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His early training came from his father, a professional organist; he went to a Jesuit school, then had a short period of music study in Italy. He may have played the violin for a time in a theatre orchestra. In 1702 he was appointed ma�tre de musique at Avignon Cathedral, but later in the same year he moved to Clermont Cathedral; by 1706 he was in Paris as organist of the Jesuit college. He retumed to Dijon in 1709 as organist at Notre Dame (a shared position); but by 1713 he was in Lyons and in 1715 he was back in Clermont with a 29-year contract as organist.
By 1722, however, he was in Paris, where he was to remain; he had left Clermont to supervise the publication of his Trait� de l'harmonie, a substantial and controversial work, particularly as regards his new theory, based on his understanding of the physical properties of sound, about the relationship of bass to harmony. The Trait� brought him to wide attention. As a composer, he was known only for his keyboard music (a second collection appeared in 1729-30) and his cantatas, though he had also written some church music.
His ambitions, however, lay in opera; and at the age of 50, in 1733, he had his first opera, Hippolyte et Aricie, given at the Op�ra. It aroused great excitement, admiration, bewilderment and (among the conservative part of the audience who saw no good in anything since Lully) disgust. It was fairly successful, as were the other operas that followed in the ensuing years; his op�ra-ballet Les Indes galantes had 64 performances over two years, and the least successful Castor et Pollux, had an initial run of 21 performances.
Rameau had various patrons, notably the financier La Pouplini�re; he moved in intellectual circles and counted Voltaire among his friends. He continued his theoretical work in the 1740s and was embroiled in several controversies. In 1745 he was appointed a royal chamber music composer; thereafter several of his works had their premieres at court theatres. Nine new theatre works followed in the mid-late 1740s, beginning with La princesse de Navarre and the comedy Plat�e; but from 1750 onwards only two major works were written, for Rameau was increasingly involved with theory and with a number of disputes, with Rousseau, Grimm and even former friends, pupils and collaborators such as Diderot and D'Alembert. When Rameau died, in 1764, he was widely respected and admired though he was seen too as unsociable and avaricious.
Rameau's harpsichord music is notable for its variety of texture, its originality of line and its boldness of harmony. But his chief contribution lies in his operas, especially those in the trag�die lyrique genre. He anticipated Gluckian reform by relating the overture to the ensuing drama. He brought to the numerous dances a remarkably wide range of moods, even within the constraints of the standard dance forms, using a richly varied orchestral palette and bold melodic lines. Diderot praised his ability to distinguish the tender, the voluptuous, the impassioned and the lascivious. He wrote many fine pathetic monologues, usually at the beginnings of acts, with intense, slow-moving vocal lines and rich, sombre accompaniments. His recitative, while following the Lullian model, is more flexible in rhythms and more expressive in its declamation. Such trag�dies as Hippolyte et Aricie and Castor et Pollux, with their noble characters and their eloquent lines, harmonies and orchestration, supported by skilfully placed divertissements that strengthen rather than dilute the force of the action, stand among the great creations of French musical drama.