"The history of music is not simply the history of masterpieces… Posterity is not always fair and can be fickle, and our keenest hope is that the curiosity of the reader will be attracted to a number of works that merit more than a passing reference in music history." – Vincent Giroud
"La terre, les cieux, et les mers / nous offrent tour-à-tour cent spectacles divers." Les Indes galantes offers plenty of spectacle : it's an all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza, a round-the-world trip full of ceremonies, storms, shipwrecks, volcanoes, and the lure of the exotic.
If Hippolyte was a musical manifesto, a bold statement of what Rameau wanted opera to be, Castor is a step back to the bad old tragédie lyrique.
For a comic interlude of 45 minutes, La serva padrona carries a lot of weight on her slim shoulders. She’s the ancestrix of both the Italian opera buffa and the French opéra comique.
The Opera Scribe 