ABSTRACT
With the emergence of opera in the seventeenth century, the status of stage sets and music which in earlier drama had been considered of only secondary significance grew steadily in importance. This chapter focuses on the dynamic aspect of the relationship between these two arts, as revealed in the case of Rameau's operas. The experiment outlined here seeks to confirm or refute the existence of such relations, through a census of all the music that Rameau wrote to accompany scene changes. It was not, of course, necessary to construct this many new stage sets, since existing decor could be recycled and customised: often the same trees or the same columns were reused from one opera to the next. This lapse of time is accentuated not only by the change of place but also by the music, in which the wide tonal shift depicts the time it would have taken for the omitted recitative to cover this harmonic distance.
