Before Jean-Philippe Rameau moved to Paris in 1722, he worked as a church organist in various small towns, and his only notable compositions were assorted vocal works and a book of harpsichord pieces. He soon published a groundbreaking harmony treatise and two more books of keyboard suites, paving the way for his greatest ambition, finally achieved at the age of fifty: to compose grand operas. He went on to create some thirty works for the stage, the finest by any French composer since Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Les Boréades was Rameau’s last tragic opera, and it was still unperformed when he died a year after its completion. Before the first scene opens on a woodland hunt, the Ouverture establishes the setting, including calls that evoke hunting horns. The gusty bursts of violin scales portray the winds, which become a significant plot point in the opera.

It was a longstanding French custom to incorporate dance numbers within operas, which explains the presence in this suite of two examples of contredanse, the French adaptation of the British “country dance” in which partners form parallel lines. The main theme of the Contredanse en rondeau leans uncharacteristically on a foreign pitch, A-natural, which rubs against the home key of C-minor. In the next selection, an independent bassoon line, acting as a foil to the violin melody, adds a special depth and richness to the spellbinding entrance music for the muse Polymnie. For the final pairing of “very lively” contredanses from Act V, a contrasting episode in the minor key interrupts the outer statements of a foot-stomping main theme in the major key.

Aaron Grad ©2025

Mozart’s young adulthood in Salzburg was a frustrating time for the composer, and he struggled for years to find a way out of his provincial hometown. Prospects brightened in 1780, when he received a commission to write the opera Idomeneo for Munich; by the next year he would ride that success to an independent career in Vienna.

The last symphony Mozart wrote before leaving Salzburg was No. 34 in C Major. He completed it on August 29, 1780, and probably performed it at court in the following days. The mysterious question about the symphony, still unresolved, concerns the minuet. The manuscript includes the beginning of a minuet on the back of the first movement’s last page (typically, a minuet would come after the second movement). Mozart crossed out those 14 measures of music and ripped out what appears to be the next two pages. Presumably the missing pages completed the minuet fragment, but that music is long lost.

Two years later, Mozart wrote a separate Minuet in C Major (K. 409). It could have been a stand-alone work for his Vienna concert series, but some scholars speculate that he intended it to replace the symphony movement he had discarded earlier. This hypothesis involves overlooking that the new minuet adds flutes to the instrumentation; still, there were other times Mozart adjusted instrumentation, such as when he revised Symphony No. 40 by adding clarinets. It could be that he added flutes to the rest of the 34th Symphony in a version that has disappeared.

Even before the minuet, Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 plays with conventions of form and proportion. In the opening Allegro vivace, the entire first theme group sounds like a declamatory introduction, only picking up momentum as it transitions toward the docile second group. Skipping the customary repeat, the movement plunges directly into a spooky development featuring new material. After this exploratory first movement, what follows is an elegant and streamlined Andante di molto, which Mozart later nudged to a slightly faster tempo by adding “piú tosto allegretto” in 1786. It dispenses with most of the winds, using only bassoon and strings — the violas divided into two parts — to produce an unusually delicate and transparent sound. The K. 409 Minuet creates a vivid contrast when inserted next, hearty and symphonic in the wake of such rarefied chamber music. The Allegro vivace finale dances with Mozart’s typical gusto, and brings back some of the individuated flavor of the Andante by treating the oboes to a jolly series of exposed duets.

Aaron Grad ©2010