1739 premiere Dardanus appeared at a time when the quarrel between Rameau's supporters and those of the operas of
Jean-Baptiste Lully had become ever more embittered. Rameau's stage music had been controversial since his debut in 1733 with
Hippolyte et Aricie. His opponents - the so-called
lullistes - were conservatives who accused him of destroying the French operatic tradition established by Lully under King
Louis XIV in the late 17th century. Yet they could not dissuade the Paris Opéra from offering Rameau commissions for new works.
Hippolyte had been followed by
Les Indes galantes in 1735 and
Castor et Pollux in 1737. In 1739 the Opéra commissioned Rameau to write not one but two new scores, the
opéra-ballet ''
Les fêtes d'Hébé, which premiered on 21 May, and Dardanus
. This could only inflame the controversy and there were many lullistes'' eager to see Rameau fail. It is likely that Rameau did not start work on the music of
Dardanus until after the premiere of ''Les fêtes d'Hébé
, so that he must have completed it in five months or less. There is some evidence that initially Voltaire had been considered as the librettist for the new opera but he did not have a finished text to hand and so he may have suggested using Dardanus
by Leclerc de La Bruère instead. La Bruère was only 23 but he had already written four opera libretti, although none were as lengthy or weighty as Dardanus
. From the start critics attacked Dardanus
, not for the quality of its verse, but for its dramatic incoherence. They accused La Bruère of stringing together a series of spectacular scenes - magical incantations, a dream sequence, the appearance of a monster - without any regard for dramatic logic and thus creating a hybrid between tragédie en musique
and opéra-ballet, a lighter genre in which connection between the acts was of little importance. The drama of two lovers divided because they came from warring nations also resembled the plots of two recent tragédies en musique'':
Royer's
Pyrrhus (1730) and
Montéclair's
Jephté (1732). Yet, according to the Rameau specialist Sylvie Bouissou,
Dardanus suffers in comparison with these models, lacking their dramatic intensity and genuinely tragic endings (in
Pyrrhus the heroine kills herself and in
Jephté the lover of the title character's daughter is struck down by God).
Dardanus premiered on 19 November 1739 and ran for 26 performances. This meant it was not a great success but neither was it the outright failure for which the
Lullistes had hoped. Rameau and La Bruère responded to criticism by making alterations to the work during its first run.
Dardanus was soon the target of two parodies:
Arlequin Dardanus (premiered at the
Comédie-Italienne on 14 January 1740) by
Charles-Simon Favart and
Jean des Dardanelles by
Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset (uncertain date, some time in 1739 or 1740).
1744 revision For the next few years after the premiere of
Dardanus, Rameau wrote no new operas but made minor revisions to two of his old scores for fresh performances,
Hippolyte et Aricie in 1742 and
Les Indes galantes in 1743. In 1744 Rameau and La Bruère returned to
Dardanus, thoroughly overhauling the drama with the help of
Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, who had been the librettist for
Hippolyte. The final three acts were completely rewritten. The revised version has a simpler plot, fewer supernatural features and a greater focus on the emotional conflicts of the main characters. It premiered at the Paris Opéra on 23 April 1744. The 1744 version attracted little notice until it was revived again on 15 April 1760. This time audiences acclaimed it as one of Rameau's greatest works. The cast included
Sophie Arnould as Iphise. The set designs in Act 4, by
René-Michel Slodtz, imitated
Piranesi's famous etchings of imaginary prisons, ''Carceri d'invenzione''. It was revived again in 1768 and 1771 with modifications to the libretto by Nicolas-René Joliveau and to the score by
Pierre Montan Berton. Thereafter, it disappeared from the stage until the 20th century, although
Nicolas-François Guillard reworked La Bruère's libretto for
Antonio Sacchini's
Dardanus in 1784.
Modern revivals Dardanus was produced a handful of times in the 20th century: in a concert version 1907 at the
Schola Cantorum in Paris on 26 April and later the same year at the
Opéra de Dijon. In 1934, it was performed in
Algiers. In 1980,
Raymond Leppard conducted his own hybrid version of the 1739 and 1744 scores at the Paris Opéra. Finally in 1997 and 1998,
Marc Minkowski conducted a series of concert performances in Grenoble, Caen, Rennes and Lyon which formed the basis of a Deutsche Grammophon recording in 2000. The American professional premiere, by the
Wolf Trap Opera Company directed by Chuck Hudson, was given in July 2003 at the
Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in suburban Virginia. The opera was also produced in Sydney in November–December 2005, by
Pinchgut Opera and the Orchestra of the Antipodes. The
Royal Academy of Music also staged
Dardanus in
London in 2006. In France it was revived again in October–November 2009, at Lille, Caen and Dijon, conducted by
Emmanuelle Haïm and staged by Claude Buchvald. In April 2015, the
Opéra National de Bordeaux with the Ensemble Pygmalion under
Raphaël Pichon performed the 1739 version in the
Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, a production published on video in the following year by
Harmonia Mundi. The first performance in England of the 1744 version was given by
English Touring Opera on 6 October 2017 at the
Hackney Empire Theatre, London. ==Music==