Structure and expression in the scènes of Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie

Abstract

The libretto for a tragèdie en musique might be regarded as a tabula rasa. Whereas an Italian dramma per musica generally differentiates between recitative poetry and aria poetry — versi sciolti on the one hand, strophic versi misurati on the other — its French counterpart contains page after page of supple vers libres, which lend themselves to a great variety of musical shapes. Indeed, apart from a few highly conventional gestures, one cannot necessarily tell simply by looking at the libretto how a tragédie en musique will have been set. The point might be illustrated by an example, a pair of invocations sung by Phèdre in Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie (1733); one of them is a single quatrain, and the other consists of eight lines divided by their rhyme scheme into two quatrains. The columns at the left show the length of the vers (with + indicating feminine rhyme) and the rhyme scheme:

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