Flowers and Weapons: Ballets Figurés in the Opera of Jean-Philippe Rameau

What is a ballet figuré? The expression is found mainly in Rameau’s works and has no connection to his librettist Cahusac, contrary to what might be believed (although we shall see that these ballets well correspond to the aesthetic as explained in Cahusac’s treatise La Danse ancienne et moderne). Indeed, it can be observed that the expression is already used in act IV of Castor et Pollux (1737), long before their first collaboration on les Festes de Polymnie (1745). Moreover, Cahusac does not use this expression in his treatise nor in his articles for the Encyclopédie, and in his ballet héroïque Les Amours de Tempé he favours the word ‘pantomime.’ 18th-century dictionaries contain the expressions ballet, danse simple, danse figuré, corps d’entrée, ballet en action, pantomime, as well as other old ballet names, but no explanation for ballet figuré. How to define ballet figuré nowadays?

Indeed, these ballets figurés, which account for more than one quarter of the music in Rameau’s operas, are crucial to understanding the logical and subtle continuity of the narrative of each work. Thus the interest in studying the inseparable link between music, text, and dance that is specific to these ballets, in order to define better this particular form
that is typical of Rameau’s operas.

Owing to the lack of notation for these ballets, our research will necessarily focus on retracing a logical structure and reasoning of performance, rather than attempting reconstitution from a precise source. This study limits the ballets examined to those for wrestlers, athletes, demons, and their opposites: ballets of flowers or offering of flowers. These last, too often neglected and considered insignificant, seem omnipresent in Rameau’s operatic works as though to balance good and evil, pride and despair, peace and war.