Jean-Philippe Rameau - Les Indes Galantes 1 (Christophe Rousset, 2014)

Prologue The Palace and Garden of Gebe. Tender Gebe, the goddess of youth, calls upon the lovers to come to her. Gebe invites them to revel among games and music, and in response to her call, they dance. This is the youth of four nations: France, Italy, Spain, and Poland*. But the goddess of war, Bellona, Mars’ sister, appears during the festivities, accompanied by trumpets and drums. She calls the young warriors to military feats. Gebe is defeated and asks for the help of Cupid, who descends from the sky with his retinue. Gebe and Cupid realize that they are unable to bring back the young men who have left their peaceful havens, their charms weakening in Europe. And then Cupid decides to send his servants to the “most remote countries“ in India to establish his new possessions.“ The title of the work requires commentary. It is obvious that “The Gallant Indies“ is a response to “The Gallant Europe“ - the most popular ballet of its time. The four-act ballet by Campra takes place in France, Italy, Spain, and Turkey, which was included in the concert of European powers thanks to its extensive territories in the Balkans. In each act, the language of the country where we follow the authors is heard (in Turkey, this is a slightly distorted French pronounced in a “Turkish“ manner). The theme announced in the prologue is the struggle between Love and Strife. In accordance with the custom of the 17th century not to give unequivocal answers and not to put a final point in the struggle of good versus evil, the matter, if looked at impartially, ends in a draw. Rameau and Fuzelier choose exotic countries of the East and West Indies - Turkey, Peru, Persia, and North America - as the setting for the action. The old-fashioned macaronism (a mixture of languages) is decisively expelled. The story is not about the struggle of allegorical figures, but about new, indisputable victories of Cupid. The word “galanterie“ (galantry in English) in the title of the ballet does not mean that its characters behave gallantly in the modern sense, but that the theme of the work is love, and not platonic love, but passionate and enterprising love. In the prologue, not just one Cupid appears on the stage, but a multitude of his brothers - of course, Venus could not have had few children! In any case, in the Baroque era, this was firmly believed. The cupids fly over the entire globe as far as they could imagine in antiquity. Their flight is embodied in the music in light ornamental figures, which first appear in the prologue and permeate the entire score (of course, not repeating literally) They also sound in the love duets, over which Rameau worked carefully. Over time, Lully established the stereotype of the French love duet for soprano and tenor, with a reliance on parallel sixths and thirds. Rameau maintains it in the Turkish and American acts, but adds an unusually large number of ornamental melodic figures. In other acts, he invents something original without breaking with tradition: he turns Fanny and Carlos’s duet into a trio by adding a contrasting part for the offended Juascar, and makes the young Persians sing an unusually tender quartet. In the opening lines of the preface to the libretto, Louis Fuzelier formulated his main task: “to entertain without gods and wizards.“ This means that, without breaking with the baroque aesthetic of the miraculous, he sought new wonders that had not yet been seen in French theater. First of all, the four “Indian“ plots, despite the ancient gods in the prologue, are relevant and mostly contemporary. Everywhere there is an exact indication of the time. The case, somewhat similar to the one described in “The Generous Turk“, occurred shortly before the composition of the ballet and was described in the “French Mercury“ of 1734. Fuzelier refers to this newspaper in the preface. The fact that the cunning Turk by nature turned out to be capable of generosity can be attributed to the miracles of human nature.