With tongue firmly in cheek, Sir William Walton once advised all sensitive young composers to die by the age of thirty-seven (New York Times, 4 June 1939); in so doing, they would escape the ‘critical damnation’ of failing to live up to their early promise. Happily, Rameau was not around to heed this advice. By that age he had composed little more than one slender volume of keyboard pieces and a handful of motets and cantatas; nor had he published a word of the forty or so theoretical writings that between them were to transform the way in which the scientific basis of music is understood, and established him as the founder of modern harmonic theory. In short, the composer would never have come to be regarded as one of the most important figures in French — and, indeed, European — musical history.

Rameau was, in fact, the classic late developer. After dropping out from school, he spent most of his first forty years in the relative obscurity of the French provinces. The first of his theoretical works was not published until he was thirty-nine. As for his operatic career, one early biographer claimed that the composer left it ‘until the ordinary mortal begins to decay’ before making his debut at the Paris Opéra — a slight exaggeration, given that Rameau was only fifty when Hippolyte et Aricie was premiered in 1733.