Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “La Naissance d’Osiris” was performed just twice in the year 1754. Now this short work, with its highly attractive music, can be performed again in the version of the first performance.

Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera “La Naissance d’Osiris” had an inauspicious start. It was performed only twice in the composer’s lifetime and never revived during the eighteenth century, either at court or at the Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra). The two performances took place on 12 and 15 October 1754 in a programme of works staged during the annual voyage of Louis XV’s court at Fontainebleau. This voyage was one of the most sumptuous ever undertaken, motivated by the birth on 23 August of the duc de Berry (the future Louis XVI), who was then third in line to the throne.

This opera was not, however, newly composed for that occasion: it had evidently been conceived as the prologue to a projected ballet, “Les Beaux Jours de l’amour”. Indeed, the work may have been in existence at least as early as 1751, when Charles Collé’s “Journal” records that Rameau had written “a prologue on the subject of the birth of the duc de Bourgogne”, which had occurred on the night of 12-13 September that year. This prologue may even have been included as part of a programme of festivities at Versailles, subsequently abandoned when the intended venue was damaged by fire.

The 1754 voyage and that year’s royal birth nonetheless presented an opportunity to repurpose this prologue. It was renamed “La Naissance d’Osiris”, given a new subtitle (“La Fête Pamilie”), and placed as the first of three entrées in a composite entertainment entitled Fragments. The other two entrées were firm favourites from among Rameau’s earlier works: “Les Incas du Pérou”, from “Les Indes galantes” (1735), and the acte de ballet “Pigmalion” (1748). The remaining Rameau work in the 1754 schedule was another component of “Les Beaux Jours de l’amour” – the presumed final entrée, “Anacréon”, now performed as an independent one-act ballet héroïque in a double bill with Louis de Boissy’s comedy “Le Mari garçon”.

For a celebration of the birth of the duc de Berry, a plot derived from the myth recounting the birth of the Egyptian god Osiris was ideal. In the myth, this event was announced to a woman named Pamilia outside the Temple of Jupiter at Thebes, and in her honour a Festival of Pamilia was instituted. In the ballet allégorique, as the opera was known, this announcement is made by Jupiter to a group of Theban shepherds, who then celebrate the birth of the hero for whom they have long wished. This scenario provides a convincing pretext for much delightful pastoral music and several attractive ariettes, notably “Non, non, une flamme volage”, which was borrowed two years later for the revised version of “Zoroastre” (1756). The plot’s Egyptian flavour was carried through into the set designs created by the Slodtz brothers, which included hieroglyphs and sphynxes. That such features were sufficiently unfamiliar to the court audience led the librettist Cahusac to warn them, in a prefatory note to his libretto, not to expect the decor to include the standard Graeco-Roman style of architecture with which they were more familiar.

Considering that “La Naissance d’Osiris” was performed only twice in 1754 and never revived, Rameau’s autograph score and the surviving performing material reveal a disproportionate number of revisions – far beyond those which might reasonably result from routine compositional adjustments. Many are concerned with adapting the work to the new performance context. Pressure from Louis XV’s courtiers to accommodate the king’s infamous boredom seems likely to have prompted numerous cuts, the result being the inclusion of significantly fewer dances in the final version of the “La Naissance d’Osiris” than were envisaged for the original prologue to Les Beaux Jours de l’amour.

Only a small number of musical sources of the opera survive, but they include a largely complete set of vocal and instrumental part-books used at the work’s premiere. These form the principal source for this new edition, which represents, as far as can be determined, the final state of “La Naissance d’Osiris” as it was first staged in 1754, and which aims to bring this attractive work to a wider audience.

Shirley Thompson
(from [t]akte 1/2025)