Especially in France, professional groups such as Ris et Danseries or L'Eventail have been founded since the 1970s , which deal specifically with the dance art of the 18th century. The Maître à Danser forms the technical basis for this. In Germany v. a. L'Espace intensively with the source to reconstruct original choreographies.

Web links

The Library of Congress contains reproductions of Rameau's two works:

• Le Maître à Danser (edition from 1748)
• Abbregé de la Nouvelle method