The Importance of Instrumental Playing in the Hell Act from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux

Abstract

In modern Music History the continuity of instrumental playing gets increasingly broken up and changes into discontinuity – a process which, in the works of the Viennese Classic, culminates in a compositional mindset that brings the continuous instrumental fl ow and its abrupt break-up to ideal balance. A significant stadium in this development is formed by the music of "Opera buffa" as new genre in the first half of the eighteenth century, as it is represented by Pergolesi’s Serva padrona. On the other hand the French contribution, which makes itself felt with Rameau’s "Tragédies en musique", should not be neglected. A detailed study of the Hell Act from Castor et Pollux shows that also in the works of Rameau instrumental playing, even if it is able to realize, with its at times disquieting motivity, once again the old continuity of instrumental music, gets repeatedly stroken by discontinuity, in which the exciting actions on the stage find their musical expression.