In March 1745, Platée was created for the wedding of the heir to the French throne in Versailles, one of the last great celebrations of the Ancien Régime. A great tragedy would have been appropriate for this event; Rameau also built his work according to this scheme, but Platée is a nifty parody. The intrigue of love for an ugly, vain swamp nymph, however, did not find much approval in Versailles, as a romantic wedding opera it was in fact extremely unsuitable:
Juno devastates the harvest with wild storms, because she is once again angry with Jupiter, her unfaithful husband and chief of the gods. This time, however, her anger is irrelevant, Jupiter is loyal to her. Mercure and Cithéron want to cure Juno of this baseless jealousy. They decide on a plot: In a swamp lives the ugly nymph Platée, whom Cithéron pursues with her affection. She is told that Jupiter fell in love with her. The god father, privy to the plan, appears to Platée in the form of a donkey, feigns love for her and orders a wedding celebration. Juno is lured to the fake wedding. Full of anger, she tears off the supposed bride's veil. Faced with the ugliness of Platée, she laughs at her own jealousy and reconciles with Jupiter.
In Paris, from 1749 , Platée immediately became one of Rameau's most successful pieces. The audience delighted in the finely composed, subtly comical music and the speech and sound games - the croaking of the marsh frogs, the I-ahen of Jupiter in donkey form. Since the middle of the 20th century, Platée has again been Rameau's most-performed opera. But it's not just the burlesque elements that characterize the work, Rameau also sensitively describes Platée's fate, being brutally laughed at and mocked, as pitiful: at the end the laughter gets stuck in your throat. Jean-Jacques Rousseau hailed Platée in 1750 "as the very best piece of music that has been heard on our stages to this day."
