Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau spent his first fifty years in relative obscurity, working as a church organist in Dijon, where he was born in 1683, and in other French towns before settling in Paris. What first made his name was not music but a book: his 1722 treatise on harmony, an attempt to explain from first principles why chords work the way they do, still cited by theorists today.

Then, at fifty, he began writing operas, and the late start turned into a second career of nearly thirty years. His stage works, full of dances, storm scenes, and unusually colorful orchestral writing, split Paris between his partisans and those loyal to the older style of Lully. He ended up a court composer to Louis XV.

Les Indes galantes, an opera-ballet that hops between four far-flung settings, is a lively way in. The Pièces de clavecin, his harpsichord pieces, make a gentler door.