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Rameau by Simon Trowbridge
This was a beautifully written, well-researched and referenced, outstanding tribute of a book to Jean-Philippe Rameau (the best composer in the history of the world whom most people have never heard of), about not only his life, challenges, and accomplishments, but also his major works in quite some detail.
I just finished it and I feel bereft 
Rameau was first known as an organist and composer of keyboard music for the harpsichord, his music but also . It was not until he was about 50 years old that he started writing opera, and became its greatest French composer.
As made abundantly clear in these pages, Rameau was not only a musical genius who created some of the most beautiful and moving music known to man, but also and intellectual giant who developed the theory of Fundamental Bass which is helped us understand tonal harmony and is taught in music schools to this day. He was also a man of contradictions - an organist who never wrote music for the organ, the star composer of his era who mostly craved recognition as a music theoretician and scientist, France's leading opera composer who dominated his country's musical scene for three decades but frequently got into trouble with his peers and wannabe composers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who later made his fame as a philosopher and was a bitter enemy to Rameau until the end) because he could not dissemble and was not naturally deferential, so was perceived as rude and arrogant in the Parisian royal court.
And still his music prevailed - instruments interlace with different voices, none more important than the other, gripping the heart and soul with its beauty and melancholy. Imagine going to the Opera in Paris to watch his Castor and Pollux for the first time, and is how it starts 
You start watching Hyppolyte et Aricie with and then hear
and
. It is not hard to see why he was revered and held in the highest esteem by his contemporaries, even while his difficult personality and perceived arrogance pushed away colleagues and potential royal supporters.
And yet the march towards the simplifying and dumbing down all entertainment and intellectual discourse including music was already in motion, and much simpler Italian comedies were becoming more and more popular in Paris, especially among the younger audience. Rameau's enemies such as Rousseau championed the new style which became immensely popular and later led to the opera of Mozart etc and Rameau was soon forgotten, this giant of the Baroque Era that closed after him.
As d'Alembert said, Rameau made the best music that his audience was capable of appreciating, not the best that could make. His last work Les Boréades had deeply 'subversive' ideas such as personal liberty and women's right to make their own choices which never made it out of the censors' clutches during Rameau's life and was performed for the 1st time ever by John Eliot Gardiner in 1982.
I leave you with , with its descending bassoons opposing pleasantly uplifting violins and vice versa, a perfect example of the beauty and melancholy in Rameau's music, unheard for 300 years until its resurrection in the 20th Century, a testament to this brilliant genius that the world has forgotten in favour of ever-dumber and discordant "music" of subsequent centuries 