Rameaus Pygmalion Around this time in 1956, the hot ticket on Broadway was for a musical based on the old Greek legend of Pygmalion, a sculptor so good that he fell in love with one of his beautiful female statues. The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, had updated the legend to modern-day London, with Pygmalion transformed into Professor Henry Higgins, and the beautiful female statue, a Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle. In 1956, the Broadway team of Lerner and Loewe had in turn transformed Shaw’s play into the smash Broadway musical, “My Fair Lady.” But 208 years before all that, on today’s date in the year 1748, another very successful musical adaptation of the Pygmalion legend opened in Paris. This “Pygmalion” was an opera-ballet by the great French Baroque composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau was born in 1683, two years earlier than Bach and Handel, but unlike them, was something of a late bloomer. Rameau was 50 before he became famous, and his opera-ballet “Pygmalion” opened shortly before his 65th birthday. In this work and many others, Rameau prefigured Wagner’s desire to integrate myth, music and dance into a theatrical whole. Rameau was also famous for imitating natural sounds and noises in his music. One of Rameau’s contemporaries, in praising the overture to “Pygmalion,” even suggested the repeated notes of Rameau’s theme represented the chipping of Pygmalion’s chisel as he worked on his lovely creation.
Posted on: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 11:48:45 +0000
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