Les Boréades is the final opera of Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), a tragédie lyrique in five acts on a libretto attributed to Louis de Cahusac, loosely based on the Greek legend of the seer and healer Abaris the Hyperborean, and incorporating Masonic elements. Although evidently rehearsed in 1763, the work remained unperformed during Rameau’s lifetime. Rameau died the following year at the age of eighty; the first fully staged performance did not take place until 1982, under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner. WikipediaThe Listeners’ Club
The “Entrée de Polymnie” forms an orchestral interlude in the fourth act. Rameau himself gave the movement the unwieldy title “The Arrival of the Muses, Zephyrs, Seasons, Hours and the Arts” — an allegorical procession of mythological figures representing art and the passage of time. Musically, the piece is distinguished by a harmonic language reaching well beyond the conventions of the French Baroque: a rich harmonic idiom built on suspended ninths and elevenths, of a kind one might more readily attribute to a late nineteenth-century work than to a mid-eighteenth-century composition.
The movement gained wider recent recognition chiefly through the Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who released his piano transcription of the piece on the 2020 album “Debussy-Rameau.” Ólafsson gave his transcription the more concise title “The Arts and the Hours,” alluding to the Greek aphorism best known in its Latin form, “ars longa, vita brevis” — art is long, life is short. This renaming is historiographically noteworthy: it detaches the piece from its original scenic-allegorical context and establishes it as an autonomous concert work — a process mirrored in the treatment of numerous Rameau movements from operas and harpsichord pieces in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which increasingly circulate in the instrumental repertoire independent of their original performance context.
Several arrangements for guitar now extend this reception process. Alongside a version for solo organ (Maurizio Machella, 2003) and chamber versions for recorder ensemble with basso continuo, explicitly guitaristic arrangements exist as well: a version for guitar quartet or ensemble/orchestra by Thomas Jancso, and an arrangement for recorder ensemble/orchestra and guitar by Clive Lane, who has also produced a version for guitar ensemble alone. Lane places his arrangement of the “Entrée de Polymnie” — realized there as a quartet movement — explicitly within a group of Rameau transcriptions for guitar ensemble that also includes “Les Tendres Plaintes” from the Pièces de Clavecin (1724, arranged here as a guitar duet) and “La Cupis” from the Pièces de Clavecin en Concerts (for four guitars).
That the “Entrée de Polymnie” tends to appear as an ensemble rather than a purely solo guitar arrangement is musically well justified. The harmonic density Ólafsson describes — suspended ninths and elevenths that, on the modern piano, blend and sustain through the pedal — can scarcely be realized adequately on a single six-string guitar: the instrument possesses neither comparable sustain nor the simultaneous voice-count such a texture demands. Distributing the material across several guitars, as Jancso and Lane do, instead allows the individual registers of the originally orchestral movement — upper and lower voices, inner filler parts — to be assigned to different instruments, approximating the texture of the original without truncating its characteristic suspensions. A reduced solo-guitar version, by contrast, would necessarily have to proceed selectively — omitting inner voices, or realizing chords through arpeggiation — in order to convey even an approximation of the movement’s underlying conception, a procedure long familiar in guitar transcription practice, from the nineteenth-century Bach arrangements to modern editions.
The “Entrée de Polymnie” thus stands as an exemplary case of a twofold process of reception: on one hand, the posthumous recovery of a long-unperformed operatic movement through late twentieth-century historically informed performance practice; on the other, its subsequent emancipation as an independent concert and transcription piece beyond its original instrumentation — a process that draws the guitar, as so often in its reception history, into service as a belated but living vehicle for older music.
