Platée was one of the most highly regarded of Rameau's operas during his lifetime. It even pleased critics who had expressed hostility to his musical style during the
Querelle des Bouffons (an argument over the relative merits of French and Italian opera).
Melchior Grimm called it a "sublime work" and even Rameau's bitter enemy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to it as "divine". The reason for this praise may be because these critics saw
Platée, a comic opera, paving the way for the lighter form of
opera buffa they favoured.
Voltaire however, who was in the audience in Versailles, wrote to his niece, "You didn't miss much except a large crowd and a very bad work. It is the height of indecency, boredom, and impertinence." in the role of the Nymph Plataea, by
Charles-Antoine Coypel (c. 1745) The work received one performance at the marriage festivities at Versailles in 1745. Little is known about this production, except that the title role was taken by the
haute-contre Pierre Jélyotte, a famous character actor and the leading tenor of the
Académie Royale de Musique. Rameau revised the opera in collaboration with the librettist
Ballot de Sauvot and presented it at the
Opéra in Paris on 9 February 1749. Its first public run was very successful and it was later revived in 1750 and again in 1754, always starring in the title role the second leading
haute-contre of the
Opéra, , called La Tour. According to
Rodolfo Celletti, the role of Platée performed by La Tour was the highest
haute-contre part ever written by Rameau. The 1754 revival was part of the continuing
Querelle des Bouffons, pitted against
Leonardo Leo's Italian
opera buffa,
I viaggiatori.
Platée was last performed complete during Rameau's lifetime in 1759. The next production would not take place until 1901 in
Munich, in a heavily adapted German version by Hans Schilling-Ziemssen. The French version reappeared at a production in
Monte Carlo in 1917 but
Platée only returned to France at the
Aix-en-Provence Festival in 1956 with young tenor
Michel Sénéchal as the queen of frogs, a part which Sénéchal took again in the revival presented by the
Paris Opera at the
Salle Favart in 1977, with
Michel Plasson as conductor. The opera made its debut in the Netherlands in 1968, in the United Kingdom in 1983 and in the United States in 1987. The London performances, in a production by the English Bach Festival at
Sadler's Wells, conducted by
Jean-Claude Malgoire, featured Jean-Claude Orliac in the title role, with
Henry Herford, Peter Jeffes and
Marilyn Hill Smith.
Platée appeared again at the Salle Favart in 1989 with Jean-Claude Malgoire as conductor, and directed by
Robert Carsen. In 2023, the
Zürich Opera House featured a new production of the opera staged by Jetske Mijnssen and conducted by
Emmanuelle Haïm, with cast including Mathias Vidal,
Evan Hughes,
Katia Ledoux, Renato Dolcini and
Alasdair Kent. ==Roles==