Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: The Early Music Show
Episode: Rameau - Platee
Description: Lucie Skeaping looks at Jean Philippe Rameau's comic masterpiece, the baroque opera Platée.Rameau wrote the opera when he was in his sixties, for an entertainment at a court wedding at Versailles. The story tells of a foolish and ugly nymph who believes she is loved by Jupiter. The sense of the absurd permeates Rameau's score, with the composer and his librettist managing to create a wonderfully imaginative and colourful piece which turn many of the operatic conventions of the time on their head.Rameau's contemporary, Melchior Grimm, considered the piece "sublime" while for J...