Louis de Cahusac was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 playwright and librettist

Libretto

A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

, most famous for his work with the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau

Jean-Philippe Rameau was one of the most important French composers and music theorists of the Baroque era. He replaced Jean-Baptiste Lully as the dominant composer of French opera and is also considered the leading French composer for the harpsichord of his time, alongside François...

. He provided the libretti for several of Rameau's operas, namely Les fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour

Les fêtes de l'Hymen et de l'Amour

Les fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour is an opéra-ballet in three entrées and a prologue by the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. The work was first performed on March 15, 1747, at the La Grande Ecurie, Versailles, and is set to a libretto by Louis de Cahusac. The opera was originally composed as...

(1748), Zaïs

Zaïs

Zaïs is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau first performed on 29 February 1748 at the Opéra in Paris. It takes the form of a pastorale héroïque in four acts and a prologue. The librettist was Louis de Cahusac....

(1748), Naïs

Naïs

Naïs is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau first performed on 22 April 1749 at the Opéra in Paris. It takes the form of a pastorale héroïque in three acts and a prologue. The librettist was Louis de Cahusac, in the fourth collaboration between him and Rameau...

(1749), Zoroastre

Zoroastre

Zoroastre is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau, first performed on 5 December 1749 at the Opéra in Paris. The libretto is by Louis de Cahusac. Zoroastre was the fourth of Rameau's tragédies en musique to be staged and the last to appear during the composer's own lifetime...

(1749; revised 1756), La naissance d'Osiris

La naissance d'Osiris

La naissance d'Osiris, ou La fête Pamilie is an opera in the form of a one-act acte de ballet by Jean-Philippe Rameau, first performed on 12 October 1754 at Fontainebleau to celebrate the birth of the future King Louis XVI. The libretto is by Rameau's frequent collaborator Louis de Cahusac...

(1754), and Anacréon

Anacréon (1754)

Anacréon is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau which was first performed at Fontainebleau on 23 October 1754. Its libretto is by Louis de Cahusac. It takes the form of an acte de ballet in one act. Rameau also composed another opera called Anacréon in 1757...

(the first of Rameau's operas by that name, 1754). He is also credited with writing the libretto of Rameau's final work, Les Boréades

Les Boréades

Les Boréades or Abaris is an opera in five acts by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It was the last of Rameau's five tragédies en musique...

(c. 1763).

Sources

• Cuthbert Girdlestone
  Cuthbert Girdlestone
  Cuthbert Morton Girdlestone was a British musicologist and literary scholar. He was educated at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, and thereafter took up the chair in French in Armstrong College, later to be King's College in Newcastle in 1926, a position he held until 1960...
  
  Jean-Philippe Rameau: His Life and Work (Dover paperback edition, 1969)
• The New Grove French Baroque Masters ed. Graham Sadler (Grove/Macmillan, 1988)