Zoroastre's premiere in 1749 was not a success; despite the magnificence of the staging, it failed to compete with
Mondonville's new
opéra-ballet Le carnaval du Parnasse. Rameau and Cahusac decided to rework the opera completely before offering it to the public again in 1756. Acts 2,3 and 5 were heavily rewritten and there were several modifications to the plot. This time audiences took to the opera, although the critic
Melchior Grimm was withering about Cahusac's libretto: "In
Zoroastre it is day and night alternately; but as the poet...cannot count up to five he has got so muddled in his reckoning that he has been compelled to make it be day and night two or three times in each act, so that it might be day at the end of the play".
Zoroastre was chosen to open the new Paris opera house on January 26, 1770, the old one having burned down in 1763. It was also translated into Italian by
Casanova for a performance in
Dresden in 1752, although some of Rameau's music was replaced by that of the ballet master Adam. Its first modern revival was in a concert version at the
Schola Cantorum, Paris in 1903. The United States premiere of the opera was staged by
Boston Baroque (then known as Banchetto Musicale) at
Harvard University's Sanders Theater under conductor
Martin Pearlman in 1983 with Jean-Claude Orliac in the title role and
James Maddalena as Abramane.
Libretto and music Zoroastre includes some important innovations: it was the first major French opera to dispense with an allegorical prologue and its subject matter is not drawn from the
Classical mythology of Greece and Rome, as was usual, but from Persian religion. There was good reason for this. As Graham Sadler writes, the opera is "a thinly disguised portrayal of
Freemasonry". Cahusac, the librettist, was a leading French Mason and many of his works celebrate the ideals of the
Enlightenment, including
Zoroastre. The historical Zoroaster was highly regarded in Masonic circles and the parallels are obvious between Rameau's opera and an even more famous Masonic allegory,
Mozart's
The Magic Flute (1791), with its initiation rites conducted under the auspices of the wise "Sarastro". ==Roles==