Dardanus is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau with a French-language libretto by Charles-Antoine Leclerc de La Bruère.

Dardanus attacks a monster ravaging Teucer's kingdom, saving the life of Anténor who is attempting, unsuccessfully, to kill it.

His opponents - the so-called lullistes - were conservatives who accused him of destroying the French operatic tradition established by Lully under King Louis XIV in the late 17th century.

There is some evidence that initially Voltaire had been considered as the librettist for the new opera but he did not have a finished text to hand and so he may have suggested using Dardanus by Leclerc de La Bruère instead.

They accused La Bruère of stringing together a series of spectacular scenes - magical incantations, a dream sequence, the appearance of a monster - without any regard for dramatic logic and thus creating a hybrid between tragédie en musique and opéra-ballet, a lighter genre in which connection between the acts was of little importance.

The drama of two lovers divided because they came from warring nations also resembled the plots of two recent tragédies en musique: Royer's Pyrrhus (1730) and Montéclair's Jephté (1732).

Yet, according to the Rameau specialist Sylvie Bouissou, Dardanus suffers in comparison with these models, lacking their dramatic intensity and genuinely tragic endings (in Pyrrhus the heroine kills herself and in Jephté the lover of the title character's daughter is struck down by God).

[5] For the next few years after the premiere of Dardanus, Rameau wrote no new operas but made minor revisions to two of his old scores for fresh performances, Hippolyte et Aricie in 1742 and Les Indes galantes in 1743.

[6] In 1744 Rameau and La Bruère returned to Dardanus, thoroughly overhauling the drama with the help of Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, who had been the librettist for Hippolyte.

[7] The revised version has a simpler plot, fewer supernatural features and a greater focus on the emotional conflicts of the main characters.

The set designs in Act 4, by René-Michel Slodtz, imitated Piranesi's famous etchings of imaginary prisons, Carceri d'invenzione.

Thereafter, it disappeared from the stage until the 20th century, although Nicolas-François Guillard reworked La Bruère's libretto for Antonio Sacchini's Dardanus in 1784.

[12] Dardanus was produced a handful of times in the 20th century: in a concert version 1907 at the Schola Cantorum in Paris on 26 April and later the same year at the Opéra de Dijon.

[14] Finally in 1997 and 1998, Marc Minkowski conducted a series of concert performances in Grenoble, Caen, Rennes and Lyon which formed the basis of a Deutsche Grammophon recording in 2000.

[20] Modern critics have generally agreed with the complaints of Rameau's contemporaries about the weakness of Dardanus as drama [21] but, musically, they have viewed it as one of the composer's richest scores.

"[23] The three major examples of the merveilleux in the 1739 version (Isménor's magic, the dream scene and the monster), though weakening the drama, provided Rameau with the ideal opportunity to show his musical imagination.

[24] Act 2 has a magical ceremony including the accompanied recitative Suspends ta brillante carrière, in which Isménor stops the course of the sun, dances for infernal spirits, and a menacing chorus for the magicians, Obéis aux lois d'Enfer, which is almost totally homophonic with one note per syllable.

[25][26] The dream sequence, in which the sleeping hero has a vision, had precedents in earlier French Baroque operas where it was called a sommeil.

"[33] The opera uses an orchestra with the following instrumentation: 2 piccolos, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, timpani and other percussion, strings (with divided violas), harpsichord.

In the opening aria Cesse, cruel Amour, de régner sur mon âme, Iphise laments that she is in love with Dardanus, the deadly enemy of her father Teucer, King of the Phrygians.

Iphise is not so sure they will defeat Dardanus, the son of the supreme god Jupiter, but the Phrygian people celebrate their predicted triumph anyway.

Isménor sings of his power to foresee the future (Aria: Tout l'avenir est présent à mes yeux).

The Phrygians have defeated Dardanus in battle and taken him captive, leading Iphise to lament his fate (Aria:Ô jour affreux).

The jealous Anténor plots with his follower Arcas to kill his rival Dardanus surreptitiously so he can win Iphise's hand at last.