Jean-Philippe Rameau was a French composer and music theorist of the late Baroque era, born 25 September 1683 in Dijon and died 12 September 1764 in Paris. Little is documented of his early years; he worked as an organist in provincial French churches before settling in Paris. He first won fame in the 1720s as a major theorist with his Treatise on Harmony (1722) and as a composer of celebrated harpsichord suites, publishing further collections in 1724 and 1727. He was nearly 50 before beginning the operatic career on which his reputation chiefly rests, debuting with the controversial Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) and going on to replace Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant figure in French opera, alongside works such as Les Indes galantes and Castor et Pollux.

Rameau’s Treatise on Harmony laid foundations for modern tonal theory, including the concept of chord inversion and the fundamental bass, that shaped Western music pedagogy for centuries. As a harpsichord composer he stands, alongside François Couperin, as the leading master of the French clavecin school, and as an opera composer his harmonically daring, orchestrally rich tragédies en musique provoked the fierce aesthetic quarrels of the Querelle des Bouffons and redefined French opera for the 18th century.

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Sources:

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-Philippe-Rameau