Les Paladins was the last of Rameau's theatrical works to reach the stage, succeeded only by the unstaged Les Boréades of 1763. For it the 76-year-old composer returned to the three-act comédie-lyrique, a genre he had essayed only once previously in his Platée of 1745. It was first performed at the Paris Opéra on February 12, 1760. The libretto is written by an anonymous author, but attributed to Duplat de Monticourt, who padded out a story by La Fontaine, itself based on Ariosto's epic Orlando Furioso. The plot, described by Rameau's great biographer Girdlestone as "impossibly intricate," is set in medieval Venetia and includes all the ingredients of a chivalric tale: a knight-errant, a damsel in distress who is kept locked up in a castle by a wicked, if cowardly jailer, fairies and furies, magic transformations, and a fairy-tale castle in exotic Chinese style. Although the libretto includes its serious elements, all the characters are essentially comic, a feature which undoubtedly contributed, along with the poor quality of the libretto, to the work's failure at the time of its first performance. Audiences for French lyric theater were not accustomed to so much comedy mixed with seriousness, an issue that was currently being articulated in Paris by the famous conflict between the adherents of French opera and those favoring Italian comic opera. After only 15 performances, Les Paladins was dropped from the repertoire, not to reemerge until 200 years later, when it was revived at the 1967 Lyons Festival. It was then that the verve of the septuagenarian Rameau's astonishingly youthful score was recognized for the first time. Particularly striking is the orchestration, brilliant even by the composer's own exalted standards, especially in its thrilling use of the horns, which appear prominently in the overture and eight other numbers, and the highly original use of piccolos and bassoons in their higher register. For Girdlestone the return to life of "this unique little masterpiece" represented the single most sensational result of last century's Rameau revival.

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