The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered

The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered Presented by Opera Lafayette June 2022

The Festival The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered is under the patronage of Mr. Philippe Etienne, Ambassador of France to the United States.

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Copyright Title The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered: Text, illustrations, cover Copyright ©️ 2022 by Opera Lafayette All rights reserved. No reproduction, copying, distribution or redistribution, in full or in part of the text or images is permitted without written permission from Opera Lafayette.

Best efforts have been made by Opera Lafayette and the contributors to this manuscript to ensure the accuracy of the content disclosed herein, however, Opera Lafayette does not represent this scholarly effort to be wholly error-free.

ISBN-13: 978-0-578-29411-7 Published 2022 Opera Lafayette 921 Pennsylvania Avenue SE Washington, DC 20002 Opera Lafayette 1202 Lexington Avenue #172 New York, NY 10028 www.operalafayette.org

This publication is made possible by a grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities.

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For Naomi Reddert and Norma Reddert Brown, who loved music and the land and the people who work in both fields.

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Table of Contents Letter from the Artistic Director.....................................................................................6 The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette............................................................................9 Program Note.........................................................................................................13 The Musical Revolutions of Marie Antoinette...............................................16 Concert Spirituel Aux Caraïbes.......................................................................................31 Program Note........................................................................................................36 Theater and the Worlds of Saint-Domingue.................................................38 Silvain............................................................................................................................55 Program Note........................................................................................................58 Seigneur de Sangre de Cristo: Carlos H. Beaubien.........................................62 A Word from the Director.................................................................................79 Translating Silvain................................................................................................79 Taos Residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation....................................80 2022 Symposia.....................................................................................................................82 Post-Festival Discussion.......................................................................................82 Virtual Symposia...................................................................................................83 Biographies..............................................................................................................84 Participating Scholars..........................................................................................84 Creative Team........................................................................................................87 Performing Artists................................................................................................91 Opera Lafayette Supporters...........................................................................................100 Festival Sponsors.................................................................................................100 Special Thanks.....................................................................................................100 Institutional Support.........................................................................................101 Individual Donors..............................................................................................102 About Opera Lafayette...................................................................................................106 Media – Books and Discography.....................................................................108 Opera Lafayette’s 2022/2023 Season.............................................................109

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Letter from the Artistic Director Dear Friends, Over the course of the coming seasons, Opera Lafayette will present three festivals which explore various facets of 18th century French music. Each festival focuses on the era of one of three women: Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI and Queen of France; Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV; and Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV. We chose to present these festivals in reverse order chronologically, starting with the Era of Marie Antoinette, for several reasons. First, Opera Lafayette’s most recent explorations have been of late 18th century opéra comique and of opera in the era of the French Revolution. Second, as an American ensemble performing historical music from Europe, we have been interested in the resonances of 18th century French music in the Americas. Finally, the current historical moment has put colonialism under the microscope, and there is much to learn from doing so through music.

Thus, adding “rediscovered” to the end of our festival title “The Era of Marie Antoinette” suggests our intent to reexamine an era which is both fraught with easy stereotypes and ingrained historical judgments, and which is usually seen only from the point of view of Versailles or Paris. Nonetheless, with French music, we start there, the center of French culture and empire, before moving outward. With just three programs, our aims are of necessity modest and specific, but take us the distance from Versailles to Saint-Domingue to New Orleans and to the southwestern United States.

The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette gives us an intimate look at Marie Antoinette the musician and salon host - what she played, what she listened to, and who she met while doing so. The French harpist Sandrine Chatron has both researched and assembled the works in this program. In an accompanying essay, the musicologist Julia Doe gives us a broader look into the musical life of Marie Antoinette and her world. Among the revelations this program brings are that two of the composers who crossed Marie Antoinette’s path had strong ties to the New World.

Concert Spirituel aux Caraïbes came about because of our investigations into the French opéras comique that were performed in the 18th century colonial theaters in Saint-Domingue, and particularly into the career of Minette, the mixed-race singer and actress who was the star of the stage in Port au Prince during the 1780’s, before the French and Haitian revolutions. Kaiama Glover and Laurent Dubois, who have written eloquently about this period and do again in an essay here, introduced Opera 6

Lafayette to Pedro Memelsdorff, a musician who has also done research in this area.

His program grapples with both the beauties and harsh truths that characterized this moment of heightened racial and social tension in the theatrical life of the western hemisphere.

Silvain, by Grétry, was a work not only known and admired by Marie Antoinette and others throughout Europe but was performed in Saint-Domingue and is thought to be the first opera performed in New Orleans, in 1796. This history of Silvain in this French/Spanish/American context in New Orleans led us to wonder whether there might be some parallels between the land issues inherent in the libretto and the history of America. Through some rather serendipitous connections, we learned that not only was research coming to light about French influence on the Indigenous homelands and Spanish settlements of the southwest, but that the central dramatic issues having to do with the use of common land in Silvain mirrored specific 19th century conflicts in the San Luis Valley which continue to the present day. This led us to identify the Mexican filmmaker Tania Hernández Velasco to direct the work, the historian and community activist Marie Mondragon-Valdez to write about this history, and the musicologist Callum Blackmore to discuss Silvain’s original context.

Together they illuminate the inspiration for our setting. We were fortunate to be able to prepare the work in the southwest while in residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.

With each of these programs, Opera Lafayette hopes to open the door a little further into a space where we can better understand our shared cultural histories while providing an experience of extraordinary beauty through music. We thank our many artists, scholars and patrons for contributing to that effort, and hope our audiences find the festival as compelling to listen to and watch as we have found it compelling to research and prepare.

Ryan Brown Artistic Director, Opera Lafayette

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Opera Lafayette presents

The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette El Museo del Barrio Wednesday, June 8, 2022 at 7:00 PM This performance is approximately 80 minutes with no intermission.

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Program Les Folies d’Espagne………………………………...........................................Francesco Petrini douze variations pour harpe, op. 28 (1744-1819) J’ai perdu mon Eurydice…………………..........................Christoph Willibald von Gluck (from Orphée et Eurydice, Acte 3) (1714-1787) L’amante abandonnée………….……….…...................................Jean-Baptiste Krumpholtz air parodié sur l’adagio de l’opus 14 (vers 1742-1790) La nuit profonde, romance…...………………...................………………………....Krumpholtz Sonate for harp in E flat, op. 7 n° 1……………...................................Jean-Baptiste Cardon Allegro-Andante- Rondo Allegretto (1760-1893) Sonate en forme de scène de mezzo caractère…………..................…………….Krumpholtz in F majeur, op. 15 n° 2 for harp and violon 3 songs pour soprano, ténor, violon & harpe…………….................Antoine Dauvergne Tircis et Cloris s’absentent chaque jour de leur troupeau (1713-1797) La beauté pour qui je brûle…

C’est une folie d’avoir tant d’appâts…

Sonate for harp & flute…......................Joseph Boulogne Chevalier de Saint-Georges Andante-Tempo di Minuetto-Rondeau (1739-1799) Romances for voice and harp C’est mon ami, soprano & harp…………………………............................Marie Antoinette (1755-1793) Air, tenor & harp…………………….....................……………………Philippe Joseph Hinner (1755-1784) Le Berceau de Madame fille du roi…………………….......Josse-François-Joseph Benaut (?-1794) Oiseaux, si tous les ans.............................................................Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart KV 307/284d, soprano and harp (1756-1791)

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continued Adagio for glass harmonica KV 356/617a…………………………..................………Mozart Sonatine for harp No 5........................................................................Jan Ladislav Dusik Larghetto-Rondo allegretto (1760-1812) Malgré la fortune cruelle…………………………............……André Ernest Modeste Grétry (from La caravane du Caire, Act 1: duo, Zélime et Saint-Phar) (1741-1813) Plaisir d’amour…………….....................……………………………….Jean-Paul Egide Martini (1741-1816)

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Program conceived by Sandrine Chatron Lisa Schlenker, Scenic Design A.J. Guban, Lighting Design Julia Doe, Pre-Concert Lecture

Artists

Sandrine Chatron……………….…..................................…………………………………….Harp Sophia Burgos………………………………………………..................................………....Soprano Nicholas Phan…………………………………………....................................………………..Tenor Jacob Ashworth………………..……………………...................................... ………………..Violin Charles Brink….…………....................................……………………….…………………...…Flute

Jean-Baptiste André Bautier-Dagoty, “Marie Antoinette playing the harp at the French Court,” 1775

Production Staff

Cat Hickerson…….…………………………………..…...............................…….Stage Manager Raine Bode……………………………………………..….............................Production Manager Patrick Kilbride………………………………................................……………..……….Supertitles Todd Mion…………………...........................……..………………..……….....Technical Director Jason Shafer………………..............................……..…………………………....…..Video Director Bill Siegmund…………………………..………...............................………..……Audio Producer 18th-century style Naderman harp provided courtesy of Christa Patton.

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Program Note Julia Doe A day in the life at Marie Antoinette’s Versailles was filled with music. Certainly, music played a critical role in the ceremonial apparatus of the court, providing a soundtrack to the public rituals that defined the quotidian existence of the Bourbon monarchs. As the historian Patrick Barbier has documented, vocalists from the royal chapel performed sacred hymns and motets for the king’s daily mass. Instrumentalists from the Maison du roi (royal household) played excerpts to accompany the soupers à grand couvert, meals taken by the king and queen before an audience of courtiers. And actors associated with the nation’s Crown-supported theaters—known as the comédiens ordinaires du roi—journeyed regularly from Paris to Versailles to supply dramatic spectacles, which functioned as vehicles of both pleasurable entertainment and monarchical glorification. Less well-known than these “official” artistic events – though no less important to the image-making of the regime—were the many musical activities of Marie Antoinette’s private sphere.

As outlined in the essay The Musical Revolution of Marie Antoinette, on the queen’s patronage, Marie Antoinette had begun her studies in voice, harpsichord, and harp during her childhood in Habsburg Austria, and she would pursue these practices with great enthusiasm throughout her time in France. The works featured on this evening’s program are, on a general level, representative of the repertory played by Marie Antoinette and her associates at her informal salons; these are exemplars of the genres most popular with French musical amateurs in the late eighteenth century, including instrumental sonatas, strophic songs known as romances, and aria arrangements from contemporary operas. Moreover, these works, reflect the output of composers and virtuosos with particularly close links to the queen. These were the artists who coached her, performed for her, and most directly benefited from her sponsorship, as showcased either in the concerts de la reine (small-scale, thrice-weekly concerts in the queen’s apartments at Versailles) or on the public stages of the French capital.

The composers featured on this program had varied relationships with the hypermusical monarch, revealing the broad scope of her cultural patronage, the diversity of styles that evoked her interest, and the multifaceted intersections between her “public” and “private” projects. Several of the musicians foregrounded on this concert served as Marie Antoinette’s personal tutors. She had the longest association with Christoph Willibald Gluck, who had been hired to teach keyboard to the Habsburg children in the 1760s; she would have her most frequent interactions with the harpist Philippe-Joseph Hinner, who gave her regular lessons 13

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on that instrument in the 1770s. Another category of artists in Marie Antoinette’s inner circle comprised the virtuosos who accompanied her private salon evenings, including the noted pianist Jan Ladislav Dussek and the violinist Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. (Dussek and Saint-Georges were also headliners at the Concert Spirituel, the most prestigious Parisian concert series of the age, an indication of the high quality of the concerts de la reine.) Finally, several composers developed ties to the queen through their preeminence in the realm of court opera. The lyric comedies of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry were performed roughly 200 times at Versailles and Fontainebleau in the late ancien régime.

Marie Antoinette was either the dedicatee (or thinly veiled allegorical subject) of several of these works; she was also named the godmother of Grétry’s youngest daughter, Antoinette. Jean-Paul-Égide Martini, similarly, enjoyed frequent court commissions in this period, with operas like Henri IV (written for the accession of Louis XVI in 1774) and Le droit du seigneur (rehearsed under the queen’s supervision in 1783).

Although the performances of Marie Antoinette’s salon and the concerts de la reine took place before limited, elite audiences, these activities cannot strictly be construed as insular. Indeed, the works patronized by the queen demonstrate her wide-ranging impact as an artistic tastemaker. Trends that took hold at Versailles provided clear impetus to the evolution of musical life in the French capital.

This is strongly the case with regard to the principal instrument on this evening’s program: the harp. The queen’s well-known fondness for the instrument – and support for its leading practitioners (such as Hinner, Jean-Baptiste Cardon, JeanBaptiste Krumpholtz, and Francesco Petrini)—were critical in transforming Paris into the European center of harp production, performance, and publication in the final decades of the ancien régime. Musical almanacs list nearly sixty harp teachers working in the French capital in the 1780s, alongside numerous firms specializing in the manufacture of the instrument, including Cousineau, Érard, and Naderman.

(The queen played a harp by the latter builder, similar to the instrument used in tonight’s performance.) As Sue Carole DeVale and Nancy Thym-Hochrein have noted, it was “in Parisian workshops that all the important developments in harp construction in the second half of the eighteenth century took place.” Marie Antoinette and several other members of the Bourbon family posed for portraits that prominently featured the instrument—underscoring how the harp was viewed as a symbol of feminine accomplishment, as well as wealth and prestige, more generally.

If there were notable overlaps between the musical fashions of Versailles and Paris, Marie Antoinette’s favored repertory also encapsulates how the artistic tastes of the Bourbon monarchy grew more “international” during her reign. While the official 14

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productions of Versailles had long been dominated by French artists, the court now served as a nexus for both native and foreign talent. Of the twelve musicians whose works are programmed here, only two—Cardon and the vocal composer Antoine Dauvergne—were born in metropolitan France. Dussek and Krumpholtz hailed from Prague; Mozart and Gluck spent most of their adult lives in Vienna; Grétry was a citizen of Liège and trained in Rome; Martini was not Italian but Bavarian.

(Baptized Johann Paul Aegidius Martin, he became “Martini” for marketing purposes upon his arrival in Paris—testament to the cachet of Italian music amongst French cultural elites.) And, crucially, two of the program’s highlighted composers had personal and professional trajectories that traversed the French Atlantic. The German-born Hinner had been recruited to the ill-fated Kourou expedition in French Guiana, alongside his parents and siblings, at the age of eight; when his family perished, the young harpist was entrusted to the colonial governor and sent to France, where he in short order achieved fame as a virtuoso. SaintGeorges, the son of an enslaver father and an enslaved mother, was brought from Guadeloupe to the metropole as a child to pursue his education. (Although SaintGeorges’s musical talents were exceptional, his broader circumstances were not: one of several thousand individuals of African descent to have resided in Paris over the course of the eighteenth century.) Marie Antoinette’s networks thus demonstrate the vast scope of musical circulation in this period—as well as the inseparability of metropolitan prosperity and colonial slavery, more broadly, on the eve of the French and Haitian Revolutions.

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The Musical Revolutions of Marie Antoinette Julia Doe Few repertories of Western art music have been more persistently identified with absolutist politics than the serious operas (tragédies lyriques) and courtly ballets of Louis XIV’s Versailles. The soundscape of the French Baroque was consolidated under the auspices of monarchy and functioned as an embodiment of governmental propaganda and prestige. Music historians have often traced a narrative of decline from this apex of French royal patronage. Over the course of an “enlightened” eighteenth century, the story goes, the Bourbon rulers became increasingly disinvested in the musical arts; composers instead catered to the demands of a Parisian public sphere (reflected, for example, in entrepreneurial new concert series divorced from Crown sponsorship). It is true that the kings that succeeded the Roi Soleil possessed neither his passion for music nor his savvy at exploiting its political potential. Louis XV was personally fond of opera, but far less active as a patron than either his wife, Marie Leszczyńska, or his maîtresse en tître, Madame de Pompadour. Louis XVI was rather more apathetic toward the art form—so much so, apparently, that it made the news when he managed to stay awake through an evening at the theater.

When Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770, government administrators feared that she might share her new husband’s aversion to music. As M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet has discussed, she reacted with seeming indifference to the spectacles presented for her wedding festivities—lavish revivals of “canonical” court tragedies

by Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau. The Mémoires secrets expressed concern that the musical offerings had “bored her to tears” (18 May 1770). It quickly grew apparent, however, that these official anxieties were somewhat misguided: if the Habsburg archduchess was openly skeptical of la musique ancienne, the aging ceremonial repertory of the Bourbon kings, this was not because she did not like music. Rather, it was because her tastes were more modern, sophisticated, and cosmopolitan than those that then prevailed amongst the French royal family. In the years that followed, Marie Antoinette would emerge as a performer and patron of expansive politico-cultural vision. Indeed, her influence would revolutionize aesthetics and programming at Versailles—with repercussions that reverberated in Paris, in Francophile courts throughout Europe, and in the distant reaches of the French colonial empire. Opera Lafayette’s festival, “The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered,” thus offers a corrective to several ingrained assumptions about music in the French Enlightenment—situating this repertory within a global context, and reframing gendered narratives centered on kingly patronage (Doe [1]; Bartlet [2]; Powers [3]).

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Marie Antoinette as Performer and Patron

Marie Antoinette’s artistic predilections were shaped during her childhood in Habsburg Austria.

In the 1750s and 1760s, under the aegis of the Empress Maria Theresa, Vienna was “Europe’s most fertile ground for innovation in music drama both sung and danced” as stated by Bruce Alan Brown. The programming of the Austrian court theaters showcased a number of important, cosmopolitan currents: serious and comic works Fig. 1. Franz Xaver Wagenschön, “Archduchess Maria Antonia at the Spinet,” 1770: in Italian (opera A portrait of Marie Antoinette, dating from her teenage years. Kunsthistorisches seria and opera Museum, Vienna. buffa), “reform” operas by Christoph Willibald Gluck (including the well-known Orfeo ed Euridice), and forward-looking, naturalist ballets (ballets d’actions) from the choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre. It is ironic that Marie Antoinette’s preferences were initially perceived as hostile to the aesthetic of Versailles, for her father, the Emperor Francis I, was born in Lorraine, and had enthusiastically supported French artists, architects, writers, and dramatists in the Austrian capital in the years around mid-century.

French was the language of choice of the Viennese aristocracy, and a company of French comédiens was in regular residence at the royal palaces at Laxenburg and 17

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Schönbrunn. The archduchess was trained in declamation and deportment by a pair of actors from Paris and took in several imported French dialogue operas (opéras comiques) and ballets. Her first documented musical performance—at the age of four—was not of an Italian aria or Viennese keyboard divertimento but of a French popular song (vaudeville), which she sang for the familial celebrations marking the name day of her father in October of 1759 (Brown [4]; Doe [5]).

Musical performance would be a lifelong Fig. 2. Collection of airs for voice and harp, 1783: This set of works was pleasure for Marie composed by Philippe-Joseph Hinner (Marie Antoinette’s harp tutor) and Antoinette, and a published by Naderman (her preferred harp manufacturer). Bibliothèque nationale de France, department of music, A-34381 (3). critical component of her politicized selffashioning. She was schooled in several instruments in her youth, favoring the keyboard and the harp (Fig.1). Alongside her siblings, she was also given instruction in figured bass and rudimentary composition, studying with the Habsburg courtaffiliated Gluck, Johann Adolph Hasse, and Georg Christoph Wagenseil. Marie Antoinette continued this musical education after her arrival in Versailles. Her letters suggest that she devoted an hour or more every afternoon to lessons and practice —a routine she would keep up, on and off, for the duration of her reign. (At one point, she even requested that her harp tutor, Philippe-Joseph Hinner, undertake his own course of advanced training in Italy, so that he would be able to teach her more effectively; (Fig.2.) Music-making was not simply a solitary activity, but a vital form of diversion amongst the members of Marie Antoinette’s elite social circle. As queen, she would sponsor small-scale concerts in her private apartments several times each week (or upward of one hundred times every year). The archives of the royal 18

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Fig. 3. Atelier Ziesenis, Scene 9 from Les deux chasseurs et la laitière, watercolor and ink: This image depicts characters from an opéra comique by Duni, performed by the troupe des seigneurs at the Château du Petit Trianon.

Marie Antoinette would have played the milkmaid, Perrette (pictured right). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Album Ziesenis, Fol-O-ICO-003.

household—which contain extensive documentation of Marie Antoinette’s music purchases—provide a clear window into her personal tastes. Notably, the queen favored genres then marked as “progressive” in style (particularly in comparison to the antiquated and eminently “French” repertory of la musique ancienne). Her library skewed largely toward arias and arrangements from the latest opera buffa and opéra comique. She ordered full scores of recent French lyric comedies on a quarterly basis, along with dozens of extracted numbers from this same corpus. She was also a regular subscriber to the Journal d’ariettes italiennes, a bi-monthly compendium of modern Italian composition, and would often request to have copies bound and given as gifts to her relatives and close friends (Heartz [6]; Arneth & Geffroy [7]).

Contrary to her reputation for frivolity in other domains, the evidence suggests that Marie Antoinette approached her musical endeavors with considerable earnestness.

After the births of each of her children, for instance, she requested a stage be built in her apartments, so that operatic performances might continue unabated as she convalesced. The all-encompassing nature of this engagement is perhaps best demonstrated in the rehearsal and scheduling of the infamous troupe des seigneurs, the amateur (or “society”) company Marie Antoinette formed in the 1780s to mount 19

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spoken and lyric comedies in her private theater at the Château du Petit Trianon.

Among other roles, the queen portrayed the shepherdess, Jenny, in Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny’s Le roi et le fermier and the milkmaid, Perrette, in Egidio Duni’s Les deux chasseurs et la laitière (Fig.3). The society troupe prepared its performances extensively, with coaching from composers and actors of the royally affiliated stages, and up to five days of rehearsal before the presentation of each. The Count of MercyArgenteau (Marie Antoinette’s Austrian “minder,” who reported on her activities to Maria Theresa in Vienna) seems not to have been exaggerating when he remarked that musical theater had become the “single and unique” obsession of the monarch (Arneth & Geffroy [7]).

Opera Lafayette’s concert, “The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette,” curated by the harpist Sandrine Chatron, provides a rare window into this soundscape of aristocratic leisure. The program foregrounds genres in vogue with eighteenth-century musical amateurs: small-scale instrumental sonatas, elegant popular songs (romances), and chamber arrangements of operatic arias. In addition, it casts a spotlight on artists with personal connections to the queen, including Hinner and Gluck, who served as her music tutors; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom she met as a child in Vienna; and Jan Ladislav Dussek and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, instrumental virtuosos who accompanied her private soirées. Taken together, the body of composers and works on this program underscores the “internationalization” of the French court repertory in the late ancien régime. During Marie Antoinette’s reign, Versailles drew artistic talent from across Europe and the French Atlantic world. At the same time, the repertory favored at this courtly center circulated extensively in print, aided by new technologies of engraving and a concomitant expansion in the commerce of music for domestic use (Barbier [8]).

Ceremonial Music at Marie Antoinette’s Versailles

Marie Antoinette’s fondness for music was thus established during her childhood and reinforced through her extensive activities as an amateur performer. But from her very first months in France, these private preferences also influenced the public theatrical calendar at court—the ceremonial performances offered

by France’s three Crown-supported companies (the Opéra, Comédie-Française, and Comédie-Italienne) at the palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau. After the disastrous reception of the royal wedding festivities in 1770, the balance of Bourbon entertainments was quickly altered; Louis XV was convinced to add more light comedies to the upcoming schedule for the sole reason that “it was suggested . . . that this would be agreeable to Madame la dauphine” (Arneth & Geffroy [6]).

After the accession of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette took an even more active role in shaping the operatic productions of the court. Given the lack of interest in such 20

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matters from her husband, it was she who began to submit suggestions for repertory or to request that a planned program be adjusted to suit her current inclinations.

The diaries of Denis-PierreJean Papillon de la Ferté, the intendant of court spectacles, are filled with complaints of the hardships he endured to ensure that these interests were fulfilled. (During one stretch of performances, for example, he was forced to rush to the capital and work overnight preparing costumes for a ballet abruptly added to the next day’s program at Versailles.) A few years into her reign, Marie 4. Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, “Christoph Willibald Antoinette was firmly in charge Fig. Gluck,” 1775: The famed operatic composer served as childhood of these entertainments. As music tutor to Marie Antoinette. Her support would assure his subsequent success on Parisian stages. Kunsthistorisches Museum, the intendant wrote matter-ofVienna. factly before the opening of the autumn Fontainebleau season in 1777: “The trip to Fontainebleau will take place.

The queen chose the spectacles as she desired” (Papillon de la Ferté [9]).

An analysis of the operas staged at the court theaters during this period reveals a broad evolution in this repertory—and a striking tendency towards contemporary composition. As we have noted, theatrical programming at Versailles prior to Marie Antoinette’s tenure was dominated by the venerable tragédies lyriques of Lully, long associated with the golden age of Louis XIV. The musicologist Richard Taruskin describes these works, accordingly, as the “courtiest court operas” ever written.

The 1770 wedding revival of Lully’s Persée seems to have made a strong impression on Marie Antoinette, though precisely the opposite impression that officials had intended: she would witness only one further court production of the composer’s output in the two decades that followed. Rameau fared little better, with a single fullscale performance after 1770: a presentation of Castor et Pollux to mark a visit from the queen’s brother, Emperor Joseph II, in 1777. Such time-honored examples of la musique ancienne were replaced with updated tragedies by the younger generation of foreign composers favored by the queen. Gluck followed his former pupil to France 21

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in 1773 (Fig.4). Several of the composer’s French-language operas were given at court, and he would remain closely linked to Marie Antoinette throughout these residencies abroad. As the Mémoires secrets reported, the queen had granted the Austrian musician the right of entry “chez elle at any hour” (14 January 1774). Marie Antoinette’s well-publicized support for Gluck would not prevent her patronizing a number of Italian composers set against him as rivals in the periodical press. Niccolò Piccinni was brought under her protection by 1776 and enjoyed several prominent court premieres (Phaon and Pénélope); Antonio Salieri and Antonio Sacchini would enjoy similar privileges in the 1780s (Taruskin [10]).

Even more dramatic than these changes in the courtly repertory of lyric tragedy was a shift in the overall distribution of musical genres in favor at the royal residences.

Indeed, for all the legitimate scholarly attention surrounding Marie Antoinette’s impact on serious opera, Gluck does not even make the list of the top-ten most frequently staged composers during her time in Versailles. The most successful court artists of the 1770s and 1780s were instead established stars of opéra comique, led by the queen’s personal director of music, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, and followed

by Monsigny, Duni and François-André-Danican Philidor. Opéra comique had enjoyed a rapid rise in status in the years since mid-century, so its inclusion within these theatrical seasons was not entirely unprecedented. But it should be emphasized that critics considered the genre to be subsidiary to tragédie lyrique (and therefore unusual within the court context) for several reasons. Although opéra comique was now performed by the Crown-sponsored Comédie-Italienne, the genre had popular roots, originating at the fairground theaters of the French capital. What is more, dialogue operas frequently featured lower-class characters and an accessible musical language that contrasted sharply with the mythological settings and elevated idiom of the conventionally “absolutist” musique ancienne. Given these distinct historical and musico-dramatic characteristics of the comic genre, its predominance within the court repertory (and the extreme rapidity at which it attained this predominance) should be read as a significant disruption to the theatrical status quo.

The centerpiece of Opera Lafayette’s festival, a fully staged production of Grétry’s Silvain, embodies the forward-looking operatic aesthetic of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles. The work is a parable of “enlightened” thought, its plot pairing a lesson in domestic reconciliation with an attack on aristocratic privilege. (The title character has been estranged from his noble relatives and living in the countryside after his “unsuitable” marriage; his benevolent father ultimately intervenes, having been convinced by the peasants’ example that “simple virtue held more weight than birth.”)

While this progressive message might seem out of place at the very center of French absolutism, it was meant to project (whether ingenuously or not) the modernizing outlook of the regime, as well as the queen’s openness to the fashionable ideals of the 22

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philosophes. And, indeed, Grétry’s opéra comique would prove immensely successful at the Bourbon court theaters, presented more than a dozen times at Versailles and Fontainebleau between its 1770 premiere and the onset of the Revolution.

Notably, the work—and the genre of opéra comique, more generally—would also come to define the sound of French music outside of metropolitan France. Silvain was disseminated widely, with documented productions throughout Europe (Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Vienna, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, to name just a few) and the French Atlantic (including Cap Français, Port-au-Prince, and New Orleans). Comic operas like Silvain were readily “exportable”—modest in scale and economically efficient to reproduce. Because they were structured with spoken dialogue rather than recitative, their texts were also relatively straightforward to translate; before the end of the century, Silvain would be reworked into Danish, Dutch, German, Russian, and Swedish. The theatrical repertory associated with Marie Antoinette would thus promulgate her “enlightened” values on a vast European stage. It would simultaneously, however, expose the hypocrisies of these values in the profoundly inegalitarian context of the French colonial empire, as Laurent Dubois and Kaiama L. Glover so eloquently describe in their accompanying essay in this booklet, Theater and the Worlds of Saint-Domingue (Loewenberg [11]; Clay [12]).

Marie Antoinette and the Parisian Marketplace

The Crown-affiliated dramatic institutions of the ancien régime held a dual identity.

While the royal actors were responsible for the entertainments of the Bourbon court, they were primarily based in the capital, and granted a relative degree of autonomy for the internal governance and repertory decisions of their Parisian theaters. Much more than her Bourbon predecessors, however, Marie Antoinette expressed an interest in these companies’ inner workings and a willingness to intervene in their public offerings. Government officials often discussed placing theatrical regulations “before the eyes of the queen” prior to approval; these ministers also received performance schedules from the Crown-subsidized troupes in advance, so that Marie Antoinette could plan her trips to the capital around these events. As Patrick Barbier has noted, visits by members of the royal family to the Parisian theaters were rare in the years before 1770—largely reserved for “official” political and ceremonial occasions. Marie Antoinette, by contrast, was a frequent and prominent presence at these spectacles. She maintained annual box subscriptions to each of the Opéra, Comédie-Française, and Comédie-Italienne, and made at least 120 appearances at their Parisian productions between 1773 and 1787. As queen, it is worth underscoring, she held the power to shape these performances to her liking. There are memoranda in the archives of the royal household for couriers sent from Versailles to Paris to alter, on short notice, the advertised schedules of the royal troupes to accommodate the monarch’s wishes. On one evening in 1777, for example, Marie 23

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Fig. 5. Payment record from the French royal household (menus plaisirs): Memorandum detailing payment for porters alerting the Parisian Comédie-Italienne that “the queen has requested Silvain in place of La servante maîtresse.” Archives Nationales (Paris), O1 3050.126 (1777).

Antoinette instructed the Comédie-Italienne to substitute her preferred Silvain for the planned program of La servante maîtresse, a French translation of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s La serva padrona (Fig.5). The queen might even exert agency over casting: while “B” casts (doubles) tended to perform on Sundays, the star players would be asked to rush from home to the theater (essentially donning their costumes en route) if Marie Antoinette sent word of her intended attendance (Barbier [8]).

The queen’s support for individual composers and musical works might assure their success on Parisian stages. Her enthusiastic response was said to have sparked the favorable reception of Gluck’s first tragédie lyrique for the Paris Opéra, Iphigénie en Aulide, in 1774—paving the way for a “revolution” in the repertory of this institution in the years that followed. The Gluckian reform at the Opéra was both pragmatic (heightening the performance standards of the company’s singers and dancers) and aesthetic (imbuing the tragic genre with a renewed psychological complexity, harmonic sobriety, and sense of integrated dramatic planning). By the end of the ancien régime, Gluck’s oeuvre was essential to the output of this lyric theater. As various internal memoranda related, audience taste at this institution was now “entirely determined by the works of M. Gluck”—to the extent that the revival of an older tragedy virtually guaranteed “the complete loss of expenditures” as recorded in the menus plaisirs. Marie Antoinette’s attentions similarly raised the profile of artists in her favored domain of opéra comique. One critic reported that, “because the light and agreeable music” of this genre greatly pleased the queen, “its authors increasingly triumphed over their rivals, and gained an increasingly prominent reputation amongst the elite society” of the French capital (Mémoires secrets, 15 July 1770) (menus plaisirs, Archives Nationales [13]).

If Paris was a major European center of operatic composition in the eighteenth century, it was also a locus of innovation in sacred and in instrumental music—as programmed, notably, in new concert series like the Concerts de la Loge Olympique (the venue that commissioned the famous “Paris” symphonies of Franz Joseph 24

The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette

Haydn, as well as many dazzling violin showpieces of Saint-Georges) and the Concert Spirituel (the most prestigious concert organization of the age, running between 1725 and 1790; (Fig.6). As its moniker implies, the programming of the latter institution was originally focused on spiritual repertory, but Fig. 6. Poster for the Concert Spirituel at the Tuileries Palace, 2 February subsequently evolved 1779: Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra, Affiches-Réserve 29 (1779, 02–02). to include a rich variety of genres: symphonies, concertos, and operatic extracts, alongside sacred works.

These Parisian concerts have often been taken to demonstrate the “democratization” of musical patronage and consumption in the late ancien régime—run by individual entrepreneurs (rather than royal sponsors), relatively affordably priced, and with dynamic and eclectic programming meant to appeal to broad audiences. As Peter Schleuning has argued, the public concert functioned as a site of “bourgeois musical struggle” in which the rising middle classes “tore down the barriers and fences which had reserved cultural goods for the feudal elite”. But here, again, Marie Antoinette retained an influence: appearing with some regularity at performances, sponsoring notable virtuosos, and developing enduring associations with certain works (such as Haydn’s Symphony No. 85 in B-flat major, nicknamed “La Reine” after the queen’s preference for it) (Blanning [14]).

Opera Lafayette’s program, Concert Spirituel aux Caraïbes highlights the wideranging impact of these new forms of concert culture—as well as their encapsulation both of the hopeful possibilities and the stark limitations of the “enlightened” eighteenth century, in musical terms. The commercial model of the Concert Spirituel sparked numerous imitators throughout Europe, expanding public access to art and music in Leipzig, Stockholm, Berlin, Saint-Petersburg, Bordeaux, and Vienna, among other cities. The series proved so portable, indeed, that it was also replicated throughout the French colonial Caribbean. The transatlantic movement of French musicians and impresarios underscores the entanglements, financial and artistic, between colonies and metropole in the late ancien régime. The expanding markets for new music were interpreted within France as an embodiment of a progressive, 25

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non-hierarchical public sphere. And yet, as Pedro Memelsdorff and Andrei Pesic have recently argued, they both reflected and were facilitated by a broader economic system based upon imperial exploitation (Pesic [15]).

Marie Antoinette’s Musical Politics: In France and Abroad

The politicized reception of Marie Antoinette’s artistic projects was—and continues to be—fraught with paradoxes, with ramifications for both the personal reputation of the queen and contemporary understandings of the French musical Enlightenment. On one level, somewhat counterintuitively, there was a stark disjuncture in eighteenth-century criticism between appraisals of forward-looking musical developments, writ large, and appraisals of the queen’s role in sponsoring them. The multifaceted strands of musical “revolution” taking hold in the 1770s and 1780s—the pan-European reforms of Gluck and Piccinni, the rising profile of lyric comedy, the “democratization” of instrumental concert music – were largely embraced by French audiences and commentators. The queen’s patronage of these developments, however, was not uncontroversial, emerging as a prominent strand of censure in the press. Marie Antoinette’s private performances of opéra comique, for example, were held up as evidence of her impropriety and ignorance of royal decorum, resented by courtiers accustomed to deriving social capital through open access to the monarch. Her support for elaborate programs of ceremonial spectacle at Versailles and Fontainebleau fared little better—eliciting scrutiny for their frivolous expense. As Papillon de la Ferté grumbled in 1778: “Since the 12th of October, there have been fourteen days of performances, at Marly, at Versailles, and in the queen’s quarters—comedies, operas, buffa works, ballets. This does nothing to reduce our expenses, either in the productions themselves or in the little theaters that had to be erected for the occasion … None of this pleases the minister of Finance, and it amuses me even less, for the public likes nothing more than to enormously exaggerate this sort of expenditure” (Papillon de la Ferté [9]).

Finally, the queen’s association with composers born outside of France intersected with broader concerns about her foreign allegiances – the lingering suspicion that, despite her marriage, she remained more Habsburg than Bourbon. Marie Antoinette was accused of acting in both the political and musical interests of her mother and brother; the queen’s support for the Austrian Gluck (as well as the Italians Piccinni, Salieri, and Sacchini) over the established representatives of la musique ancienne provided fodder to those skeptics who deemed her insufficiently French. These pressures reached their peak at the final Fontainebleau season of Marie Antoinette’s reign, in 1786; an opera championed by the queen—Sacchini’s Oedipe à Colone— was hastily replaced by the work of a French composer (Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne’s Phèdre), in response to criticisms in the Gazette musicale de Paris, that she accorded “too much favor to foreigners”. In the politically charged atmosphere of the late 26

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ancien régime, artistic choices had far-reaching consequences—ones that would be detrimental for Marie Antoinette’s reputation even as they proved “revolutionary” for French musical culture as a whole (Doe [1]; Geoffroy-Schwinden [16]).

More broadly, the works sponsored by the queen—and their contested reception history—prompt us to reconsider the mechanisms through which this repertory generated political meaning. Put another way, the music featured in Opera Lafayette’s festival informs us about ancien-régime politics by demonstrating (and powerfully so) that meaning was not simply present “within” the works themselves, but produced through the complex interaction of authorial intent, audience composition, and venue of performance. The body of pastoral opéras comiques patronized by Marie Antoinette offers a case in point here. As we have noted, French lyric comedy of the late eighteenth century has often been associated with the progressive worldview of the philosophes, for the manner it foregrounded the musical idioms and social concerns of the third estate. Presented in a Parisian or ceremonial courtly context, an opera like Silvain might be used to broadcast the “open-mindedness” of the regime, or the monarchy’s ostensible concern for its rural dependents. Produced at the queen’s faux-rustic retreat at the Petit Trianon, pastoral opera had starkly different implications. Marie Antoinette’s staged recreations of country life were interpreted less as a sign of engagement than of detachment, a troubling displacement of realworld responsibilities into the illusory realm of the theater. This chasm grew more acute in France’s Caribbean colonies, as Callum Blackmore details in his program note for Silvain; here, the pastoral utopianism of Silvain could be used to justify the perpetuation of a plantation economy based upon enslavement. The opera acquired yet further layers of meaning in Louisiana at the turn of the nineteenth century, its critiques of land rights now set against a backdrop of American territorial expansion.

Opera Lafayette’s festival encourages us to be attuned to this historical nuance: to the circuitous global paths that artists traveled, and to the manner their performances re-sounded distinctively as they did so.

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Bibliography 1. Doe, Julia. The Comedians of the King: Opéra Comique and the Bourbon Monarchy on the Eve of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

2. Bartlet, M. Elizabeth C. “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette and La rosière de Salency.”

Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 111 (1984–1985): 92–120.

3. Powers, David M. From Plantation to Paradise?: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies, 1764-1789. Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 2014.

4. Brown, Bruce Alan. Gluck and the French Theatre in Vienna. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

5. Doe, Julia. “Marie-Antoinette, la musique et la danse.” In Histoire de l’opéra français du roi soleil à la Révolution, edited by Hervé Lacombe, pp.

577–585. Paris: Éditions Fayard, 2021.

6. Heartz, Daniel. “A Keyboard Concerto by Marie Antoinette?” In Essays in Musicology: A Tribute to Alvin Johnson, edited by Lewis Lockwood and Edward Roesner, 201–212. Philadelphia: American Musicological Society, 1990.

7. Arneth, Alfred von and M. A. Geffroy, eds. Correspondance secrète entre Marie Thérèse et le Cte de Mercy-Argenteau. 3 vols. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot Frères, Fils et Cie, 1874.

8. Barbier, Patrick. Marie-Antoinette et la musique. Paris: Grasset, 2022.

9. Papillon de la Ferté, Denis-Pierre Jean. Journal de Papillon de la Ferté, intendant et contrôleur de l’argenterie, menus-plaisirs, et affaires de la chambre du roi (1756–1780). Edited by Ernest Boysse. Paris: Ollendorf, 1887.

10. Taruskin, Richard. Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Vol. 2 of The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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continued 11. Loewenberg, Alfred. Annals of Opera, 1597–1940. 3rd ed. London: John Calder, 1978.

12. Clay, Lauren. Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and its Colonies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.

13. Records of the menus plaisirs, Archives Nationales (F-Pan), Série O1 616–618, 842, 848–853, 2809–2810, 3026–3086.

14. Blanning, T. C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

15. Pesic, Andrei. “The Flighty Coquette Sings on Easter Sunday: Music and Religion in Saint-Domingue, 1765–1789.” French Historical Studies 42 (2019): 563–593.

16. Geoffroy-Schwinden, Rebecca Dowd. “A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account of Marie Antoinette’s Musical Politics: Women, Music, and the French Revolution.” Women & Music 21 (2017): 72–100.

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Opera Lafayette presents

Concert Spirituel aux Caraïbes

Religious Music in the French Caribbean 1760 – 1790 El Museo del Barrio Thursday, June 9, 2022 at 7:00 PM & The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Terrace Theater Sunday, June 12, 2022 at 7:30 PM This performance is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

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Program Messe en cantiques Cayenne, 1763

A l’Introit. Air: Folies d’Espagne Domenico Zippoli, Versi 1-2 (from: Sonate d’intavolatura, Rome, 1716) Au Confiteor. Air: Quand on a du vin de Champagne Au Kyrie. Air: Au Gloria en Excelsis. Air: Eglé tient tous se biens A l’Offertoire. Air: Agréable Solitude

Concert Spirituel au jour de Noël Port-au-Prince, 1780 - 1786

Grave……………………………....................................................Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (from Stabat Mater) (1710-1736) Quel air pur………………………….........................................................Adolfe Benoît Blaise (from Isabelle et Gertrude, libretto by Charles-Simon Favart (?- 1772) Le marriage………………………….......................................Johann Paul Aegidius Martini (from L’amoureux de quinze ans, libretto by Pierre Laujon) (1741 – 1816) Divertissement instrumental……………..............………………………Egido Duni (1 and 2 from: La fée Urgèle) (1708-1775) Qu’il est cruel (L’amoureux de quinze ans)…………………...................…... Martini / Laujon Au mot d’amour…………............………….........................................François-Joseph Gossec (from Toinon et Toinette, libretto by Jean-Auguste Julien) (1734-1829) Divertissement (3 and 4, La fée Urgèle)………............…………………..........Duni Sonate op. 5, n. 4, Invocation……............………………Jean-Frédéric Edelmann (1749-1794) Divertissement (5, from: La fée Urgèle)……………….................…………Duni Sonate à violon seul et Bc op. 4, n. 5, Allegro………….........……M. Tremais Sonate pour harpe op. 7, s.n. [Allegro]………………......….Philippe Hinner (1755-1784)

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continued s.o. 1777, n. 2, Presto…………………………………………...............................................….....Hinner Concerto 16 per violino ……...........…………….. Giovanni Mane Giornovichi Rondò Allegro Vivace (1747-1804) Ce qui séduit les dames……………....................................................................................Duni (from La fée Urgèle, libretto by Claude-Henri de Fusée de Voisenon) O ma tendre musette, Oui, malgré moi…………......................................Nicolas Dalayrac (from L’amant statue, libretto by Desfontaines ) (1753-1809)

Messe en cantiques A l’Offertoire. Air: Agréable Solitude Au Pater. Air: Musette de Desjardins Domenico Zippoli, Offertorio (Sonate d’intavolatura, Rome, 1716)

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Program conceived and conducted by Pedro Memelsdorff A.J. Guban, Lighting Design Kaiama Glover and Laurent Dubois, Pre-Concert Lecture

Artists

Samantha Louis-Jean………………...................................…………………………….....Soprano Sophia Burgos..............................................................................................................Soprano Sishel Claverie…………………………...................................……………………Mezzo-Soprano Jehú Otero………………………….......................................……………………..........……...Tenor Victor Sicard………………………………………………...…...........................................Baritone Jonathan Woody……………………….....….……………................................……Bass Baritone Théotime Langlois de Swarte...................….................................................................Violin Sandrine Chatron..................................……………………………………..….................…Harp Charles Brink….……....................................…………………………….………….............…Flute

Le Port au Prince, île de Saint-Domingue (artist/date unknown)

Production Staff

Cat Hickerson…….…………………………………..…...............................…….Stage Manager Raine Bode…………………………......……..……….................................Production Manager Patrick Kilbride…………………................................…………………………………...Supertitles Todd Mion…………………………………..……...........................……….…..Technical Director Leslie Nero………………………………….…..............................…………….....Music Librarian Jason Shafer…………………….................................……………………………….Video Director Bill Siegmund………...............................………………………………………….Audio Producer Nancy Jo Snider……………………....................………………Orchestra Personnel Manager 34

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Opera Lafayette Orchestra Violin 1

Théotime Langlois de Swarte † Concertmaster June Huang Theresa Salomon Elizabeth Field Anca Nicolau

Violin 2

Keats Diefenbach* Natalie Kress † Geza Kordes C. Anne Loud

Viola

Oboe

Caroline Giassi* Fatma Daglar †

Bassoon

Anna Marsh*

French Horn

Elisabeth Axtell* Linda Dempf

Percussion

Michelle Humphreys* Aldo Rivera †

Kyle Miller* Isaiah Chapman

Guitar

Cello

Harpsichord/Organ

Loretta O’Sullivan* NJ Snider David Bakamjian

Paul Holmes Morton* †

Jeffrey Grossman* †

Bass

Jessica Powell Eig* †

Flute

Charles Brink* Immanuel Davis

*Principal †Opera Lafayette debut

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Program Note Pedro Memelsdorff As is well known, Saint-Domingue was the richest and most powerful of France’s 18th-century Caribbean colonies. More than half of the coffee and sugar consumed in Europe and almost a third of France’s gross income came from Saint-Domingue’s legendary plantations—entirely based on the workforce of brutally exploited subSaharan slaves.

Numerous documents inform us about the religious and cultural life of white planters of the time: diaries, letters, traveler’s chronicles or announcements in the incipient local press. We know, for instance, that parish churches hosted sung services of Catholic observance; and that eight opera theatres—some of which of European dimensions—regularly imported concert programs and operas from France. Between 1764 and 1791 over 8,000 European-styled concert evenings and 1,200 operas were staged in Saint-Domingue, to please an audience perhaps as eager and demanding as that of Paris.

Little is known, however, about the religious and cultural life of enslaved people of African ascent. Uprooted and—in the best of cases—forced to assimilation, their ritual and (sub)cultural life, mostly prohibited, was rarely documented and can only partially be reconstructed using vestigial written witnesses or still living traditions.

The present concert shows two moments in the religious and musical life of two of France’s 18th-century Caribbean colonies. One of them consists in the evocation of a Concert Spirituel at Saint-Domingue that is a devotional concert held at the theatre of Port-au-Prince on the Christmas day of 1780 (replicated with new pieces in the coming years). It included the public debut of the fourteen-year-old Elisabeth Minette Ferrand, first title-role soloist of color in the history of French opera. The success of that evening paved her way for a stunning musical and theatrical career in which she sung and acted in over forty operas in eight years.

Unmarried mother of nine children and fragile in health, Minette exiled first to Baltimore, Charleston and Philadelphia, and eventually to New Orleans, where she died young in 1807.

Minette’s hits are here echoed by violin virtuoso music of the same period— especially that composed and performed by French musicians immigrated to the Caribbean colonies of the time.

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The second moment is to a large extent a discovery: Messe en cantiques, a mass setting composed for, and sung by, enslaved people of African ascent living in the French Guiana in the decades around 1740. Only partially published in 1982, it was our task to identify the music of most of its movements, here presented for the first time. The Messe en cantiques includes an initial procession to be sung during the (often chained) walks from the sugar-cane plantations to the countryside chapels, and fourteenth further mass movements. Their style ranges from prebaroque ‘simple polyphony’ to elaborated opera arias with complex harmony and obbligato instrumentation. This contrast prompts to reconsider the musical training of at least part of the enslaved people, taught by Jesuit missionaries to read and write—often against the will of European owners.

Not least, the Messe en cantiques became a part of the spiritual patrimony of runaway communities in the Guianese hinterland—thus an emblem of cultural appropriation of self-emancipated slaves.

Concert Spirituel aux Caraïbes, in short, offers a glimpse into the beauty and melancholy of French-Caribbean spiritual music—in a time of extreme social injustice, tension and pain. The program may also help us to reflect on the resignification of European repertoires in non-European contexts. For Marin Marais’ Pieces de viole were certainly not the same if played in Paris or sung by enslaved people in Cayenne or Kourou; and Egidio Duni’s or Nicholas Dalayrac’s arias on freedom and self-determination must have acquired new meanings when sung by an enfant prodige of color in Port-au-Prince. This re-signification determined our historical research—and inspired this concert.

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Theater and the Worlds of Saint-Domingue Laurent Dubois & Kaiama L. Glover The history of theater in the French Caribbean, particularly the colony of Saint-Domingue, is intertwined with that of the broader French Atlantic. SaintDomingue was the most profitable colony in the French empire, and indeed in the world, in the late eighteenth century. Its brutal plantation economy produced sugar and coffee for export to France, and from there to many other parts of Europe, creating fortunes for a small number of merchants and planters. The centrality of that system in the creation of France’s wealth has long been overlooked, but it is visible everywhere, in the port cities of Nantes and Bordeaux that were the center of the French slave trade, but also in the center of Paris, where the Elysée, today the Presidential Palace, was built by a slave trader named Antoine Crozat with the fortune he made from trafficking in human beings. In the eighteenth century, the courtly and bourgeois worlds of Europe, where theater and music thrived, were deeply interlinked with the worlds of the Caribbean plantation system. Our task today is to understand, and truly listen to, the complex connections between these worlds, the contradictions that suffused them, and the ways that past still haunts and shapes the present.

The colonial world, like metropolitan France, was alive with theater. Even if most of the wealth produced through plantation slavery ended up in France, it also created boom towns in the colonies themselves. Le Cap and other port cities of Saint-Domingue, as well as the booming capital city of Fort-de-France, Martinique, all had theaters by the second half of the eighteenth century. LouisMédéric Moreau de St. Méry, a Martinican-born lawyer and prolific chronicler of the world of colonial Saint-Domingue, wrote extensively about the theater.

Building on this and other sources, two twentieth-century Haitian intellectuals and writers – Jean Fouchard and Marie-Vieux Chauvet – produced powerful works of history and literature on the topic. In this essay, we draw on and explore their work in order to tell the story of Saint-Domingue’s theatrical worlds.

Fouchard was a journalist, writer and historian who, from the 1950s through the 1970s, penned a series of remarkable books on the cultural history of SaintDomingue. One of the most influential of these was his sweeping description of the world of theater in late eighteenth century Saint-Domingue, Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue [Theater in Saint-Domingue], published in 1954. The work is exhaustive in scope, presenting every detail, every anecdote, every atmosphere of this spectacular realm – from the construction of the colony’s opera houses and 38

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concert halls, to the squabbles among its principal financiers, to the triumphs and misadventures of its most beloved performers. His richly documented narrative was, in Fouchard’s own words, an attempt at nothing less than the “resurrection of theatrical life in SaintDomingue” (Fouchard [1]).

Just three years later, in 1957, celebrated novelist and playwright Marie Chauvet Fig.1. The French slave-trading ship Marie Seraphique: The Marie published her work of Seraphique was a French slave trading vessel from Nantes that travelled to the historical fiction, Danse Kongo region of West Central Africa and carried African captives across the to Saint-Domingue. This image shows the ship harbored in the bay at sur le volcan [Dance on Atlantic Cap Français in 1772, with whites being rowed out to examine and purchase the Volcano], an equally the captives. Watercolor by unknown artist. ambitious account of theater life in the colony during the years leading up to its world-changing revolution. Taking up one of the most dramatic stories told in Fouchard’s book, Chauvet tells the tale of one woman’s extraordinary life against the backdrop of an equally extraordinary moment in Haiti’s history. That woman, Minette, was one of the great stars of theatrical life in Saint-Domingue, and unlike almost all the other actors and actresses of the time, she was a woman of African descent. In recent years, we have learned a great deal more about her story through the research of Bernard Camier.

Chauvet and Fouchard both sought to represent the complex imbrication of the brutalities of plantation slavery with the thriving, even glittery, performance culture of Saint-Domingue. They both recognized, and powerfully depicted in their work, that the colonial world was built on exploitation and death. As many as a million Africans were brought to the colony over the course of the eighteenth century, and at the end of that time the enslaved population was about half a million (Fig.1). In the 1780s, earthquakes and hurricanes battered Port39

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au-Prince, and the enslaved were always the most vulnerable. The wealthy planters who attended performances in Le Cap and Port-au-Prince were often travelling from plantations with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of enslaved people – most of them African-born survivors of the Middle Passage – who worked under the daily threat of corporal punishment. Each plantation had, at its center, a post where enslaved people were whipped, burned, sometimes executed.

These plantation worlds sustained their own forms of culture, often practiced somewhat in secret – song and music, including the development of a new musical Fig.2. Haitian Banza, replica by Pete Ross: Artist Pete instrument known in SaintRoss makes replicas of a Haitian banza collected by Victor Domingue as the banza, or banjo; Schoelcher in Haiti in 1841. The resonators on early banjos religious rituals; and widespread were made of gourds and sometimes decorated with religious symbols like the cross (a Kongo symbol for the meeting of the healing practices that sought to worlds of the dead and living) here. Source: Laurent Dubois counter the devastating impacts of and Kaimaia Glover. the regime of slavery (Fig.2). These were in many cases criminalized, considered to be forms of resistance to slavery.

But they also came to shape aspects of the more formally-sanctioned performance culture in the colony, through plays in Creole that sometimes depicted the AfroCaribbean culture that was, in fact, the dominant one on the island in terms of its broad presence in the population.

It was French-oriented theater, however, that occupied the most structurally visible cultural institutions of the colony: the theaters that existed in the center of all the major port towns, offering performances several times each week. The largest theaters in Saint-Domingue were in Le Cap and the colonial capital of Port-auPrince, where Minette grew up and largely performed. But by the 1780s there were also theaters in smaller port towns: Les Cayes, Léogane, and St. Marc. Theatergoing was not without its discomforts and dangers. The tropical heat was worsened by the practice of wearing fashionable velvet clothes to the theater and the chandeliers that lit up the theaters. One man described how he almost had become 40

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“a mute” at one play when, twisting his neck and looking upwards at a woman sitting above him with “pleasure and affection” – because, he claimed innocently, she very much “resembled his first wife” – hot wax from a candle overhead had spilled down his throat! There were fights, and the occasional earthquake. In 1784, one struck during a performance in Port-au-Prince, and the audience fled in panic (Fouchard [1]; Fouchard [2]).

Despite these dangers and inconveniences, the theater was extremely popular.

As Moreau de Saint-Méry, although himself a Creole (that is a person born in the Americas) from Martinique, commented with some displeasure, the colony’s Creoles had a great “enthusiasm” and “passion” for “those tragedies that repel people of good taste.” Governors, colonial administrators, and uniformed officers attended regularly. The Conseil du Cap, the island’s equivalent to the French Parlements, rented the right balcony of the Le Cap theater with such consistency that it was named after them. The performances were an occasion to show off the latest fashions, to rendez-vous and flirt, to watch and hear plays, and to celebrate or excoriate those who performed them. And the repertoire in the colony was extremely rich, paralleling that of the theaters of Paris and other French towns, bringing together operas, comedies, historical tragedies – all that eighteenth century theater had to offer to its large and enthusiastic audiences (Fouchard [1]; Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description [3]; Clay [4]).

In Saint-Domingue, the theater also became an important site for social struggle.

Free people of African descent, who made up about five percent of the total population and played a vital economic role in the colony, asserted their cultural presence by pushing to attend performances. The members of this group were extremely diverse in both their familial histories and their economic and social status, and thus constituted an unsettlingly fluid social class. The terms used to describe them in legal documents varied across time and according to context, and contemporary scholars continue to struggle over the question of which terms to use. While many free people of color were of mixed European and African ancestry and were described and described themselves as mulâtres, others were entirely of African descent. The term affranchis, a term from the period used frequently in Chauvet’s novel, was also used to describe these individuals. The terms nègre libre and négresse libre – which can be translated as “free black” – were used to describe free men and women entirely of African descent. Contemporary historians often use the term “free people of color” to describe all individuals of African descent in the colony.

With increasing intensity over the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, the growing population of free people of African descent was subjected to a complex battery of racial legislation that aimed to affirm the idea that, despite 41

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Fig.3. “Free Women of Color, Saint-Domingue”: This image, from Agostino Brunias’s 1769 painting “A West Indian Flower Girl,” shows free women of color in an urban setting. It is one among Brunias’s many depictions of everyday life in the 18th century Americas, and was originally featured in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Loix et Constitution des Colonies Francais (Paris 1784, 1790).

their wealth or status, they remained inferior to whites. They were excluded from certain professions and faced regulations that made it unlawful for them to use the last names of white parents, in an effort to limit the implications of filiation and the possibilities of inheritance. Their consumption of consumer goods was micromanaged in ways that can now seem absurd––limitations on what clothes and furniture they could buy––but that highlight the ways in which economic power on the part of free people of color was always seen as a potential threat to racial hierarchies (Garrigus [5]).

The gens de couleur occupied a baffling place in colonial society. They were living contradictions of the foundations of the slave system. Whether “black” or “mixed-race,” whether born free or formerly enslaved, the very fact of their being was a testament to the fragility of the imposed order, both its biological and socio-political logics – to the mutability (as opposed to the ontology), that is, of enslaved status and to the illegitimacy of racial distinction. Not only was the sociobiological positioning of the gens de couleur unstable and, as such, menacing, but their political allegiance was notoriously unreliable. As such, the gens de couleur posed a constant threat to the fantasy of absolute racial distinction so critical to the functioning of slave society. The colonial state responded by disavowing, through legislation and regulation, the uncomfortable truths this social class quite literally embodied.

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Fig.4. Agostino Brunias, “The Linen Market”: Agostino Brunias was an Italian painter who lived in the Eastern Caribbean in the 1760s and 1770s and made a series of paintings of daily life there. These were reproduced and repurposed in many different settings, such as this one, a much-circulated image of a market in Saint-Domingue.

Some free people of color were able to amass significant fortunes, and many played key roles in the social, economic and cultural life of urban areas. Vincent Ogé, whose uprising against the colonial regime is depicted in Chauvet’s novel, owned enough plantations and slaves in the 1780s to have amassed a fortune triple that of wealthy Paris merchants of the time. In Port-au-Prince, where Minette grew up and performed, many free women of color owned real estate and lived on the profits from renting it. One free woman of color owned the Vauxhall of Port-au-Prince, a fashionable venue offering food, performances, and dancing (Burnard and Garrigus [6]; Garrigus [7]; Rogers and King [8]). (Fig.3 and Fig.4) For people in the colony who were not literate, including both enslaved people and affranchis, the theater was a particularly important cultural space. While free people of color and some enslaved people attended plays, this was not the only way to learn about them, or to hear about their plots, themes, and lines, since those avid to attend the theater were also avid to speak about it elsewhere. People in the colony, writes Fouchard, “talked about theater as much as about the cost of sugar or politics.” And as Chauvet portrays powerfully in her novel, the life of the theater intersected constantly with broader currents of urban life. For example, because the Port-au-Prince theater did not have dressing rooms until 1787, actors and actresses were often seen walking through the town in their costumes (Fouchard [1]).

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Though much of the repertoire, and many of the performers, had crossed the Atlantic from metropolitan France, the meaning and practice of theater was very much indigenous in its way. The experiences of plantation life in Saint-Domingue readily made their way onto the stage. There were a number of local dramaturges who produced popular plays, some of them in Creole – the first literary works produced in the language. One of them, Jeannot et Thérèse, was a reworking of Rousseau’s blockbuster opera Le Devin du Village. The play is a romantic comedy, and in the Saint-Domingue version the village is a plantation, the characters are enslaved and free people of African descent, and the magician who helps reunite lovers is an African-born healer named Papa Simon. Fouchard wrote about the play based on advertisements for it in the newspaper but, more recently, researchers have found full manuscripts of the play, first in the British Public Record Office and later in the Library Company of Philadelphia. These manuscripts show us a play that was truly written in Haitian Creole – it would have been unintelligible for those who did not speak the language – and rich with symbols of Haiti’s religious culture. First performed in 1758, it was a favorite among theatergoers in the colony for decades. In fact, on the evening Minette made her debut in a fulllength role in an opera, the other play performed was none other than Jeannot et Thérèse, in which Minette’s white mentors performed the lead roles – in blackface (Camier and Dubois [9]; Fouchard [1]).

Minette’s story encapsulates and illuminates all the contradictions of this society, and of the place of free people of African descent within it. It was first unearthed through the research of Jean Fouchard. In a chapter titled simply “Minette et Lise,” he offered a brief chronicle recounting the rise of two young mixed-race girls, the eponymous Minette and Lise, to the highest echelons of celebrity in SaintDomingue. The girls’ story is, in and of itself, the stuff of fiction. Born in poverty to a formerly enslaved woman of color, they are “discovered” at the ages of fourteen and twelve, respectively, by a local white actress Madame Acquaire. Madame Acquaire trained the two sisters and, working with others at the Port-au-Prince theater, took the bold step of presenting Minette to the public. Minette was such a success that she went on to star in several different theatrical works, appearing on stages throughout the colony and celebrated everywhere for her remarkable talent and great beauty.

Minette’s roles on the stage were rich and varied: she performed as Love, a character “whose head was separated from her corpse” and sang from the moon; as a woman disguised as a man; as the fairy Myris in the popular opera La Belle Arsène; and in another opera where she sang the following lines which, as Fouchard points out, were rich with multiple meanings:

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Is there a more glorious destiny?

I will see the earth under my feet I will walk on thunder . . .

I will triumph, I am the Queen Minette performed throughout the 1780s, the period that marked the height of the theater’s popularity in Saint-Domingue. Only one other actress can legitimately be called her rival, a white woman named Marie Marsan. As Fouchard notes, one anonymous review that celebrated “Madame Marsan” over “La Demoiselle Minette” contained hints of color prejudice, revealing “not only an echo of the secular duel between mulatresses and white women, but also – albeit almost imperceptibly – the subtle demands of the regime and the milieu” (Fouchard [1]).

For Fouchard, and Chauvet, Minette’s story illustrated the exceptional role of theater in the evolution of Haitian society. That was because Minette, despite all her talent, had to constantly struggle against the forces of white domination and control. Not only did white men control the economics of theater, something well dramatized in Chauvet’s novel, they also shaped taste through their published reviews of actors and actresses. Fouchard documents this thoroughly, notably through his descriptions of the critiques made by a man named Charles Mozard, who time and again critiqued Minette, condemning her, among else, for choosing costumes he deemed inappropriate for the roles she was playing. Yet Fouchard claims that “Minette did not worry much” about Mozard’s disfavor, knowing “in her heart” that those who critiqued her did so simply because she had “risen so quickly and so high” (Fouchard [1]). Chauvet, on the other hand, believed this must have deeply impacted Minette, and includes a scene in which an anguished Minette goes to Mozard to explain to him in detail why she must dress a certain way in order to confront the degrading stereotypes she faced as a woman of color.

Fouchard was able to find one powerful trace of Minette’s own aesthetic choices in the form of a newspaper announcement for one of her performances in 1783, which explained Minette’s decision to perform in the French opera L’Infante de Zamora. The reason, the article explained, was that this work was “in good taste,” a play that “fans of beauty will always see again with pleasure.” The play marked a contrast with “those ephemeral productions that have bastardized or we might say degraded the lyric stage for some time, plays that are only local and which often only focus on daily life in private society.” This was a disparaging reference to locally written plays, some in Creole, including Clément’s popular drama Jeannot et Thérèse. Fouchard interprets Minette’s rejection of the local plays as a sign of 45

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her cultural Francophilia, situating her in a tradition of elite Haitian rejection of the Creole language and other forms of Haitian culture. Between her and her sister Lise, who did perform in Creole language plays, Fouchard sees the history of Haitian literary and cultural debates condensed (Fouchard [1]). Chauvet, however, adds another dimension to this interpretation, suggesting that what makes Minette uncomfortable was the fact that such “facile and superficial plays” depicted the slaves without serving some “greater purpose.” If only, Minette thinks, such plays could “cry out in the slaves’ own language their sufferings and their desire for freedom!” In Chauvet’s interpretation, then, the issue is not that Minette did not want to perform in Creole, but rather that she did not want the experiences of the enslaved to become part of a culture in which “the planters always came out smelling like roses” (Chauvet [10]).

Chauvet’s novel brings alive the social complexities of Saint-Domingue because it provides portraits of individuals – free people of African descent, enslaved people, white slave owners and white actors, parents and children – in a way that doesn’t allow for the simple application of racial categories to political and social life.

The diversity among the characters of African descent, some of who own slaves themselves, is compellingly chronicled, as are the contradictions and fissures among the community of colonists.

Chauvet centers her narrative on the gens de couleur, as opposed to the enslaved population. But her representation of this class attends as fully to its corruption, prejudices, and misjudgments, as to its heroism. The deep complexities of the relationship between this group and the enslaved is richly drawn through a diversity of characters, some of them unapologetic slave-owners, others working to help runaways find their freedom. And, over the course of the novel, Minette is in a sense politically radicalized through her contact with injustices suffered by the enslaved, and comes to understand justice through blackness. Chauvet’s representation of confused allegiances and self-contradicting social actors suggests that class alliance or, rather, alliance of condition – infused, certainly, with racial codes and hierarchies – largely situated the various protagonists in the transformation of colony into postcolony. Chauvet represents the gens de couleur as a complex, indeed unstable and incoherent group, offering an ambivalent story that in its context represented a powerful articulation of a different way of thinking about race in Haitian history.

This also allows Chauvet to evoke the ways in which revolutionary thought was circulating among these various networks, including the affranchis. The enslaved themselves remain relatively off-stage in her novel, however, in contrast to the

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more recent depiction of this period offered by Evelyne Trouillot in The Infamous Rosalie. But Chauvet’s Minette is radicalized by encounters with various forms of marginalized blackness, including learning about Fig.5. Affiches Américaines, 1776: A typical newspaper advertisement seeking an escaped her mother’s enslaved person from Saint-Domingue’s leading newspaper, the Affiches américaines – in this instance a man named Basile, who, it is noted, “plays the violin very well.” enslaved past, the story of Zoe Lambert, an escaped slave, and the mutilation of a character named Joseph Ogé, the brother of Vincent Ogé, who in the novel is depicted as advocating for the emancipation of black slaves. And, throughout the novel, the presence of maroons – those Blacks who lived as fugitives from enslavement – as part of the fabric of both plantation and urban society is vividly rendered. A few decades before Fouchard published his classic Maroons of Liberty, Chauvet’s Dance depicted maroons being harbored by networks of activists in urban areas, and therefore playing an important role in the unfolding political movement. The richness with which the novel presents these themes is based on the way she places women at the center of the narrative, for this allows her to render a deeply complex and anchored portrayal of how ideas and practices actually moved in a society on the verge of revolution (Fig.5).

Fouchard and Chauvet offer us very different portraits of the end of Minette’s life.

Fouchard argues that she probably died during a terrible few days of killings and fire in Port-au-Prince in late 1791 that were part of a larger set of uprisings that destroyed plantations throughout the island (Fig.6). Chauvet gives her a little bit more time, carrying the story forward to 1793, when the French commissioner Sonthonax abolished slavery on the island, and then ending her book – and Minette’s life – with a powerful scene at the moment freedom finally comes.

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Fig.6. “Vue des 40 jours d’incendie des habitations de la plaine du Cap Français. Arrivée le 23 Août 1791” Jean-Baptiste Chapuy: Based on a painting done by Jean-Pierre Bouquet, this engraving depicts the destruction of sugar plantations across the Northern plain by insurgents in 1791. The city of Le Cap Français and the bay filled with ships at anchor are visible in the foreground.

And in fact Minette’s story, too, stretched out beyond the Haitian Revolution, taking her to Cuba and ultimately New Orleans. Over the past decade, Bernard Camier – in collaboration with other scholars including Pedro Memelsdorff – has tracked down a number of fascinating additional traces of Minette’s life of which Fouchard, and thus Chauvet, were not aware. These traces have emerged from a range of sources, including notarial records, consular records relating to refugees in Cuba, and records from New Orleans. Camier’s work offers up a strikingly different portrait of both Minette’s family background and the broader course of her life. He convincingly argues that Minette’s mother was free, as was her grandmother. He notes that she was born on the Fourth of July, 1767, and when she was baptized a few weeks later her grandmother, Elizabeth Dougé, was there. Her father, Marin Ferrand, a French treasurer working with the colonial government, was not. Minette seems to have been raised in comfortable circumstances, and even may have owned two slaves. Though the evidence is circumstantial, Camier concludes that she had a romantic relationship with François Saint-Martin, manager of the Port-au-Prince theater, and had her first child with him at the age of fifteen. She went on to have two more children after his death, two girls named Marie Jeanne and Louise Françoise. And she probably 48

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raised them to adulthood, though not in Saint-Domingue. For it is very likely that Minette did not die in Port-au-Prince in 1791, or even in 1793. Rather, fragments from the archive suggest that she embarked on a journey into exile at that time – that at some point, perhaps soon after 1802, she made her way to Cuba and then New Orleans, following a route traced by many others from Saint-Domingue during this period (Camier [11]).

In November 1806, a benefit performance was announced in a French-language New Orleans newspaper, the Moniteur de la Louisiane. It was for an “ancienne artiste” named Minette Ferrand. The advertisement noted that a long illness had left her in difficult circumstances, especially given that she was taking care of a “large family.” The play she was meant to perform, likely chosen by Minette, was Euphrosine ou la Tyran Corrigé, a popular French romantic opera set in medieval Provence. This was not a play Minette had staged in Saint-Domingue, but the tactic was a familiar one, for she had organized similar evenings in Port-auPrince, where actors often supplemented their meager salaries through benefit performances. Not long after, in January 1807, Minette Ferrand died in New Orleans (Camier [11]).

This means that Minette was also part of the thriving French-language theatrical life that Saint-Domingue refugees brought to New Orleans in the early nineteenth century. Though some of these, like Minette, arrived earlier, a large group of these – about 10,000 – arrived in 1809 after being expelled from Cuba, doubling the size of New Orleans all at once. They brought their love of theater, and the practices surrounding it, into the new city. This led to some confrontation between mores. A notice in the newspaper, Moniteur de la Louisiane, in New Orleans in 1809, announcing a French-language performance at the Théatre de Saint-Pierre informed “people who bring with them one or more domestics” to the show that “these domestics will henceforth only enter with a 50-cent ticket purchased at the office.” This suggests that many of the French-speaking refugees from SaintDomingue may have been in the habit of being accompanied by their enslaved domestics to the theater.

The traces found by Camier about Minette’s life in New Orleans are tantalizing, but only the bare outlines, of a whole life lived by Minette in the years that unfold after the end of the story told by both Fouchard and Chauvet. Since the 1950s, glints of the archive have opened up onto what could be entirely new works of history – and literature: Minette as a witness to or actor in the Haitian Revolution; Minette deciding to leave in 1802, then seeking to build a new life in New Orleans; Minette as a mother and grandmother. One might imagine the many roles she ultimately played, both on and off stage. One might imagine her children, still 49

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there in New Orleans after her death, founding new families, new genealogies, new histories. One might imagine her extending Le théâtre en Saint-Domingue into a far vaster circum-Caribbean space.

The theater of Saint-Domingue left many other afterlives as well. In 1804, while Minette was living in New Orleans, one of her contemporaries in Saint-Domingue also reached for the theater as the best space from which to stage an unexpected and radically different future. Defending his notorious order to massacre white planters remaining on the island after the defeat of French, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the founder of independent Haiti, famously proclaimed: “Yes, we have paid back these true cannibals back crime for crime, war for war, outrage for outrage. I have avenged America.”

It is and was a powerful, theatrical phrase – a veritable political performance on the whole of the Atlantic stage. It was also a phrase with history, anchored meaningfully in the world of theater in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue.

Specifically, Voltaire’s 1736 play Alzire, ou les Américains, features an Inca rebel named Zamor, who repeatedly contrasts the barbarism of the European colonists to the virtues of his beautiful land. He is introduced by his lover Alzire as “le vengeur de l’Etat” [avenger of our State]. And one of his followers declares that when the Inca see their “avengers” rising up, they will join him in the struggle.

Zamor announces that his intention is to lead a “heroic crowd” – that will either “avenge America” or perish in that effort (Voltaire [12]; Monty [13]).

Surprisingly, given its anti-colonial message, this play was performed on multiple occasions in Saint-Domingue during the eighteenth century, as Fouchard has documented. In August 1783, for instance, Alzire was staged as a benefit for an actor named Deauville who, it was noted in the Affiches Américaines, Port-auPrince newspaper on August 2, 1783, “was the only actor in the colony to have the true costume of an Inca Prince” (Fouchard [14]). There is good reason to believe that Minette would have attended the performance that night and that, given the small size of the theatrical community in Port-au-Prince, she knew Deauville. Her debut performance two years prior had been in the opera Isabelle and Gertrude, ou les sylphes supposés, a work based on a Voltaire play, in which she sang the lead role of Isabelle (Powers [15]). Yes, she was certainly familiar with Voltaire’s theatrical works. Had she ever been tempted to perform as Alzire?

The world of theater in which Minette had played such a crucial role was clearly implicated in the volcanic synthesis of passions, ideas, and performances that gave birth to Haiti’s revolution. And once independence had been achieved, the nation’s leaders turned in earnest to the theater in articulating the very foundations of their 50

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new nation. Dessalines had the music from Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du Village played at his coronation (Dumervé [16]). And it is also very possible that in his 1804 declaration – his theatrical claim to have avenged the Americas GovernorGeneral-cum-Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines meant to quote Zamor, Inca rebel and hero of Voltaire’s play.

What Dessalines likely understood, and what Minette – and Fouchard, and Chauvet – always knew, was that theater, like politics, is fundamentally an opening up onto other worlds. To write for and to play on the stage is to act as if another world is possible, as if another world is already present. It is to take a place in that world, in name and in body – in the theater yes, but from there beyond it. For the performance, the telling, and the making of history – on a stage or in an archive, in a work of history or in a novel – all rely ultimately on the power of the imagination to restage, to reclaim, and even to remake the real.

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Bibliography 1. Fouchard, Jean. Le théâtre à Saint-Domingue. Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1988.

2. Fouchard, Jean. Plaisirs de Saint-Domingue. Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1988.

3. Moreau de Saint-Méry, M. L. E. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de L’isle Saint Domingue.

Société française d’histoire d’Outre-Mer, 2004.

4. Clay, Lauren. Stagestruck: The Business of Theatre in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Colonies. Cornell University Press, 2013.

5. Garrigus, John D. Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

6. Burnard, Trevor G., and John D. Garrigus. The Plantation Machine. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

7. Garrigus, John. “Vincent Ogé Jeune (1757-1791): Social Class and Free Colored Mobilization on the Eve of the Haitian Revolution.” The Americas, vol. 68, no. 1, July 2011, pp. 33–62.

8. Rogers, Dominique and Stewart King, “Housekeepers, Merchants, Rentieres: Free Women of Color in the Port cities of Colonial Saint-Domingue, 1750-1790.” In Douglas Catterall and Jody Campbell, eds., Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port cities, 1500-1800, pp. 357-397. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

9. Camier, Bernard and Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaïre, ou le théâtre des Lumières dans l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 54:4 (April 2007): 39-69.

10. Chauvet, Marie Vieux. Dance on the Volcano. Translated by Kaiama L. Glover, Archipelago Books, 2016.

11. Camier, Bernard. “Minette (Élisabeth, Alexandrine, Louse Ferrand Dite)/ Artiste Libre de Couleur á Port-Au-Prince à La Fine Du XVIIIe Siècle.”

Journal de La Société d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Haïti, vol. 259–262, Dec. 2016, pp. 215–37.

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continued 12. Voltaire. Seven Plays by Voltaire. Howard Vertig, 1988.

13. Monty, Jeanne. “Le Travail de Composition d’Alzire.” The French Review, vol. 35, no. 4, Feb. 1962, pp. 383–89.

14. Fouchard, Jean. Artistes et répertoire des scènes de Saint-Domingue. Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1988.

15. Powers, David M. From Plantation to Paradise: Cultural Politics and Musical Theater in the French Slave Colonies 1764-1789. Michigan State University Press, 2014.

16. Dumervé, Constantin. Histoire de la musique en Haïti. Imprimerie des Antilles, 1968.

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Opera Lafayette presents

Silvain

Music by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry Libretto by Jean-François Marmontel The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Terrace Theater Thursday, June 2, 2022 at 7:30 PM Friday, June 3, 2022 at 7:30 PM & El Museo del Barrio Tuesday, June 7, 2022, at 7:00 PM This production was made possible, in part, by generous gifts from The Wage Foundation The Arthur and Alice E Adams Charitable Foundation This performance is approximately 90 minutes with no intermission.

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Ryan Brown, Conductor Tania Hernández Velasco, Stage Direction and Visual images Josh Higgason, Set and Projection Design Patricia Michaels, Costume Design A.J. Guban, Lighting Design Linn Cary Mehta, Translation and Adaptation Sylvia Rodríguez and Judith Miller, Pre-Concert Lecture

Cast (in order of appearance)

Victor Sicard…...............................................................................................................Silvain Camille Ortiz…………………..................………………….……….....................Elena (Hélène) Samantha Louis-Jean.................…............................................................Paulina (Pauline) Teresa Castillo……………………………….………............................................Lucia (Lucette) Jehú Otero……………………………...……………………......................................Bazil (Bazile) Zack Powell..………………………...……...................................................Dolmon, Fils Cadet Nathan Berg…………………….............................................................................Dolmon père Juan Hernandez…………………………………………......................................……First Guard Gilbert Chavez…………………………….......................................………………Second Guard Jose M. Pietri-Coimbre…………………………………….....................................Third Guard

Production Staff

Raine Bode……………………………………………...............................……...…Stage Manager Nancy Jo Snider…………………….................……..…..Orchestra Personnel Management Leslie Nero…………………...............................…………………………………Music Librarian Todd Mion……………….............................………………………………….Technical Direction Patrick Kilbride………................................………………………………………...……Supertitles Jason Shafer……………………….................................…………………………….Video Director Bill Siegmund…………………………………..............................…………….….Audio Producer Paul Curran………………………………………………..........................Directorial Consultant

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Opera Lafayette Orchestra Violin 1

Jacob Ashworth Concertmaster June Huang Theresa Salomon Elizabeth Field

Violin 2

Keats Diefenbach* Natalie Kress † Geza Kordes C. Anne Loud

Viola

Kyle Miller* Isaiah Chapman

Cello

Loretta O’Sullivan* NJ Snider David Bakamjian

Bass

Jessica Powell Eig* †

Flute

Charles Brink* Immanuel Davis

Oboe

Margaret Owens* Caroline Giassi

Bassoon

Anna Marsh* Ben Matus

French Horn Todd Williams* Linda Dempf

Harpsichord

Justin Taylor* (New York only) *Principal †Opera Lafayette debut

Sangre de Cristo Mountains - Silvain Still. Reproduced with permission of copyright holder (Tania Hernàndez Velasco).

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Program Note Callum John Blackmore In the 1770s, Paris was gripped by pastoral fever. Pastoralism began to permeate every facet of artistic life in the city, from literature, to painting, fashion, architecture, interior design, and (above all) opera. This aestheticization of the countryside was the result of mounting anxieties over the state of French politics – anxieties that would later spill over into the French Revolution. Louis XV had led France into numerous expensive military conflicts which had left the royal finances in dire straits.

The economy of pre-Revolutionary France was largely agrarian: over 80% of the French population lived in the countryside and agriculture provided over two thirds of the nation’s GDP. At the same time, France was experiencing a rapid period of urban expansion as famine, rioting, dwindling land supply, and growing commercial opportunities prompted many peasants to seek work as urban laborers.

The Parisian literati saw this urban drift as bad news for the French economy. Many Enlightenment thinkers feared the economic and moral costs of urbanization – the cramped living conditions, the alienation from nature, the arable land left uncultivated – and proposed that a full-scale return to rural living was the only way to vouchsafe France from socio-economic ruin. Included among them were the Baron d’Holbach (the host of a glitzy Parisian salon), who declared that the cultivation of the land was “the true basis of the state,” and the physiocrats, an iconoclastic group of economists who believed that a free trade in agricultural goods would entice laborers back to the countryside. This radical agenda would penetrate the very highest circles of French society: Marie Antoinette, eager to align herself with the growing pastoral movement, ordered the construction of a model farm (replete with dairy, watermill, and barnyard) just outside of Versailles, where the queen-consort and her aristocratic companions would play as shepherdesses. Even as Paris became one of the cultural capitals of European Enlightenment, its salons were abuzz with talk of rural exodus.

The Comédie-Italienne (a Parisian theater that specialized in opéra-comique, or opera with spoken dialogue) had become a hotbed of operatic pastoralism in the 1760s, renowned for pairing folksy, sentimentalized depictions of rustic life with progressive political messages. Opera Lafayette has recorded a number of these pastoral works, including the 1762 Le roi et le fermier and the 1769 Le déserteur. In the latter work (a moving opera about an innocent rustic tricked into deserting the army), librettist Michel-Jean Sedaine combines idealized rural imagery with a hardhitting, high-stakes plot (the eponymous deserter is almost put to death) to infuse the opera with tension, pathos, and political bite.

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Marmontel was a pastoralist par excellence. He was knowledgeable about agricultural economics, having attended the salons of d’Holbach and the physiocrats, and was a preeminent literary theorist of the eclogue, a traditional form of pastoral poetry. And it was Marmontel who was first to collaborate with the young Belgian composer, André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, freshly arrived in Paris from his apprenticeship in Rome. Their first two opéras-comiques, Le huron (1768) and Lucile (1769), explored many of the themes that would later be crystalized in their 1770 Silvain: love across traditional social boundaries; the countryside as a site of abundance, freedom, and modernity; and the ultimate triumph of familial bonds and simple virtue within this rustic setting.

In Silvain, Marmontel depicts a rustic idyll threatened by authoritarian forces. He paints the French peasantry as brow-beaten by the restrictions imposed on them by absentee landowners, their livelihoods curtailed by harsh feudal laws governing the use of rural land. In the opera, Silvain, a disinherited noble, and his wife, Hélène, suddenly discover that the neighboring woodlands – which the family rely on for food and firewood – have fallen into the ownership of Dolmon, to be policed by his ruthless son, Dolmon fils. The latter accuses Silvain of illegal poaching and places him under arrest, even as Silvain asserts his right to forage freely on Dolman’s land. It was this aspect of the plot – based on a now-obscure facet of rural property law – that resonated most strongly with Enlightenment audiences.

For the Parisian commentariat, Marmontel’s libretto spoke to anxieties around the productivity of the agricultural sector and the role of outdated feudal regulations in limiting this output and driving workers to the city. One critic praised the opera for its depiction of a “good, virtuous, and sensitive peasantry,” noting that the opera had “instantly fixed in the sights of the nobility the principles of natural law.”

In other words, Silvain was not merely entertainment, it was a form of political education, schooling rural landowners in the most effective way to cultivate their agricultural holdings.

Although the drama is contained in a single act, Silvain is an opera of two halves.

The first half is a fly-on-the-wall peek into the daily life of an ordinary peasant household – a family hastening to marshal their modest resources in preparation for a village wedding. The second half is a grand emotional catharsis as Silvain and Hélène’s life is torn apart by Dolmon fils, as Hélène and her daughters plead with Dolmon père for Silvain’s acquittance, as Dolmon père recognizes Silvain as his estranged son, and, finally, as Dolmon père, so moved by Hélène’s noble bearing, gives his blessing to Silvain’s (socially unequal) marriage.

It is in the second half of the opera that Grétry pulls out all the stops. The ensembles (a particular specialty of Grétry’s) are utterly gripping, they are the 59

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opera’s driving engine, endowing the work with a sense of dramatic propulsion.

The opera’s theatrical highpoint is the septet between Silvain, the guards who have come to arrest him, Silvain’s future son-in-law (who jumps furiously to his defense), and Silvain’s wife and daughters (who try desperately to diffuse the situation). It is an ensemble of staggering complexity, of vivid musical contrasts, of cascading, interlocking vocal interjections, of chaos, panic, sorrow, and noise.

Another highlight is the trio that precedes the opera’s denouement, in which Silvain’s daughters, Pauline and Lucette, entreat Dolmon père to stay with them awhile and to experience the love and warmth of a kindhearted rustic family. With spritely, capering phrases, Pauline and Lucette paint a rosy picture of rural living; meanwhile, the orchestra itself seems to bristle with arcadian bliss, surging forth in ecstatic arpeggios beneath the voices.

Grétry and Marmontel had a particular knack for writing strong operatic heroines.

Hélène, the heroine of Silvain, is one of their best. In her tour-de-force aria, Hélène finds herself alone in the house, realizing that she must face down Dolmon père without her husband at her side: initially trembling with fear, she prays to God for strength (a lilting andante, austere and restrained) and finds an eleventh-hour burst of courage (a rousing allegro with oboe obbligato). This scene is interesting because it begins with a type of music rarely heard in opéra-comique: recitative.

Because the Comédie-Italienne (where Silvain premiered) was restricted entirely to opera with spoken dialogue, it was generally forbidden from performing operas whose numbers were connected by recitative: these operas were the exclusive domain of the Paris Opéra, the flagship opera company of the French monarchy, which specialized not in comedy but in tragedy. Yet Grétry incorporates recitative into his otherwise comic opera to lend Hélène’s music a dramatic weight ordinarily reserved for operatic tragedy, heightening the stakes in Marmontel’s plot through musical style alone.

Opera Lafayette’s production of Silvain draws inspiration from the opera’s connections to the Americas. Silvain was the first documented opera to be performed in New Orleans, opening at the Théâtre de la Rue Saint-Pierre in 1796.

In the company of this theater were a number of players formerly of the opera houses of French colonial Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti), who had fled to New Orleans during the Haitian Revolution.

Silvain was revived at least 28 times in Saint-Domingue prior to the Revolution: The opera’s firm endorsement of uninhibited agricultural production, paired with its utopian depiction of rural life and staunch moral message, clearly resonated with colonial audiences. In Saint-Domingue, the relationship between plantationowners (many of whom were based in France), and their enslaved workforce was 60

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constantly being legally, physically, and psychologically negotiated: Grétry’s opera thus offered colonists a quixotic vision of rural laborers, working willingly and harmoniously in the fields, their tensions with their overlords eventually resolved, their toil productive and unimpaired by unnecessary government regulation.

Given the widespread practice of naming enslaved Africans after opera characters, it is perhaps no coincidence that countless African men who were enslaved on Saint-Domingue were given the name “Silvain”: plantation-owners seem to have perversely attempted to “act out” the romanticized pastoral labor relations of Grétry’s opera, to have imagined an altogether violent and coercive relationship as one of pastoral benevolence.

Marmontel ends the libretto to Silvain with the opera’s central maxim: “simple virtue holds more weight than good birth.” To some conservative pundits, this was an attack on strict hierarchies that governed pre-Revolutionary French society; to others, these words were intended to engender a new, more productive relationship between peasants, landowners, and the land itself; and, in Saint-Domingue, this adage papered over the brutality of the slave economy, allowing plantation owners to reimagine the colonies as a pastoral arcadia.

Opera Lafayette’s new production of Silvain will help us find new meaning in these words, allowing us to hear Grétry’s opera with fresh ears. The company’s path-breaking new staging, which will be directed by Tania Hernandez Velasco, transposes the opera to Colorado’s San Luis Valley, whose inhabitants have, since the nineteenth century, grappled with many of the same issues faced by Silvain and his family: the loss of access to ancestral lands, the abuse of power, the growing alienation of the ordinary folk from the natural environment, and the erosion of hard-won rights and liberties. By reimagining the opera through the lens of this ongoing conflict, Opera Lafayette’s Silvain recaptures the radical spirit of Marmontel’s text, showing that this opera – contrived from the anxieties of a nation on the brink of revolution – might still resonate with us today.

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Seigneur de Sangre de Cristo: Carlos H. Beaubien Maria Mondragon-Valdez A descendant of a wealthy Quebecois family, Alexis (Charles) Hippolyte Trotier, Sieur de Beaubien (1800 – 1864) was responsible for the emergence of French colonial long-lot land allocation in the uplands of southern Colorado. (Fig.1) The history of Spanish colonization of the southwest precedes him, and the region under discussion in this essay was home during his lifetime to the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande, as well as the Utes, Apaches, and Navajo, as it was before Fig.1. Charles H. Beaubien: Charles H. Beaubien, French-Canadian fur the Spanish arrived, and trader and owner of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in the New Mexico Territory. Photo undated, courtesy Museum of New Mexico Press, negative as it remains to this day. #8799 Beaubien lived through the transition from Spanish colonial rule to Mexican independence to American conquest. His role in the history of the San Luis Valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains to the east still reverberates in the present.

The Priestly Beginning

Born in 1800, Beaubien grew to maturity in Nicolet, Quebec, on the Island of Moras, where his family resided on the Seigneurial Manor of Pierre Monte.

Through intermarriage the Beaubien family controlled three baronial estates: Moras Island, Rivière-de-Loup, and des Ruisseau. His older brother inherited the 62

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Fig.2. Multistory Taos Pueblo (National Registry of Historic Places): The Taos Pueblo is one of the longest continuously inhabited dwellings in the Americas, thought to have been built between 1000 and 1450 A.D., before the Spanish arrived in the region in 1540. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DSC_1844_ Taos_Pueblo,_New_Mexico.jpg

family estate, following the custom of primogeniture, and Alexis was destined for the priesthood. With abbots for paternal and maternal uncles, Beaubien was ordained and tonsured at 21. Beaubien likely completed his education at Séminaire de Nicolet where he read the classics and learned to speak and read Latin. Father Beaubien must have been dissatisfied, however, as priests were required to take the vow of poverty, stifling ambitions to prosperity or travel beyond the bounds of Canada. Within a year of ordination Beaubien resigned the priesthood. Shocked and disappointed, his family realized that the lure of the prosperous fur industry and travel to the unknown wilderness was stronger than a religious vocation.

The Secular Man Emerges

Leaving Nicolet, Alexis changed his name to Charles and never looked back.

Charles settled briefly in Kaskaskia, Illinois, moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, and thus lived in three culturally rich French Colonial settlements before his arrival in Taos, New Mexico, in 1824, with his caravan of more than a dozen extranjeros casados (a term used for foreign beaver hunters). In his vocation as a French-Canadian trapper and trader, Charles Beaubien chose to experience this commodity market in a free-trade zone as a “Mountain Man.'' 63

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Fig.3. Long-lot subdivisions: The image is an example of the long-lot subdivision of land found in the San Luis Valley, also found in earlier French settlements in Illinois and Quebec. USGS Aerial Photo of San Francisco, Colorado, 1955. Source: Maria Mondragon-Valdez

In the 1820s, Taos was a village of extended families residing near earthen plazas with Indigenous neighbors living in multi-story pueblos. (Fig.2) Most residents raised sheep, goats, and farmed small plots of land. Money was scarce and bartering was customary: dry meat, pinon nuts, coffee, spices, and tobacco were traded for human captives, woven blankets, peltries, buffalo robes, horses, and mules. Like “Mountain Men'' of this era, Charles Beaubien would have worn leather clothing and a trapper’s wool coat with hood. Among his belongings were necessities of the trail: a pistol, long gun, tomahawk, several knives. Expecting to trade after months in the wilderness, the trappers rode their horses laden with beaver pelts through the dusty roadway intersecting the village plaza. After a day of bargaining, traders would visit the plaza to meet old friends, drink, gamble, and flirt with local women at a fandango (dance). The annual Taos Rendezvous introduced foreigners to local society and drove shifts in material culture and social norms.

Canada, Louisiana, and Missouri: French-Colonial Inroads to the Frontier

Charles Beaubien may have learned of New Mexico in Quebec, an economic hub of fur trading, or from the inhabitants of Kaskaskia, Illinois which he visited 64

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in 1822. Established as a mission ten years after the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico following the Pueblo revolt of 1680, this Illinois town lay west of the Mississippi near Saint Louis. Early in the eighteenth-century, slaves from SaintDomingue and Indigenous peoples comprised the majority of the population; the priests, French Creoles, and twenty French-Canadian voyageurs were the minority.

Initially a mission and a trading post, the town supplied corn and wheat for Lower Louisiana and became pivotal to western expansion. Many settlers in Kaskaskia knew routes to and from New Mexico. One resident, Gervacio Nolán, a veteran of Montreal’s Northwest Trading Company, had traveled with a group of trappers into the western frontier to expand pelt trade along the tributaries of the Rio Grande del Norte. Beaubien and Nolán both later relocated to Taos, enjoying a life-long friendship.

When Beaubien was in Kaskaskia, he would have seen long-lot subdivisions worked by “habitants”, or agriculturalists. (Fig.3) Settlers could acquire a long narrow plot with the proviso that they would improve and cultivate the land.

Large tracts were divided among habitants into family-sized parcels, leaving access to the waterfront and to a central road. Settlement of the tracts depended on the Cadastral system of surveying and keeping official records of such information. The long-lot settlement pattern, familiar to Beaubien and customary throughout New France and Quebec, helped establish French-Canadian communities.

During the trapping off-season, Beaubien lived in St. Louis, Missouri, learning about appraising pelts and brokering finances from Auguste Chouteau, a French creole from a wealthy mercantile family who controlled the pelt industry for a century. Auguste, who had traveled to New Mexico, the San Luis Valley, and the Rio Culebra, would no doubt have talked with Beaubien about his travels.

Competition created ruthless rivals, primarily among French and American trappers who dominated the trade in New Mexico. Stopping to rest at rustic forts along routes to and from the interior, Beaubien became acquainted with entrepreneurs who shared his aspirations. With three years of trapping experience and living on the trail, Beaubien forged friendships and grew to understand international business ventures in peltry. After all, many of the top hats worn by the Europeans, from London to Russia, were made of beaver harvested from the mountain ranges in New Mexico.

As explorers from French-Colonial Quebec expanded their range southwesterly beyond the Saint Lawrence River and throughout the Great Lakes Region, others from the old Acadian Colony in Louisiana were moving northward along the Mississippi River and westward along the Gulf coast into Texas. The earliest surviving record of the French in New Mexico is from 1692 when Governor Juan 65

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de Vargas resettled the colony after the Pueblo Revolt. Known as the Reconquista or Reconquest, professional soldiers marching into New Mexico included Jean Ľ Archevêque ( Juan de Archeveque) and Jacques Grollet (Santiago Gurule). For this expedition both men hispanized their names and swore allegiance to the Spanish crown, after having been members of La Salle’s last expedition in 1684, an ill-fated attempt to establish a French settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Arriving a few years later, a third survivor from La Salle’s expedition, Pierre Meunier, whose father was Sieur de Perville, resided in Santa Fe in 1696.

Early Visitations: The Upland in Transition

In 1703, twenty French colonists, likely voyageurs from Kaskaskia, crossed into Spanish Territory to explore possibilities of trading. After recolonization, fellow Frenchmen came to New Mexico from Europe, Canada, Louisiana, and Missouri; thus did France encroach upon Spanish territory. Spanish and French influences began to merge as traders and guides like Jean Baptiste La Lande (a French Creole) and Julius DeMun (an aristocrat born in Saint-Domingue) were in New Mexico by 1804. La Lande, originally from Kaskaskia, sequentially married three New Mexican women, two of whom two died at a young age, and produced nine children. His daughter married Gervacio Nolán, completing a circle of influence.

These early arrivals were followed by the Mallet Brothers and many others who were documented as illegally crossing into New Mexico. Not every party was caught in the act of trespassing; those who were apprehended were taken to Chihuahua to be interrogated, imprisoned, and their goods impounded.

Oftentimes authorities allowed trespassers to settle to keep information from reaching French colonial Louisiana. This policy did not prohibit Jean Baptiste La Lande and Julius DeMun from illegally entering the “Rio de la Culevra” (Rio Culebra Basin) in the San Luis Valley. Camping and exploring the uplands, without regard to prohibitions imposed by the Spanish, DeMun recorded site-specific information. The strategic miscalculation by Spain and later Mexico to buffer and better protect its outlying provinces created challenges that would eventually open the door to resource exploitation and ineffectual boundary maintenance.

The international peltry market forged isolated regions into a monolithic economic system, driving the geopolitical re-balancing with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Doubling the size of America, the boundaries of the Louisiana Territory were unknown until the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific (1803-1806) and Zebulon Pike’s surveillance. Pike crossed the Arkansas river, the border of the Louisiana Territory, and entered Spanish territory, arriving in the San Luis Basin in the winter of 1807. His journal records impressions of wildlife, terrain, and watercourses of the Rio Grande. Walking eastward along a “large road,” he entered 66

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the Rio Culebra Watershed. Initially a small group of Spanish scouts, including two Frenchmen from Santa Fe, approached Pike's stockade at Conejos, which was flying the American flag. Accused of spying, Pike was interrogated, but later released. Pike’s cartography was beautiful, although its repercussions would emerge after his writings were published, translated into five languages, and circulated in Europe, Canada, and America: Pike described a seemingly untouched landscape and routes in and out. Soon, trappers arrived to hunt, and adventurers in caravans hauled trade goods over the mountains, setting the stage for future invasion.

The Economy of Dependency

After generations of neglect from Spain and continued challenges from within, Mexican liberals overthrew Spanish rule in 1821. Ten percent of the male population died in this rebellion, leaving a quarter of the land vacant, resulting in poverty and hunger. The young Mexican government soon reversed Spain’s restrictions on international trade by opening the Santa Fe Trail to Missouri.

The Santa Fe Trail enabled Mexico to collect tariffs, sell livestock, and trade for manufactured goods. An alternative pathway known as the Trappers Trail, formally the “Old Mexican Road'', traversed through the Rio Culebra, along foothills to the Rio Trinchera. By ascending the Sangre de Cristo Pass, riders moved east along the Arkansas River to Bent’s Fort, in what is now southeastern Colorado. Acting as a bank, rest stop, fortress, and marketplace, Bent’s Fort became a centrifugal force driving foreigners into New Mexico.

New Mexico, a free-trade zone and no longer a surrogate of Spain, became dependent on Saint Louis merchandise. Goods sold for Mexican pesos, which created a crisis: Pesos minted in Mexico contained more silver than did American coins used in Saint Louis. Pesos became so scarce that New Mexico was forced to fabricate copper coins. Sales of gold dust to Missouri banks added further asymmetry to the economy. New Mexico officials tried tariffs to stabilize their economy but were unable to force compliance on the foreigners who monopolized trading and trapping, resisted paying taxes, and refused to obtain passports.

New Mexicans spent an inordinate amount of time defending themselves from tribes and war parties that surrounded the province on all sides. Individuals, the shared plaza, and herds of grazing animals all needed protection. Some settlers owned antique muskets and lances, but most used bows and arrows. Betterarmed foreign companies operating out of forts along eastbound routes traded contraband, mainly weapons of war and liquor, which encouraged attacks on colonial villages and Pueblos alike. The constant raids rendered peace treaties obsolete and soured alliances. The continual threats left New Mexico without guilds or economic diversity.

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Land Granting: Colonial Maintenance of the Borderlands

The frontier in transition made use of land granting, a policy rooted in Old World feudalism. The estate owner would provide resources and grant plots Fig.4. Making Adobe bricks: The image shows the making of adobe bricks next to the San Juan and Piedra rivers on the Colorado New Mexico border. The man in of land, while the the center is Leon Madrid, a friend of photographer E.O. Richmond, who took this settler in return photo 1882 and 1912. Reproduced with permission of copyright holder (Reddart/ would work the Brown family collection) land, protect it, and return a portion of the output to the estate. At the Spanish Iberian border, land grants encouraged settlement with plots for home, garden, and agriculture, while the settlers defended against intruders.

The land granting experience of Spain was modified for tierra nueva (new lands) of the Americas. Originally the Spanish who settled New Mexico were given large tracts. A small number of wealthy individuals benefited, with disastrous results.

After the reconquest this faulted approach was refashioned, giving preference to communities organized by groups of pobladores (settlers). Community land grants allowed pobladores to become vecinos (neighbors). Vecinos were subsistence pastoralists who lived cooperatively within a larger group of interrelated families.

Situated at watersheds, tending small crops and raising livestock of mostly sheep and goats, these fortified small villages lay on the periphery of older wellestablished colonies. Together these frontier plazas were New Mexico’s versions of medieval Spain.

By the eighteenth century, elaborate documents penned in ink recorded these grants. Replete with Spanish legal terminology, these documents listed names of settlers, the location and size of the land grant, and described identifiable rivers and landmarks. Individual settlers were given a solar (home site), suerte (agricultural field), and access to the community held ejido (common land). In return the pobladores were required to protect the land, build homes, and raise crops.

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Within three years of opening the Santa Fe Trail, Mexico City enacted colonization laws to mitigate an increase in illegal immigration. Between 1824 and 1837, five laws were passed defining how foreigners could settle. Laws granting land to foreigners varied by Province. In Texas, foreigners were allowed to become empresarios, (agents), recruiting settlers by offering individual plots for a small fee and payment of taxes after four years. California, on the other hand, did not allow foreign colonies near international boundaries or along coastlines, though the Governor sold land taken from missions to foreigners. Throughout the West, Mexican provinces were pressured by immigration despite these policies; Americans in Texas outnumbered the Mexican population ten to one, and nearly one-third of California was owned by foreigners.

In New Mexico during the Mexican Land Grant Era, foreigners could initially obtain as much as 71 square miles, with a preference for applicants of Mexican descent and citizens. To circumvent this requirement, foreigners became silent partners. As an example, in 1828 William Gordon, an American trader, attempted to gain control of the Rio Culebra Basin in partnership with two local men from Taos. This failed attempt was denied, though it indicated that foreigners were aware of Mexican Colonization Laws and were poised to exploit the system.

Beaubien the Family and Business Man

On a government-sanctioned trading venture to Chihuahua and Sonora in 1827, Beaubien profited handsomely, learned the route, and made business acquaintances. After returning, Charles moved to Taos and married the same year, allying himself with one of the most prominent and prestigious extended families in the Taos Valley. Charles renamed himself Carlos. He and his wife Paula lived in a large adobe plazuela, where they raised their children in the safety of the gated compound. (Fig.4) This pattern of marriage emerged between 1820-1850, as church records list 122 marriages to foreigners, some common law, most of which occurred in the Taos Valley. This is probably an underestimation; many did not document unions as cohabitation was accepted in the frontier.

Beaubien's wife, Maria Paula Lobato, likely had many servants, as her plazuela had 38 rooms. In addition to the family quarters, the Beaubien home had a large kitchen, rooms for servants, laundry space, and storage; an earthen oven for baking, sheds, and corrals were within the large compound. The dining room was grand and described as being large enough to seat 100 guests, and her furniture was said to be luxurious. Paula was well-dressed and wore imported New York and Paris fashions. An oil painting of Paula with a lace blouse covered by a shawl was not as revealing as photos of her adult daughters. Resembling their mother, the two eldest daughters were stout, matronly, and dressed in American styled clothing with 69

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high collars. Images of the Beaubien's younger daughters are poignant; Eleanor on her wedding day, wearing a form-fitting blazer and a long skirt with ruffles, shapely and elegant, though without a bride’s veil or white dress. Her somber look was suggestive; her husband was reputed to have many mistresses, eventually cohabiting with another woman. Through a scandalous divorce, Eleanor fought to keep her inheritance, but died at a young age. The photograph of her younger sister Juana shows a woman who lived on the northern frontier. Attired in a plain dress and large shawl, Juana was visibly pregnant with two small children at her side.

Residing in a rustic plazuela, Juana lived with the danger adherent to this outpost on the Rio Costilla and the village’s repeated epidemics and dysentery.

Descriptions of local women with coarse homemade clothing and black roboz (head covering) demonstrate their subservient status, however younger women of courting age favored bright festive skirts worn above the ankles, blouses with bare shoulders, and shawls, all popular items from Chihuahua merchants. Prestige items from American markets, like those worn by ricos (wealthy) were ready-made and imported from the East Coast.

Paula entertained many influential guests. In all likelihood when her husband dined with politicians and partners she arranged for a card game of “Mexican monte” before men talked business. If the event was more festive, perhaps she would have arranged for musicians to sing and play guitars. They may have hosted gatherings after baptisms, weddings, and wakes, as did the wealthy in small villages.

In the latter part of the 1820s Beaubien, Gervacio Nolán, and Antoine and Louis Robidoux became Mexican citizens to avoid the higher tax rates assessed to foreigners. Opening a business on the Taos Plaza, Carlos appraised pelts, sold trapping supplies, and hosted an informal gathering space. Beaubien forged a deep friendship with Ceran St. Vrain and Charles Bent (co-owners of Bent’s Fort). By 1835, Bent resided at Taos and Ceran St. Vrain at Santa Fe. St. Vrain, from an aristocratic Saint Louis family, and Charles Bent, son of a Missouri Supreme Court Justice, were both connected to merchandising houses. Together they monopolized trade. Citizenship conferred status to Beaubien and as a result he was named alcalde (magistrate judge and mayor) of Taos and later the Rio Arriba region. In honor, Carlos' name was prefaced with “Don” (a title of respect).

Opposition From Within

Initially, Mexico City hoped foreigners would assimilate, Mexicanize, become tax-paying citizens, and defend outlying colonies. The patriarchal society of interrelated families living in the valleys of the Rio Grande Watershed understood the fallacy of this theory, as the power differential confronting New Mexico grew 70

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Fig.5. Mexican Land Grants of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado: The image shows the major land grants given by the Mexican government in the 1840’s to Beaubien, Miranda, St. Vrain and Nolán, among others. Beaubien’s Sangre de Cristo land grant is at the center. Land Grants Map adapted from Haflen, 1927.

Source: Maria Mondragon-Valdez

ominous. Some who were priests, large landowners, and compatriots understood the risks of the growing influence of foreigners in New Mexico but lacked support for change from Mexico City. The most outspoken was the Cura of Taos, Padre Antonio Jose Martinez.

Padre Martinez was the equal to Charles Beaubien.

Privately tutored and educated in a seminary, he read complex religious texts, spoke Latin, and excelled in Canon Law, Spanish Law, and Mexican Law. Son of a wealthy family, who lived in a large self-sufficient rancho, Martinez was previously married with one child, but became a cura (priest) after his wife died. Ordained in Durango, Mexico, he arrived at Taos with the only printing press in New Mexico.

Opening a seminary, he attempted to meet the rectify shortage of priests, for the last native-born cura had died 52 years before.

The Cura of Taos watched as tensions between locals and foreigners unfolded.

From 1837 to 1843, violence and hand-to-hand combat by Texan-Americans was recurring until 325 armed men from Texas attempted to invade. Although the attackers were repelled, foreigners who were Mexican citizens were accused of disloyalty. Publishing a “Memorial” to the President of Mexico and to the Canadian Minister, Padre Martinez described the depravity of foreigners, their negative influence on Indigenous bands, and the “idle and ill-intentioned'' who support them. He complained that buffalos were on the brink of extinction, that the peltry market created hunger, intensified raiding, and destroyed peace.

Although the Padre did not mention beaver, their population in the San Luis Basin was decimated by the mid-1830s due to over-trapping.

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Father Martinez’s public statement fell on deaf ears. The Governor of New Mexico disregarded his objections and authorized mammoth Mexican Land Grants to foreigners who had become naturalized Mexican citizens or were in partnership with citizens. Carlos Beaubien, Guadalupe Miranda, Ceran St. Vrain, and Gervacio Nolán among them received grants adding up to 8,425,273-acres, roughly 13,164-square miles. Beaubien and his family’s included the Sangre de Cristo land grant. (Fig.5) Rich in minerals, pastureland, wildlife, and rivers and watershed, these privatized Mexican land grants given to four men who were in essence silent partners amounted to the largest private land holding in America, extending from the New Mexico borderlands into southern Colorado. The region was taken not by force, but by elaborate documents written in archaic Spanish.

Consequences of Forced Occupation and Military Rule

With the land partitioning completed, Brigadier General Stephen Kearny, commander of the Army of the West, organized his forces at Bent’s Fort at the beginning of the Mexican – American War (1846-1848). Kearny secured New Mexico after Governor Armijo dismissed 4,000 Mexican volunteers and left for Chihuahua. Kearny implemented a Code of Conduct and appointed foreign merchants to the highest positions, making Charles Bent Governor and Carlos Beaubien Justice of the Supreme Court. Though some thought that American democracy would bring positive change, people of the newly occupied land faced prejudice and hostility. They worried that Spanish and Mexican land tenure traditions and property rights would not be respected.

In 1847, villagers of Taos, Arroyo Hondo, Mora, Questa, and Taos Pueblo revolted against the American occupation and attacked the distillery at Arroyo Hondo, killing Charles Bent (Governor), Narcisco Beaubien (Carlos’s son), Stephen Louis Lee (Sheriff ), Cornelio Vigil (Taos Alcalde). The distillery became an inferno when the roof was set ablaze. Though the rioters sought out Carlos Beaubien, he was elsewhere.

The American Army reacted by killing one hundred and fifty men and capturing four hundred after breaching the Taos Pueblo church with cannon. Seven Americans were lost and forty-five wounded. The military killed twenty-five locals at Mora and leveled the village with cannon in reprisal for the death of a single commander. Rebels were tried at Taos; sixteen were hung and 50 imprisoned for treason by a jury of friends of the deceased and by Judge Beaubien.

The Taos priest Padre Martinez was considered a threat. The Seventh Council of Baltimore authorized the newly arrived French Missionaries to replace the Archdiocese of Durango, Mexico. Father Jean-Baptiste Lamy was named the 72

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Fig.6. Utes in Colorado: The image shows Utes crossing a river during the period of their defeat and relocation.

Photo by E.O. Richmond, 1880’s. Reproduced with permission of copyright holder (Reddart/Brown family collection)

ecclesiastical head of New Mexico. The conflicts with Martinez ended when Lamy excommunicated Martinez in 1858.

From Bereavement to Forward Movement: Beaubien’s Seigneurial Colony

Soon after the death of his son and partners, Don Carlos began to colonize the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. When the land was granted 1844, Don Carlos recruited extended families from the Taos and Chama Valley and appointed three alcaldes to manage the colony. In 1848, Beaubien’s men ejected a Scottish merchant from Taos who attempted to settle near where Don Carlos had a temporary sheep camp, suggesting he anticipated losing control once squatters and eastern homesteaders arrived.

Concurrently, the military’s peacekeeping force was patrolling the San Luis Basin.

Beaubien lobbied the Army and offered a free twenty-five-year lease if the military would build a fort and pacify the Ute and Jicarilla Apache. In 1858 Fort Garland was constructed of adobe. Nearby northbound trails gave merchants and millers, including Carlos Beaubien and Ceran St. Vrain, along with freighters, farmers, wood-gathers, and laborers access to the lucrative military market.

Assuming the Navajos and Plains Indians would be stopped by the Army, the Utes agreed to treaties that were later broken. Settlers’ plazas were far from the fort 73

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Fig.7 Acequia Landscape Drawing:The image shows how the landscape around a river were typically irrigated and utilized in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. (Illustration by Arnold A. Valdez, 2015).

Reproduced with permission of copyright holder Arnold A. Valdez

and hard to defend; a thousand sheep were taken in 1852, when military arrived too late to stop the theft. The Indian Agent took the Ute Chiefs to Washington, hoping to impress upon them the extent of American power, but resistance continued. An offer of small-pox infected blankets by the army to tribal leaders provoked attacks at Conejos and San Acacio. After a conflict in 1855 with the army and mercenaries, the Utes moved west of the Continental Divide, initiating the Indigenous diaspora from the San Luis Basin. (Fig.6) Beaubien pushed to settle people on his land before the 1860 Census in order to comply with American land tenure laws. The census undergirded the creation of Colorado in 1861 and the future County of Costilla, which was one of the first seventeen districts in the new territory. Without people, borderlands could be redefined as public domain and not a private estate. Meanwhile, a bill in the US Senate changed the southern boundary so that certain land grants that had been part of northern New Mexico were reallocated to Territorial Colorado, where private property rights were safe from challenge.

With the Trinchera Watershed militarized, Carlos focused on the lateral streams of the Rio Culebra Watershed in the Sangre de Cristo Range. Early settlements 74

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were established near bottomland and cottonwood forests to supply the water, clay, stone, and wood needed for construction.

To attract pobladores to move into the frontier, Beaubien offered “usufructuary rights”. This feudal concept allowed use of another’s land and was the foundation of the Manorial System. Beaubien followed the pattern and granted the settlers access to his own land. Such settlers' rights complemented individual property holdings, which were divided into long-lots. Known as vara (a unit of measurement equaling three feet) lots were narrow parcels and ran between and at right angles to streams.

In addition to allowing water frontage, the land included river bottoms, pastures, woodlands, and foothills. Most people paid a dollar per vara of land. A few favored settlers obtained multiple tracts at various elevations in different watersheds.

Beaubien organized the land he deeded to the settlers to replicate French colonial property divisions in Quebec, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, and Illinois.

Along the Rio Costilla, south of Rio Culebra, was a mercantile store and individual plazuelas at the west where Juana Beaubien resided with her family. Construction had begun on a central church. It was erroneously thought that the southern edge of the Rio Costilla Basin was within the Territory of Colorado, but the government surveyor ruled that the Rio Costilla villages were in New Mexico, and the county seat was moved sixteen miles north to the Rio Culebra de San Luis.

Humanizing the Landscape

While the timeline of colonial establishment in San Luis is unclear in the earliest years, the population count was 1,700 persons in 1860, though land had yet to be deeded and the long-lots laid out. Settlers may have continued living in plazas along the Rio Costilla and Rio Culebra, since the long-lots were usually outside the villages and thus vulnerable to attack. Beaubien appointed John Gaspar, a Frenchman, as his local “Attorney in Fact” early in 1860, to assist him in creating an orderly settlement.

As along the Rio Costilla, the northern villages were sited along the Rio Culebra.

Five plazas were designated along with a furte, or little fort. Plazas were named after a saint-protector, fortified with thick walls, and high gates. One village had a torreón or watch tower with portholes. The first villages of San Luis de la Culebra, San Pablo, San Acacio, and Los Fuertes were founded by 1853; additional plazas were founded at Chama and San Pedro soon after.

Prior to his death in 1864, Carlos Beaubien journeyed to the Rio Culebra in his modern horse-drawn buggy with camping gear, large compass, rods for surveying, paper, ink, prewritten lists, and other documents. He intended to walk the land to measure settlers’ parcels, from the upper Rio Culebra at San Francisco to the 75

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middle village at San Luis. Because of his failing health, he assigned an assistant to divide the land at the western edge of the grant near San Acacio. His second was to file his instructions in a formal record book at the County Seat. Don Carlos met with the leading families to discuss his intent and present a list of individuals with an itemized allotment of land by location.

The surviving copy of the lista, or list, has names checked off with notations along the edges; it was a working document and paper was limited. The list indicates that some who purchased varas were absentee owners with tenant farmers. Crossreferencing names to property records indicated that some never received deeds, though their names appear on the lista. Beaubien’s representatives, whom he deemed County Commissioners, received land for services rendered. The lista also contained an entry of a villager who paid in livestock with an additional $200 for 400 varas on the north fork of the Rio Culebra, which was the highest pasture land with trails and the headwaters of the river.

The list’s talking points were likely written by Beaubien’s secretary John Gaspar.

Beaubien's primary concerns were the chapel, the commons of la vega, roads near the center of commerce, and that landowners be given access to acequias (irrigation ditches). Beaubien’s assistants marked entry to the long-lot with large rocks.

(Fig.7) Later, Don Carlos described his intent for the grant. Written in archaic Spanish and filed in the Costilla County Clerk & Recorders Record Book 1, Page 256, this short entry, in ink on now yellowing paper, is perhaps the most celebrated real estate transaction in Colorado. It is the legal linchpin that holds the villagers common use rights to The Sangre de Cristo Land Grant.

Though vague, the paragraph sets the parameters for settlement following the tradition of the Seigneurial Regime. Introduced in 1627 by Cardinal Richelieu, the Chief Minister to King Louis XIII, the Manorial System was a feudal mechanism used to populate New France. An estate was usually given to nobles, the wealthy, clergy, and military men, and could be inherited. The Seigneur, or Lord of the Manor, was expected to divide a portion of the land among habitants. The tenants lived and worked on small long-lot plots that were purchased for a nominal fee, and were required to protect the manor, give surpluses, and contribute labor for road maintenance. The Cardinal dictated that the Seigneur provide a church, roads, and a mill.

Carlos Beaubien’s description of settlers' rights and obligations followed this manorial system, which he experienced in Canada as a young man. Rights to 76

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graze and use water were communal, but the planted land would be protected from animals except for “domestic service”. The document underscored that “All inhabitants have the right to use pastures, water, wood, and lumber, always taking care that one does not cause damage to the others''. Beaubien granted 5,000 acres including the site for a mill for grinding wheat at San Luis to St. Vrain, who had led the militia against the rebels at Taos and later against the Utes.

Epilogue

Don Carlos’ final visit to the Rio Culebra Basin was early in the 1860s. He was overweight and struggling with his health. A photo of Beaubien, date unknown, shows him in his prime, a serious man, wearing a dark suit jacket, white shirt with buttons down the center and a high neck with a horizontal bow, with a deeply receding hairline.

Aware that his vast estates would be taxed under American rule, Beaubien subdivided the land grant, giving his daughters large estates as marriage gifts and selling the remainder of his holdings to the first Governor of Colorado.

The original arrangements regarding settlement and land use in the Rio Culebra Basin were soon disrupted. The complexity of Beaubien’s later transactions left a burden on settlers after his death in 1864. Large tracts of land were subsequently bought by speculators from New York to Massachusetts, London, Germany, and Holland. More interested in profit than community, these owners’ interests would increasingly be at odds with those of the settlers and their descendants who inherited the traditions and the agreements of land use set down by Beaubien.

In 2002, however, by a majority of four to three, the Colorado Supreme Court granted the descendants of the original settlers in San Luis property rights access to the upland and lowland in common. With this decision, an estimated 1,200 landowners can gather firewood and graze cattle on this land. The decision respects the history of the community of San Luis while similar issues arising from the early privatization of vast tracts of land in the southwest remain unaddressed.

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Bibliography Grassham, John Williams. “Charles Beaubien: 1800-1864.” University of New Mexico, 1983 (M.A. thesis).

Gutierrez, Ramon A. “When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846.” Stanford: Sanford University Press, 1991.

Mares, E.A. “Padre Martinez: New Perspectives from Taos.” Taos: The Millicent Rogers Museum, 1988.

Montoya, Maria E. “Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900.” Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2002.

Roth, Jeffery E. “Long-Lots in New Mexico and Texas: The French Connection, 1693-1731.” University of Oklahoma, 2005 (Dissertation).

Swadish, Frances Leon. “Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier.” London: University of Norte Dame Press, 1974.

Valdez, Arnold. A. “Hispanic Vernacular Architecture and Settlement Patterns of The Culebra River Villages of Southern Colorado (1850-1950).”

University of New Mexico, 1992 (M.A. thesis).

Valdez-Mondragon, Maria A. “Challenging Domination: Local Resistance on the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant.” University of New Mexico, 2006 (Dissertation).

Valdez-Mondragon, Maria A. “The Culebra River Villages of Costilla County, Colorado.” National Registry of Historic Places, 2000.

Weber, David J. “The Taos Trappers: Fur Trade in the Far Southwest. 1540-1846.”

Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980.

Weber, David J. “The Mexican Frontier 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

Weber, David J. “The Spanish Frontier in North America.” New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

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A Word from the Director Tania Hernández Velasco As an artist who descends from a peasant lineage in Central Mexico, I am rooted in the world by the dignity and hardships that come with traditionally working the land. From those who resiliently continue to defend a relationship to land, nature and its original inhabitants based on respect, love and gratitude, Opera Lafayette found a worldview that this production seeks to honor. By drawing on a diversity of experiences and places –that is, the original questions and themes that were germinating in France before the French Revolution; the still vivid concerns that emerged in the XIX century land struggles of the communities of San Luis, Colorado; and even the wisdom of my own family in Guadalupe Victoria, Puebla, Mexico – we seek to transport you to a sensorial and lyrical experience that, hopefully, makes you long for the warm touch of earth in your hands.

Translating Silvain Linn Cary Mehta This translation aims to capture the multilingual character of the region around the San Luis Valley in the 19th century. The arias are sung in French, the original language of composition, but the dialogue has changed to reflect the background of the different characters. Dolmon (the father of Silvain) reflects the French background of Beaubien. His son, Silvain, naturally would have grown up speaking French as a first language. Dolmon fils, the second son born considerably later, could have been sent away to an English-language school in response to the westward expansion of the United States. As a result, he represents the gringo attitude toward the Spanish-speaking population.

Silvain was cast out of his family because of an inappropriate marriage – here, to a poor Spanish-speaking woman, Elena. But when in the course of the opera, Dolmon finally meets Elena, he recognizes that she is from a fine Mexican family, however different from his own. She has learned some French from Silvain, and he too has learned Spanish from her. The daughters of Silvain and Elena are slightly different in their linguistic orientation: the younger, Lucia, identifies completely with her mother’s Mexican background while the older daughter, Paulina, is closer to her father. He supports her marriage to a peasant farmer, Bazil, most likely of mixed Spanish and indigenous background, whose family helped Silvain learn to 79

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farm the land when he was cast out of his privileged family. Bazil’s first language is Spanish, enriched by a vocabulary that shows his ties to the land.

We chose to keep the dialogue intelligible to an English-speaking audience and turn to the first language of each character at moments of intensity or emotion.

Strangely, the transition from the formal 18th-century poetic French to a combination of more modern languages seemed both natural and appropriate to the new setting of the opera. We did not include a native character, but it is likely that the guards were genízaros, natives forced into indentured servitude, who nonetheless sing in French. Together with Bazil, their presence acknowledges the continuing indigenous presence in and heritage of the Southwest.

Taos Residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Opera Lafayette was in residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico in May 2022. During this period, the artistic team staged Grétry’s Silvain, setting this opera about land rights issues and family reconciliation in the nearby San Luis Valley of Colorado in the 19th century. The residency included discussions and online seminars and culminated in a free public performance of the ‘opera in progress’ – i.e., a dress rehearsal with costumes and minimal lighting, without the full orchestra and scenic design added for the Kennedy Center and El Museo del Barrio performances.

© Reproduced with permission of the Wurlitzer Foundation

More information can be found on their website: wurlitzerfoundation.org 80

Jules Breton, “The Weeders,” 1868

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2022 Symposia Post-Festival Discussion Consulate General of France in New York June 10, 2022, 10:00am

Consulate General of France, Salon Rose Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Consulate_General_of_France_-_Exterior.jpg

Consulate General of France, Exterior Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Consulate_General_of_France_-_Exterior.jpg

Following the three programs of The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered at El Museo del Barrio, Opera Lafayette presents scholars and artists who participated in the Festival in a public discussion to take place at the Consulate General of France in New York, 934 Fifth Avenue, between the hours of 10:00am and 12noon. This event will be live-streamed at: operalafayette.org/festival-symposium

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Virtual Symposia THE INFAMOUS ROSALIE March 2022

Laurent Dubois and Kaiama Glover facilitated a series of conversations examining the novel The Infamous Rosalie by Évelyn Trouillot, one of Haiti’s great contemporary writers. As Trouillot explored the lead-up to the Haitian Revolution through the eyes of Lisette, a young Creole woman, our discussion group explored themes of slavery, resistance, and motherhood taken in this historical context to better understand the world that shaped the music of Concert Spirituel aux Caraïbes.

Learn more at: operalafayette.org/rosalie-book-club

THE MARIE ANTOINETTE SALON SERIES April 2022

Julia Doe hosted this three-part series exploring Marie Antoinette’s role as musician, tastemaker, and patron of the arts. Along with special guests Caroline Weber, author and fashion historian, and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, music historian at University of North Texas College of Music, the panel considered how Marie Antoinette’s artistic tastes influenced French musical style, looked at her role as tastemaker across a variety of media, and examined the long-lasting political repercussions of the queen’s musical tastes.

Visit our archives to learn more about why Marie Antoinette inspired our 2022 musical season: operalafayette.org/marie-salon

SILVAIN, LIVE FROM TAOS May 2022

Scholars Judith Miller, Sylvia Rodríguez, and Maria Mondragon-Valdez discussed the past and present-day land rights issues that informed Opera Lafayette’s setting of Silvain, along with European colonization of the southwest. Silvain Designer Patricia Michaels brought an Indigenous perspective to costumes, and Staging Director Tania Hernández Velasco described her connection with the land and how it gave rise to her artistic choices.

Learn more about Silvain’s resonance in the New World: operalafayette.org/silvain-taos-series 83

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Biographies Participating Scholars CALLUM JOHN BLACKMORE is a graduate student in historical musicology at Columbia University in the City of New York studying French opera in the long eighteenth century.

His dissertation, “Opera at the Dawn of Capitalism: Staging Economic Change in France and Its Colonies from Rameau to Cherubini,” explores representations of economic life on the operatic stage in the lead-up to the French and Haitian Revolutions. He has been published in Current Musicology and Naxos Musicology International and has presented his research at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. His research has been supported by the Barker Fellowship and the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.

JULIA DOE received a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University in 2013. She is a scholar of eighteenth-century opera, with particular emphasis on the music, literature, and politics of the French Enlightenment. Her first book, The Comedians of the King (University of Chicago Press, 2020), traces the impact of Bourbon patronage on the development of opéra comique in the final decades of the Old Regime. This monograph interrogates how comic theater was exploited in (and worked against) the construction of the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image – examining the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the courtly propaganda machine. Essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, EighteenthCentury Music, Music & Letters, Current Musicology, and Renaissance Quarterly.

With a tenure-track appointment at Columbia, she is the recipient of the Alfred Einstein and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet awards from the AMS, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Opera Association, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

LAURENT DUBOIS is the John L. Nau III Bicentennial Professor in the History & Principles of Democracy in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, and Director for Academic Affairs of the Democracy Initiative.

He has written about the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean, with Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 84

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1787-1804 (2004), which won four book prizes including the Frederick Douglass Prize. His 2012 Haiti: The Aftershocks of History was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work on the cultural history of music, The Banjo: America's African Instrument (2016), was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Fellowship, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship. His most recent book is Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (2019), co-authored with Richard Turits. He is currently beginning work on a history of the French Atlantic.

REBECCA GEOFFROY-SCHWINDEN is an associate professor of music history at the University of North Texas College of Music. She is a historian of eighteenth-century music cultures, particularly musical labor during the French Revolution and early Age of Revolutions (c. 1775–1815). Rebecca’s first book, From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022), exposes the fundamental role that the French Revolution played in the emergence of modern professional musicianship and music historiography. She regularly teaches graduate courses and gives public lectures about women’s musical practices during the classical era, and numerous scholarly and public outlets have published her research about the political reception of Marie Antoinette’s musical practices and the musical lives of women in the queen’s milieu. Rebecca’s article “Music as Feminine Capital in Napoleonic France: Nancy Macdonald’s Musical Upbringing” recently received a Music & Letters Centenary Prize for best original article in musicology. From 2017–2019, she contributed to Opera News as a Dallas review correspondent, and from 2018– 2020 served as Vice-President of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music.

KAIAMA L. GLOVER is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies and Faculty Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Barnard College, Columbia University.

She has written extensively about Caribbean literature in such works as A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (2021) and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010), and she is the prize-winning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction. Her current project, an intellectual biography titled For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life, has been supported by fellowships at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris and the New York Public Library Cullman Center. She has also been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the co-host of the podcast, WRITING HOME | American Voices from the Caribbean.

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JUDITH A. MILLER is an associate professor of History at Emory University (Atlanta). She specializes in eighteenthcentury French history, in particular the French Revolution. She is completing a second book project on the Political Self of the French Revolution: Mind, Emotion, and Terror, 1760-1804. Her first book was Mastering the Market: The State and the Grain Trade in Northern France, 1700-1860 (Cambridge UP, 1998). Her articles include “Fratricide: Tragic Brothers, Masculine Violence and the Republic on the French Stage, 1799,” in Republics at War, 1776-1840: Revolutions, Conflicts and Geopolitics in Europe and the Atlantic World, which she co-edited with Pierre Serna and Antonino De Francesco (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Newberry Library. She is a Chevalier in the French Ordre des Palmes Académiques (2002).

She enjoys teaching courses on “Jane Austen’s World,” “Music and Politics in the Nineteenth Century,” “The Origins of Capitalism,” and “The History of Skiing and Snowsports.” She came to her love of music, opera, and piano through her father, a high school band director and expert piano technician.

MARIA MONDRAGON-VALDEZ is a resident and descendant of multiple generations of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. Living on the border of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, Maria brings expertise in Mexican Era Land Grant with her focus on land loss and resistance, as it relates to the evolution of this region's cultural landscapes. Maria has authored many scholarly works and she is considered a community activist for her environmental justice work.

SYLVIA RODRÍGUEZ is a native Taoseña, professor emerita of anthropology and former director of the Alfonso A. Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies at the University of New Mexico.

She is a commissioner on the Acequia de San Antonio in Valdez and a member of the Taos Valley Acequia Association board of directors. Her publications have focused on interethnic relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, with emphasis on the cultural impact of tourism on ritual, ethnic identity, and conflict over land and water. She works in collaboration with acequia organizations and other researchers. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, plus two prize-winning books: The Matachines Dance: Ritual Symbolism and Interethnic Relations in the Upper Rio Grande Valley, and Acequia: Water Sharing, Sanctity, and Place.

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CAROLINE WEBER is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she specializes in the literature and history of the ancient regime, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. Her books are: Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (2003); Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006); and Proust’s Duchess (2018), which won the French Heritage Society Book Award and was a finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has contributed articles to such outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, Town & Country Magazine, W Magazine, Vogue, Bookforum, and the London Review of Books.

Creative Team RYAN BROWN (Opera Lafayette Founder and Artistic Director; Conductor, Silvain) Ryan Brown is the founder and artistic director of Opera Lafayette, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in the 2019/2020 season. Through his work with Opera Lafayette, Ryan has gained an international reputation for his role in the revival and reassessment of significant works from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. His discography of twelve sound recordings for Naxos has focused on the French repertoire, including well-known works by composers such as Lully, Rameau, and Gluck, as well as premiere recordings of operas by Rebel/Francœur, Monsigny, Philidor, Grétry, Sacchini, and Félicien David. Ryan has also created two DVDs with Opera Lafayette for Naxos, including the modern premiere of Gaveaux and Bouilly’s Léonore, ou L’Amour conjugal, the model for Beethoven’s Leonore, the latter of which Opera Lafayette will present in its 25th anniversary season, as well as Rameau’s Les Fêtes de L’Hymen et de L’Amour, ou Les Dieux d’Egypte, a collaboration with the New York Baroque Dance Company, the Seán Curran Dance Company, and Kalanidhi Dance. Ryan has also led performances of operas by Vivaldi, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Paisiello, and Cimarosa. He regularly appears in Washington, DC and New York with Opera Lafayette and has also conducted in San Francisco, Seattle, and at The Glimmerglass Festival, and the Opéra Royal de Versailles. Ryan was raised in a musical family in California and performed extensively as a violinist and chamber musician before turning his attention to conducting. His teachers included 87

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Dorothy DeLay and Gustav Meier. He is a recipient of La Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, and when not conducting spends his time in southwestern Colorado.

SANDRINE CHATRON (Harp, Program Conception of The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette) Sandrine Chatron is a harpist whose musical curiosity and innovation is aptly suited to the many facets of her artistry, which she expresses in her work as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral principal, and teacher. Based in Amsterdam, where she has been solo harpist with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra since 2009 (principal conductor, Marc Albrecht) she has also been a member of the teaching staff at the Amsterdam Conservatoire since 2012, gives master classes and takes part of international juries. Sandrine Chatron was awarded first prize for harp and chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire in 1995. She studied with M.C. Jamet, F. Cambreling and G. Lorenzini. She also won first prize at the Cité des Arts Competition, at the Chamber Music Competition in Arles and is also a Foundation Banque Populaire award winner. She has appeared both as a concert artist and as a chamber musician across Europe, Asia and North America including appearances at the Theatre des Champs- Elysees, the Amsterdam Concergebouw, Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Pablo Casals Festival, the Festival Presence, the Festival Messian, and the Fondation Royaumont. She is a member of the French Chamber Music Group Calliopée as well as the trio Polycordes, and plays regularly with musicians such as Ophelie Gaillard, Nicolas Dautricourt, Lise Berthaud, Gordan Nikolić, Michael Bennett, Daniel Isoir, Juliette Hurel, Francois Salque, the Elias string quartet. She performs regularly with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with whom she has recorded Pierre Boulez's Sur Incises for Deutsche Grammophon. She has worked with the principal French orchestras, such as Orchestre de Paris, Opera de Paris, Orchestre National de France, as well as the Klangforum Wien, The Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, working with such conductors as Claudio Abbado.

A.J. GUBAN (Lighting Design) A.J. Guban is excited to return to Opera Lafayette after designing L’Epreuve Villageoise. Other recent credits include the Kennedy Center’s 50th Anniversary Concert, Washington National Opera’s Come Home: A Celebration of Return, and Constellation Theatre Company’s Moon Man Walk. He has designed for Opera Cleveland, Opera Vivente, The Maryland Opera Studio, Atlanta Opera, Opéra de Montréal, 88

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Synetic Theatre, Imagination Stage, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Postal Museum, among others. Upcoming projects include Il trovatore and La bohème for Washington National Opera and La traviata at Lyric Opera of Kansas City. A.J. has been the Lighting Supervisor at the Washington National Opera for the past twelve seasons and is a proud member of USA Local 829. www.ajguban.com JOSHUA HIGGASON (Scenic and Projections Design) Joshua Higgason is a video, lighting, scenic, and interactive designer for theater, opera, concerts, and live performances.

Recent projects include Hansel und Gretel (projections; Teatro Alla Scala); King Arthur (projections; Statsoper Berlin); Die Dreigroschenoper (projections; Salzburger Festspiele); Nico Muhly’s Control (Five Landscapes for Orchestra) (video, scenic; Utah Symphony); Ira Glass’ Seven Things I’ve Learned Tour (projections); Persona (video and lighting; Dir. Jay Scheib); Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell Tour 2015 (video); Radiolab’s Apocalyptical Tour (video, scenic, lighting); Powder her Face (video; NYC Opera; Dir. Jay Scheib); and The Ambassador (video; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Dir. John Tiffany). He has designed and consulted for The Builders Association, Big Dance Theater, MoMA, MASS MoCA, Theatre for One/Christine Jones, The Windmill Factory, and TED. He currently teaches Performance Media, Interactive Design for Live Performance, and Lighting Design at MIT. LINN CARY MEHTA (Translator, Silvain) Linn Cary Mehta, Ph.D., teaches English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College and at New York University. A poet and translator, her work focuses on 19th and 20th-century literature in English, French, and Spanish; she has translated plays from both French and Spanish for ID Studio Theater, a Hispanic theater company in the South Bronx.

PEDRO MEMELSDORFF (Guest Conductor, Program Conception of Concert Spirituel) A music director, medievalist in musicology and recorder player, Pedro Memelsdorff was born in Argentina, graduated from the Schola Cantorum in Basle and the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam, and obtained a Ph.D. in Musicology from Utrecht University.

As a musician, he has been a member of Jordi Savall’s Hesperion XX/XXI since 1981 and of a duo with Andreas Staier since 1984. In 1987 he founded the ensemble Mala Punica, specializing in late medieval polyphony, with which he 89

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has performed over four hundred concerts in major early-music venues in Europe and America and published eight CDs that have received over forty international awards. Memelsdorff and Mala Punica have been Artists in Residence at the University of California Davis, Amuz in Antwerp, Fondation Royaumont in Paris, and at Harvard University. He was tenured Professor of Music at the Conservatory of Zurich (Switzerland) and the Civica Scuola di Musica of Milan (Italy), and still serves as a tenured Professor at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya in Barcelona (Spain). He has been guest professor and lecturer at music institutions throughout Europe, America, and Japan. A tenured Director of the Egida Sartori and Laura Alvini Early Music Seminars at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice since 2006, he has also served as the Director of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basle and Artistic Director of the early-music festival Festtage Alte Musik in the same city. In 2020 he founded Arlequin Philosophe, a chamber orchestra specialized in French-Caribbean baroque repertoire, which began performing in Poland, USA, and Germany in 2021-22.

PATRICIA MICHAELS (Costume Design, Silvain) Patricia Michaels of Taos Pueblo is a world-renowned Fashion and Textile designer. She holds a degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has worked at The Santa Fe Opera costume department with Nick Cave as her mentor, and with an Italian tailor in Italy. Ms. Michaels was in Project Runway Season 11, and received the inaugural “Arts & Design Award” from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She has also been a speaker at the Bill & Melinda Gates Scholar Foundation, among other accolades. Her work as a Native CEO of PM Waterlily, LLC, takes her around the world to places like New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Europe, USA and at least twice a year to New York for fashion week to do fashion, textiles, lectures, presentations, workshops, fund raisers, artist in residency programs and inspirational speeches. She has a home collection with “Akin Homes” and has created uniforms for Hotel Chaco.

Her driving forces are her two children Gabriel and Margeaux, the elderly, youth, and empowering women. Her cottage industry encourages women’s voices and support organizations such as Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls, Community Against Violence, American Indian College Fund, Big Brother & Big Sister, Smart Art, and Preservation of Native Culture & Resources. Patricia and her companion James spend a lot of time in nature where Patricia pulls inspiration for her collections. Recently she has entered into a new digital ready-to-wear line with a team under the name of “Water Lily Designs.”

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TANIA HERNÁNDEZ VELASCO (Stage Direction, Silvain) Tania is a film director born and based in Mexico City. Through a poetic, ludic and sensory approach, her work explores questions regarding legacy, territory, nature, and identity in her intimate sphere. Titixe (2018), her first feature film in which she holds directing, editing, producing and cinematography credits, premiered in more than forty international film festivals and collected over ten awards and mentions. The film, which follows the last harvest her family attempted before having to let go of their small piece of land, was selected as one of the “All Time 100 Best Mexican Films” by film critics through a poll organized by Sector Cine magazine. In 2019, Hernández Velasco was selected as a Flaherty Seminar - Professional Development Fellow (Flaherty Institute, NY) and received the Charles C. Guggenheim Emerging Artist Award (Full Frame Festival, Durham). She holds an MA in Creative Documentary and a Postgraduate Diploma in Film Editing, both from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Previously, she received a BA in Film in CENTRO (México City).

She currently is directing Eclipsis (short film produced by Mexico’s National Autonomous University) and recently finished “My Body Is an Expanding Star”, her second feature with which she is a Fellow for Firelight Media’s William Greaves Fund (United States, 2021) and a recipient of Mexico’s Institute of Cinematography FOCINE (2021). Silvain is her first exploration as an opera stage director, where she approaches social themes and visual motifs that dwell in her cinematic work.

Performing Artists JACOB ASHWORTH (Violin, The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette) Jacob is the “impressive Artistic Director” (The New York Times) of the stylistically omnivorous ensemble Cantata Profana, where he has won acclaim for his vision of crafting theatrical, genrebending chamber music shows. As a soloist, Jacob appears in recitals and chamber music performances throughout the US. Jacob performs equally on modern and baroque violin, as a conductor, and occasionally on renaissance vielle. On period instruments he has been concertmaster for Mark Morris Dance Group and Opera Lafayette, and performed with American Bach Soloists, TENET, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, Helicon Ensemble, Juilliard415, the Yale Baroque Ensemble, New York Baroque Inc., the Chamber Music Society of Central Virginia, and at the 91

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Smithsonian Institution. In contemporary music, he has worked closely with numerous composers and premiered works with New York New Music Ensemble, Princeton Sound Kitchen, MATA Festival, Locrian Chamber Players, The Stone, NOVUS NY, Philadelphia’s Network for New Music, and at the Museo National de Arte in Mexico City. Jacob has been an artist at the Staunton Music Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, France’s Festival Daniou, Lake George Music Festival, and Music Mountain. Jacob has been called a “lithe and nimble” (The New York Times) baroque violinist, an “exacting and sensitive” (The Boston Globe) new music player, and a “richly detailed” (The New York Times) conductor. His 2015 fully staged performance of György Kurtag’s Kafka-Fragments, an hour-long tourde-force for violin and voice, was hailed as a “flat-out triumph” by Opera News.

Jacob earned his masters and doctorate from the Yale School of Music under Ani Kavafian and studied baroque violin with Robert Mealy as a member of the Yale Baroque Ensemble. Previous degrees include a Performer Diploma from Indiana University and a bachelor's from Manhattan School of Music.

NATHAN BERG (Dolmon père, Silvain) A “tall, majestic bass” with “impeccable technique” and “a palpable presence on stage,” Canadian bass-baritone Nathan Berg’s career has spanned a vast range of repertoire on the concert and operatic stage. His recent dramatic work has earned acclaim around the globe from the title role in Der fliegende Holländer in his Bolshoi Theatre debut, Alberich in Das Rheingold with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra and Minnesota Opera, Doktor in Wozzeck with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the Houston Symphony, for which he won a Grammy-Award, and his company debut at Teatro alla Scala, in Robert Carsen’s world-premiere production of Battistelli’s CO2. In the 2019-2020 season, Mr. Berg made his house and role debuts as Jochanaan in Salome with The Atlanta Opera and Hawaii Opera Theatre as well as returned to the roster of the Metropolitan Opera in Manon and Turandot. On the concert stage, Mr. Berg is to sing Palemon in Thaïs for the Toronto Symphony, the Rotterdam Philharmonic on a European tour to sing Der Einarmige in Die Frau ohne Schatten with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, debut the role of Kurwenal in Tristan und Isolde with the Taiwan Philharmonic, and performed Lélio with the Helsinki Philharmonic. Finally, Mr. Berg performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with Filharmonia Narodowa in Warsaw, Poland, Naples Philharmonic and Greensboro Symphony. In the 2018-2019 season, Nathan Berg continued to establish himself as a specialist in the works of Wagner, where he performed Alberich in Das Rheingold with Opéra de Montréal, Alberich in Siegfried with the National Performing Arts Center in Taipei, Taiwan, and joined the roster of the Metropolitan Opera for The Ring Cycle. He also appeared with Leon Botstein 92

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at the Bard Music Festival in Das Wunder der Heliane and the Grant Park Music Festival in Delius’ A Mass of Life.

CHARLES BRINK (Flute, The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette) Charles Brink began his flute studies with Jacob Berg in his native St. Louis. He holds degrees from the New England Conservatory (Boston), the San Francisco Conservatory and the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. Since devoting himself primarily to historical flutes in 1998, he has toured and recorded with, among others, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Wiener Akademie, Les Musciens du Louvre, The Four Nations Ensemble and Les Nouveaux Caractères. From 2005-2009 Charlie led the Grand Tour Orchestra (New York City), which he founded. With this ensemble he conducted the US premieres of works by C.Ph.E. Bach and N. Jommelli. His recordings can be heard on West German Radio, Middle German Radio, Dutch Radio and Television, Austrian Radio, and the EMI, Raumklang (Germany), Fuga Libera (Belgium) and Orchid Classics (London) labels. In 2018 Mr. Brink conducted the modern premiere of Niccolò Jommelli’s Cerere placata with Opera Lafayette at the Kennedy Center and the Times Center (New York).

Mr. Brink is beginning his Ph.D. studies in musicology (Niccolò Jommelli and the Orchestra) at the University of Bayreuth (Germany). Charlie lives in Vienna, Austria with his wife, Stephanie Houtzeel, and their son Jacob.

SOPHIA BURGOS (Soprano, Concert Spirituel & The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette) Puerto Rican soprano Sophia Burgos has in recent seasons established herself internationally as an artist of extraordinary intelligence, musicality, and stage presence. Most notably, she gave role and house debuts as Teresa/Benvenuto Cellini with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Ensemble at the BBC PROMS, Musikfest Berlin, Versailles and the BerliozFest in La Côte-Saint-André, as Despina/Così fan tutte at De Nationale Opera, conducted by Ivor Bolton, at La Monnaie as Susanna/Le Nozze di Figaro and Zerlina/Don Giovanni conducted by Antonello Manacorda, Fox/The Cunning Little Vixen with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle (the CD is nominated for a 2022 Grammy Award), Maria/West Side Story at the Edinburgh International Festival, conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Ann Trulove/The Rake’s Progress with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski.

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TERESA CASTILLO (Lucette, Silvain) Costa Rican-American Soprano Teresa Castillo has been hailed by the San Francisco Gate as a “standout, bringing [vocal] power and florid elegance,” and by Opera News for exhibiting “a clean, concentrated sound, and a lovely, intelligent musicianship.” Ms. Castillo’s operatic repertoire includes Juliette (Roméo and Juliette), Madame Mao (Nixon in China), Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor), Tytania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Creusa (Medea in Corinto), #1 (Transformations), Rosina (The Barber of Seville), Königin der Nacht (Die Zauberflöte), Amina (La Sonnambula), Drusilla (L’incoronazione di Poppea) and Adele (Die Fledermaus). She has sung with Knoxville Opera, The Princeton Festival, Opera Theatre St. Louis, Teatro Nuovo, Bel Canto at Caramoor, Emerald City Opera, Virginia Opera, Central City Opera, San Francisco’s prestigious Merola Opera Program and will be making debuts this upcoming season with Opera Lafayette, Opera San Jose, White Snake Projects and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Recent competition prizes include the George London Competition, the Cooper-Bing Competition, Opera Index Competition, The Jensen Foundation Vocal Competition, and the Altamura/Caruso International Voice Competition, The Anita Cerquetti International Competition, Lois Alba Aria Competition, Denver Lyric Opera Guild Competition, Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and has received grants from Career Bridges, The Allied Arts (CO), The Anna Sosenko Trust, and the Bel Canto Vocal Scholarship Foundation (RI).

SISHEL CLAVERIE (Mezzo-Soprano, Concert Spirituel) Mexican Mezzo-soprano, Sishel Claverie, enjoys a versatile career in opera, musical theater, new music and multidisciplinary collaborations. A champion of new operatic works, Ms. Claverie has been involved in a number of world premieres, including: Houston Grand Opera´s El Milagro del Recuerdo and Ted Rosenthal’s Dear Erich, produced by the New York City Opera. This year she will originate several roles: Gloria in the video-opera series Everything for Dawn by Experiments in Opera; Fia in the new opera Pietá by Jake Landau; and The Cheshire Cat in Amy Scurria’s Alice, an Operatic Wonderland. Sishel is increasingly interested in multidisciplinary collaborations. During lockdown in 2020, she helped develop an online adaptation of Verdi’s Macbeth (Lady M) alongside Heartbeat Opera, experimenting with video footage. She will be featured as Carmen in the upcoming short film Chinese Laundry, directed by Giorgio Arcelli. She recently won several awards for her work directing music videos, including the Harold Haugh Light Opera Competition and the Opera en Castellano Competition, among others (2021). Recent 94

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performance highlights include the title role in Piazzolla’s tango-opera Maria de Buenos Aires with Opera in the Heights, Charlotte Malcolm in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music with Alamo City Opera; and Carmen with Heartbeat Opera, which was praised by The New York Times as “riveting”. Sishel holds a Bachelor's Degree in Music from the University of Houston and a Master's Degree in Music from Rice University. She currently resides in New York City.

THÉOTIME LANGLOIS DE SWARTE (Violin, Concert Spirituel) Théotime is the first baroque violinist to be nominated for a Victoires de la Musique Classique, a recognition of his work with numerous baroque ensembles, including Les Ombres and Les Arts Florissants. He plays at prestigious venues such as the Berlin Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Potsdam and Wonderfeel festivals, Bach Festival Riga, Musikverein Vienna, Philharmonie de Paris Shanghai National Art Center and Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. From September 2022 he will be the Artistin-Residence at the Arsenal de Metz and will make his debut with the Orchestre National de Lorraine. He will continue his collaboration with the Holland Baroque Orchestra, Les Vespres d'Arnadi in Barcelona, and his own ensemble, Le Consort. 2020 marked the beginning of his relationship as a soloist with the Harmonia Mundi label, with which he has recorded four discs: The Mad Lover, a collection of English music with the lutenist Thomas Dunford, Proust, le concert retrouvé with the pianist Tanguy de Williencourt, Générations, a french duet programme with William Christie (sonatas by Leclair and Sénaillé), and finally a disc of concertos (Vivaldi, Leclair, Locatelli) recorded with Les Ombres. He studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in the class of Michaël Hentz, and is a laureate of the Banque Populaire Foundation and the Jumpstart Foundation. Théotime Langlois de Swarte plays on a Jacob Stainer violin of 1665.

SAMANTHA LOUIS-JEAN (Soprano, Concert Spirituel; Pauline, Silvain) The Canadian and French soprano Samantha Louis-Jean received her vocal training at the Maîtrise de Radio-France, the University of the Montreal then with Marie Daveluy and Yolande Parent.

She made her professional debut singing Euridice (Monteverdi, L’Orfeo) with the Montreal Baroque Festival and Lauretta (Puccini, Gianni Schicchi) with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Her operatic roles include Zerlina (Mozart, Don Giovanni), Barbarina (Le Nozze di Figaro), Belinda (Purcell, Dido and Aeneas), Euridice (L’Orfeo), Poppea (L’incoronazione di Poppea), the Dew Fairy (Humperdinck, Hänsel und Gretel), Altisidore and une Japonaise (Boismortier, 95

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Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse) and Colette (Rousseau, Le Devin du Village).

In Fall 2016, she went on tour with the Jeunesses Musicales Canada performing works by Handel and Scarlatti with Ensemble Les Songes. She then portrayed the role of Angelica in Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso at the Tourcoing Lyric Atelier and the Champs-Élysées Theatre (April 2017). Other recent performances include La Statue in Rameau’s Pygmalion with Les Talens Lyriques and Christophe Rousset (Innsbruck Festival), Zerlina in Don Giovanni (Vichy Opera), the four female roles in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann in a specifically modified version at the Dijon Opera conducted by Nicolas Chesneau and directed by Mikaël Serre, as well as Céphise in Rameau’s Pygmalion and Vénus in Mondoville’s L’Amour et Psyché with Le Concert d’Astrée conducted by Emmanuelle Haïm and Robyn Orlin as stage director (Dijon Opéra, Lille Opera, Luxemburg Grand Théâtre, Théâtre de Caen). Samantha Louis-Jean is a winner of the Froville International Baroque Competition, the Prix d’Europe Competition, the Lyndon-Woodside Oratorio Society of New York Competition, and the Jacqueline Desmarais Foundation. She is a grant recipient of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, the Canada Council of the Arts, and the Jeunesses Musicales du Canada.

CAMILLE ORTIZ (Hélène, Silvain) Internationally recognized for compelling performances of baroque and concert repertoire, native Puerto Rican soprano Camille Ortiz is quickly establishing herself as a leading operatic artist. The 2021-2022 season includes recitals and masterclasses of Latin American art song across the United States; a faculty recital in University of Oregon’s Beall Hall; an Ars Lyrica Houston tour of Spanish and Latin American baroque repertoire, including a debut with the Music Before 1800 music series in New York City; Pamina in Eugene Opera’s production of The Magic Flute; a recital and masterclass at the Puerto Rico Conservatory; a highly anticipated debut with the Boston Baroque as Oriana in Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula; and an exciting Kennedy Center debut with Opera Lafayette as Elena in their adaptation of Grétry’s Silvain.

She has appeared with the Philhamornia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale, Ars Lyrica Houston, Opera Orlando, Gulfshore Opera, Magic City Opera, the Naples Philharmonic, the Dallas Bach Society, the Orchestra of New Spain, the Festival of the Aegean in Greece, the Orchestra da Camera Fiorentina ( John Rutter conducting), and at Carnegie Hall with MidAm International. She appears in the highly acclaimed CD recording of Rameau’s Le temple de la gloire with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale, conducted by Nicholas McGegan, for which she was named “the stand-out” of the recording by BBC Music Magazine, October 2018. Her fall 2018 performances with the Philharmonia Baroque of Mozart’s Exsultate Jubilate, Coronation Mass in C major, and Litaniae 96

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Lauretanae have also been broadcast on San Francisco’s KDFC, classical music radio. Ms. Ortiz is Assistant Professor of Voice at University of Oregon, School of Music and Dance.camilleortizsoprano.com JEHÚ OTERO (Tenor, Concert Spirtuel, Bazile, Silvain) Puerto Rican tenor Jehú has a master’s degree in Voice from The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University (2020), where he studied under the guidance of Dr. Stephen King. Jehú will also be debuting the role of John in the world premiere of the opera ¿Y los pasteles? by Johanny Navarro. In March 2022, Jehú sang the role of Langston in A Space of Sky (Another City) for a workshop with the Houston Grand Opera, which he also performed during the summer of 2021. In December 2021, Jehú toured with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra for a series of Christmas Concerts. In 2019 Jehú sang the role of Chucho in El Milagro del Recuerdo with the Houston Grand Opera. Jehú also sang the role of Miles Zegner in Proving Up by the American composer Missy Mazzoli. During the summer, he performed the role of Mr. Erlanson in Sondheim's A Little Night Music at the Aspen Music Festival. He also sang the role of Anselmo for a second season in Johanny Navarro’s Frenesí.

In 2018, Jehú was Pane in Cavalli’s La Calisto and Elder Hayes in Susannah by Carlisle Floyd. Jehú was the tenor soloist in Handel's Messiah with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. In 2017, he was Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte with the Puerto Rico Music Conservatory. Jehú Otero was a District Winner of the Laffont Competition (2021) in Puerto Rico, where he received the La Zarzuela Award (2021). He has received multiple awards including the Jim and Molly Crownover Endowed Scholarship in Voice, the Matt Stoner Award, the Vincent Foundation Scholarship, and the Roberto I. Ferdman Prize (2018) granted by Pro Arte Musical.

NICHOLAS PHAN (Tenor, The Musical Salon of Marie Antoinette) Described by The Boston Globe as “one of the world’s most remarkable singers,” American tenor Nicholas Phan is increasingly recognized as an artist of distinction. An artist with an incredibly diverse repertoire that spans nearly 500 years of music, he performs regularly with the world’s leading orchestras and opera companies. Phan is also an avid recitalist and a passionate advocate for art, song, and vocal chamber music; in 2010, Phan co-founded Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, an organization devoted to promoting this underserved repertoire. A celebrated recording artist, Phan’s most recent album, Clairières, a recording of songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, was nominated for the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album.

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His album, Gods and Monsters, was nominated for the same award in 2017. He remains the first and only singer of Asian descent to be nominated in the history of the category, which has been awarded by the Recording Academy since 1959.

Phan’s growing discography also includes a Grammy-nominated recording of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella with Pierre Boulez and the Chicago Symphony, as well as the world premiere recording Elliott Carter’s A Sunbeam’s Architecture. Sought after as a curator and programmer, in addition to his work as artistic director of CAIC, Phan has also created programs for broadcast on WFMT and WQXR and served as guest curator for projects with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Merola Opera, and San Francisco Performances, where he served as the vocal artistin-residence from 2014-2018. Phan’s programs often examine themes of identity, highlight unfairly underrepresented voices from history, and strive to underline the relevance of music from all periods to the currents of the present day.

ZACK POWELL (Dolmon, Fils Cadet, Silvain) Zack Powell, based in Washington DC, is an actor and theatre maker. Originally from the mid-west, he received his MFA in Classical Acting from Illinois State University in 2012 and has built a career in the theatre community of DC. He has also worked at major regional theatres across the country. Zack Powell's selected credits: Alabama Shakespeare Festival: Macbeth, Everyman Theatre: Sense and Sensibility, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Cleveland Playhouse: Robin Hood in Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood, RepStage: Edward II in E2, The Kennedy Center: Shear Madness (500+ performances), Round House Theatre: Georgia Mcbride in The Legend of Georgia McBride, Theater J: The Last Night of Ballyhoo, The Folger Theatre: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Shakespeare Theatre Co.: Dunsinane, The Utah Shakespeare Festival: King John, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, Henry IV Pt 2, South Pacific, and Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure, Illinois Shakespeare Festival: Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Othello, As You Like It, Comedy of Errors (TYA), The American Shakespeare Center: Twelfth Night, King Lear, Henry VI Pt 2, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Off-Square Theatre Co.: Godspell, Cabaret, Cherry Orchard. Film: Tapawingo. Instagram: @zackpowellthezactor.

VICTOR SICARD (Silvain, Silvain; Baritone, Concert Spirituel) The young baritone Victor Sicard from la Rochelle is increasingly in demand for his vocal, drama, and linguistic skills. He has captured international attention since his participation in William Christie's sixth Jardin des Voix, which led him to do an international tour with the Arts Florissants Orchestra. He has had the opportunity to work 98

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with the best international ensembles, first by continuing his collaboration with Les Arts Florissants and William Christie but also with Le Concert d'Astrée and Emmanuelle Haïm, Le Concert Spirituel and Hervé Niquet, the Ensemble Aedes and Mathieu Romano, Le Poème Harmonique and Vincent Dumestre and Matheus Ensemble with Jean Christophe Spinosi. His operatic repertoire includes the roles of Adario in Les Indes Galantes (Rameau) in Washington and New York, Tisiphone in Amour et Psyché (Mondonville) at the Operas of Dijon, Lille, Luxembourg and Caen, Apollon in La descente d’Orphée aux enfers (Charpentier), Yamadori in Madame Butterfly (Puccini) at the Operas of Limoges and Rouen, Dr Falke in Die Fledermaus at the Staatstheater Linz (Austria), Aeneas in Dido and Aeneas with Les Arts Florissants, Clock and Cat in L’Enfant et les sortilèges for Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Enfant fantôme in Coraline (Turnage) in the Operas of Lille, Demetriusin in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten) at the Barbican. His baritone soloist oratorio repertoire includes Mozart’s Victor Sicard has recently recorded a CD dedicated to Ravel's melodies with pianist Anna Cardona which was released in Spring 2020.

JONATHAN WOODY (Bass-Baritone, Concert Spirituel) Bass-baritone Jonathan Woody is a sought-after performer of early and new music in New York and across North America.

He has been featured with historically-informed orchestras such as Apollo’s Fire, Boston Early Music Festival, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Bach Collegium San Diego, Portland Baroque Orchestra and New York Baroque Incorporated, earning praise as “charismatic,” “riveting,” and “wonderfully dramatic.” Jonathan is also committed to ensemble singing at the highest level and has performed with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, TENET, the Clarion Music Society and New York Polyphony, among others. An avid performer of new music, Jonathan has premiered works including Ellen Reid's prism (2019 Pulitzer Prize winner), Ted Hearne's The Source, Missy Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves (NYC premiere), and Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone (2017 Pulitzer Prize winner). He has appeared with Staunton Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Portland Bach Festival, Carmel Bach Festival, Oregon Bach Festival, Opera Lafayette, Gotham Chamber Opera, and Beth Morrison Projects. Jonathan has recorded with the Choir of Trinity Wall Street (Musica Omnia), Boston Early Music Festival (RadioBremen), and New York Polyphony (BIS Records). Jonathan's musical pursuits extend beyond his voice and has been commissioned as a composer for groups including Lorelei Ensemble, the Handel & Haydn Society and the Uncommon Music Festival. Currently based in Brooklyn, NY, Jonathan holds degrees from McGill University and the University of Maryland, College Park and is represented by Miguel Rodriguez of Athlone Artists.

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Opera Lafayette Supporters Festival Sponsors Francis Dubois Marifé Hernández Ishtar Méjanès Barbara Tober

Special Thanks Sophia Lynn and David Frederick for their three-year challenge grant (2020 – June 30, 2022) The Cultural Services of the Embassy of France The Consulate General of France in New York Pamela J. Hines for editorial assistance with the 2022 Festival program book.

Yoko and Tom Arthur for underwriting Silvain directorial consultant Paul Curran.

And the many others who helped make “The Era of Marie Antoinette, rediscovered” possible.

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Institutional Support Opera Lafayette gratefully acknowledges the following corporations, foundations, and government agencies for their support and for their continued commitment to the arts.

The Arthur and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies Capitol Hill Community Foundation DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Exxon-Mobil The Nancy Peery Marriott Foundation National Endowment for the Arts National Endowment for the Humanities Prince Charitable Trusts Wage Foundation

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Individual Donors Opera Lafayette expresses its deepest gratitude for the extraordinary support of its donors and patrons, whose generous contributions help to ensure the continued success of our organization.

Please consider joining this group of dedicated arts lovers who support Opera Lafayette. For more information on how you can make a difference, please visit our website at operalafayette.org/support or contact the Development Officer. Email: development@operalafayette.org; In Washington: (202) 546-9332; In New York: (212) 634-9388.

The individual gift listings below reflects donations made within the last year (April 16, 2021 – April 15, 2022)

Leader’s Circle ($25,000+) Anonymous David C. Frederick and Sophia Lynn Ishtar Méjanès

Benefactor’s Circle ($10,000 - $24,999) Marifé Hernández and Joel Bell Valerie R. Lynn Ellen McCoy Ms. Elizabeth Prince Mr. and Mrs. Leonard H. Ralston Bruce Rosenblum and Lori Laitman Trustee’s Circle ($5,000 - $9,999) Mr. and Mrs. Ross Ain Walter Arnheim and Marsha Rehns Thomas L. and Yoko N. Arthur Ryan Brown and Christine Healey Mr. and Mrs. Dorsey Dunn Bill and Cari Gradison Robert V. Jones Susan A. Lynner Ms. Heather Mac Donald and Mr. Erich Eichman Mr. and Mrs. William Maroney Daniel and Sybil Silver

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Sustainer’s Circle ($2,500 - $5,000) Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Allen Mrs. Bruno Desforges Cheryl Gorelick Jeffrey Mora and Wendy Fuller-Mora Dr. and Mrs. Thomas P. Sculco Michelle Sikora Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Stanley Mrs. Barbara Tober Mr. and Mrs. Alan Wilkinson JoAnn Willis and Charles N. Kahn III Patron’s Circle ($1,000 - $2,499) Mehdi Reza Asef Stephanie Bernheim and Ralph Wharton Corrick Brown Joan L. Elliston Louis and Marie-Hélène Forget Elisabeth R. French Dennis Gallagher and Carol Barthel Susan Ginsburg Tom Helinski and Bob Miller Samuel and Marcia Hellman Pamela J. Hines and Robert G. Lerner Adrienne Jamieson and Patrick Chamorel Parker Jayne and Thea Austen Stephen E. and Mary Sue Kitchen Thomas G. MacCracken Pamela Manice

Supporters

Dianne and Chris O’Flinn Mr. and Mrs. Robert Quinlan Jane and Bruce Robert Joel and Joan Simon Theodora and Albert Simons Dr. Janet M. Storella and Mr. Andrew T. Karron Dr. and Mrs. Daniel Thys John C. Wiecking Susan Yamada Donor’s Circle ($500 - $999) Barry L. Abel David Abernethy and Elizabeth Lewis Alan Agle Dr. Joel Brenner and Ms. Victoria Pope Derek Brown and Deborah Hellman Mr. and Mrs. Jerald L. Clark Carol Collins Francis Dubois Bruce A. Garetz and Anne Eisenberg Ms. Joan Greenberg Ralph Johanson Mr. and Mrs. Richard Johnson Cathy Kaufman and Tom Pippert Andrea Allen Knutson Vivianne C. Lake Mr. and Mrs. John Lipsky Tiffany Lynn Mr. and Mrs. John Manice Karen A. McLaughlin and Mark Schubin McMurphy Family Mrs. Newhouse Mrs. Greenway O’Dea Marvin and Rochelle Pollock Diana Prince Mrs. Kenneth B. Prouty Sunita and Ashwani Rajput Bill and Annette Reilly Mr. and Mrs. Clark Silcox Matthew Slater and Faith Roessel Thomas Strikwerda Michael and Eileen Tanner Judith Weintraub Irving and Carol Yoskowitz

Supporter ($100 - $499) Anonymous Ms. Catherine Armington Bobbie and Dan Arnheim Wallace K. Bailey Mr. Eric Bash Virginia M. Bland Avis Bohlen Calleo and David Calleo Michael Canning Sara Caples and Everardo Jefferson Vickie D. Carlson Dickson and Rives Carroll Ms. Louise Cort Linda DeRamus Duane and JoAnne K. DeVries Ms. A. Dorsey Mr. John Driscoll Thomas D. Dunn Ms. Fynnette Eaton and Mr. James E. Miller Selzer Family Alan and Hannah Fisher Ms. Polly Fisher Margaret S. Frances Dwight Frankfather and Karen Peterson Rosemary Freeman Aloysia Friedmann and Jon Kimura Parker Janet and Sid Getz Dr. Karen Gilmore James A. Glazier Michael L. Godec and Suzanne Wells Mr. Robert Green Marissa Greenberg and Adam E. Lyons Tilly Gurman Margaret C. Jones Gloria and Michael Kadish Geoffrey D. Kaiser Joseph P. Kerr Lorna Kettaneh Dr. Walter L. Kirchner Sandra Kolb Monika Kosior Julia Liebeskind Ruoke Liu and Reid Thompson Ronald Lorentzen Daniel Lozier 103

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Elisabeth Lynn and John Crane Daniel and Maeva Marcus Carol Marsh Ms. Joan E. McFarland Cynthia and Michael McKee Mr. and Mrs.David A. Mead Catherine S. Michaelson Deborah Mintz Lisa and Todd Mion Robert Parker and Nancy Gordon Barbara A. Patocka Stephen Marylyn Pauley Mr. John Percy Trudy Gary Peterson Anna Protsenko and Jason Strudler Thomas Pulling Mr. and Mrs.Robert Reischauer Mr. Christopher Robey J. Brinton Rowdybush and Isabelle de Montagu Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert Schmidle and Pamela Schmidle Leo H. Settler and Joel Cuffman Marilyn Shapiro Anne Shine Richard and Athena Tacha Spear Austin Stewart and Charlie Dill Jerome and Carol Trautschold Baird Webel Larry Wehr Ms. Deborah Weinberger Phoebe Jane Winthrop Elizabeth A. Witt Friend ($99 or less) Anonymous Melissa Ashabranner Antonia Banducci Ms. Bozorth Todd Breitbart John Burkhalter Sally and Harold Burman Marco Cagetti Mr. Hector Carrero Jessica Chaney Ms. Nichole Chaney 104

Mia Cruz-Worthy Mr. Richard Davis David Drasin Robert Fegley Ersian Francois John S. Fitzgerald Sage Segarra Garay Joan Gardner Gerard Geoffroy Carrie Grant June Hargrove Mr. and Mrs. Basil W. Henderson, Jr. Kara Hess Paul J. Horowitz & Ruth E. Jaffe Jacqueline Jenkins Erica Jin Carole Kassel Gale D. Kaufman Emily Lemer Diane Lin and Joshua Cole Patricia Mahoney Judy Mannes & David Dantzler Mrs. Francoise Marcus Gerry and Lulu Murphy Joyce Offerman Joan Rosasco Linda and Duncan Rose Prof. Ellen Rosand Andrew Schneider Steven Steinbach Ms. Lavanya Thamire David Therkelsen Takemi Ueno Sara G. Wagschal and Jay M. Elinsky Gran Wilson Tracy Wojcik Diana Zablocki Georgianna Ziegler Andrew Schneider Steven Steinbach Ms. Lavanya Thamire David Therkelsen Takemi Ueno Sara G. Wagschal and Jay M. Elinsky Gran Wilson Tracy Wojcik Diana Zablocki Georgianna Ziegler

Supporters

Donations Made In Honor

Barbara Patocka in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Bobbie and Dan Arnheim in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Ms. Deborah Weinberger in honor of Walter Arnheim and Marsha Rehns Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Allen in honor of Gluck Mrs. Greenway O’Dea in honor of Annelyse Allen Joyce Offerman in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Judy Mannes in honor of Walter Arnheim and Marsha Rehns Marissa Greenberg in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Marylyn Pauley in honor of Pascale Beaudin The Selzer Family in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Gloria and Michael Kadish in honor of Len and Annemarie Ralston Rochelle Pollock in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Sidney and Janet Getz in honor of Marsha Rehns and Walter Arnheim Tiffany Lynn in honor of my grandmother, an Italian opera singer & mother, C.C., a Peking opera singer

Donations Made In Memory

Walter R. Arnheim and Marsha Rehns in memory of Norma Brown Aloysia Friedmann and Jon Kimura Parker in memory of Norma Brown

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Opera Lafayette

About Opera Lafayette Ryan Brown, Artistic Director

Opera Lafayette 921 Pennsylvania Avenue SE Washington, Dc, 20003 DC: (202) 546-9332 | NYC: (212) 634-9388 OperaLafayette.org Opera Lafayette is the pre-eminent American interpreter and producer of periodinstrument opera from the 17th through the 19th centuries and an international leader in this repertoire. Based on meticulous research and the creation of modern performing editions, the company’s compelling performances and recordings of rediscovered gems and historical masterpieces highlight the works’ original appeal and introduce a new generation to their contemporary relevance.

Opera Lafayette rehearsing at the Opéra Royale in Versailles

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Opera Lafayette

Opera Lafayette Leadership Board of Directors

Dorsey Dunn, Co-Chair * Nizam Kettaneh, Co-Chair * Ross Ain, Vice Chair Ryan Brown, Founder & Artistic Director Merri C. Moken, Member-at-Large Marifé Hernández, Member-at-Large * Adrienne Jamieson, Vice Chair Parker Jayne, Treasurer Stephen Kitchen, Secretary Annelyse Allen * Catia Chapin * Pamela J. Hines Susan A. Lynner Ellen McCoy Ashwani Rajput Leonard H. Ralston JoAnn Willis Cheryl Gorelick *Member of the New York Advisory Committee

Life Members of the Board Walter R. Arnheim Yoko Arthur Joel Brenner Marie-Hélène Forget Bill Gradison Cari Elliott Gradison Vivianne C. Lake Sophia Lynn Chris O’Flinn Joan Simon Daniel B. Silver Brian Vogel

New York Advisory Committee Janet Desforges Francis Dubois Jean-Paul Fouchécourt Vivianne C. Lake Anne Mackinnon Ishtar Méjanès Catherine S. Michaelson

Opera Lafayette Staff Lisa Mion Managing Director Kara Hess Business Manager Jace Chambers Community Engagement and Marketing Associate Bee Kinstle Box Office and Artist Services Associate

Nancy Jo Snider Orchestra Personnel Manager Kate Ehle | Cake & Ale Studio Book Design Kendra Rubenfield | KRPR Public Relations Jonathan Marder | Marder and Associates Public Relations

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Opera Lafayette

Media Books and Discography Central to Opera Lafayette’s mission is creating a legacy of the forgotten repertoire the company brings back to life. Opera Lafayette released its first CD on the Naxos label, and now has 12 commercial audio recordings. In 2018, Opera Lafayette released its first DVD, and now has three on the Naxos label. In 2019 Opera Lafayette published its first illustrated book. These books complement Opera Lafayette’s discography and further bolster the legacy of early opera to new audiences. In 2020, the company filmed its first production for PBS, with initial regional broadcast dates on RMPBS in 2022.

PBS

DVDs

The Blacksmith (2022)

François-André-Danican Philidor, composer François-Antoine-Quétant, librettist English Translation by Nick Olcott Adaptation by Nick Olcott and Ryan Brown

Illustrated Retellings As told by Kelley Rourke and illustrated by Amy Severson

Radamisto (2019)

George Frideric Handel, composer Nicola Francesco Haym, librettist Based on L’amor tirrannico

by Domenico Lalli and after L’amor tyrannique by Georges de Scudery

La Susanna (2019)

Alessandro Stradella, composer Giovanni Battista Giardini, librettist Based on Susanna and The Elders from The Book of Daniel

Leonore (2020)

Ludwig van Beethoven, composer Joseph Sonnleithner, librettist

Les Fêtes de l’Hymen et de l’Amour, ou Les Dieux d’Ègypte (2019) Jean-Philippe Rameau, composer Louis de Cahusac, librettists Cover: Louis Forget

Leonore, ou L’Amour conjugal (2018)

Pierre Gaveaux, composer Jean-Nicolas Bouilly, librettist Also available on Blu-ray Cover: Pierre-Etienne Bergeron

Leonore (2021)

Ludwig van Beethoven, composer Joseph Sonnleithner, librettist, after Bouilly Cover: Louis Forget

Opera Lafayette

CDs

Le Déserteur (2010) L’épreuve villageoise (2016)

André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, composer Pierre Desforges, librettist Cover: Louis Forget

Les Femmes Vengées (2015)

François-André Danican Philidor, composer Michel-Jean Sedaine, librettist Cover: Louis Forget

Lalla Roukh (2014)

Félicien David, composer Michel Carré and Hippolyte Lucas, librettists Cover: Louis Forget

Le Roi et le fermier (2013)

Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, composer Michel-Jean Sedine, librettist Cover: Restored 1780 set designs for Le Roi et le fermier Photo by J.M. Manai

Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, composer Michel-Jean Sedaine, librettist Cover: The Deserter Pardoned

by George Moreland (17631804) (The Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

Zélindor, roi des Sylphes (2009)

François Rebel and François Francœur, composers Text by François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif Cover: Louis Forget

The Tragedy of Armide (2008)

Jean-Baptiste Lully, composer Philippe Quinault, librettist Cover: Rinaldo and Armida by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) (Louvre, Paris, France, Lauros/Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

Rameau Operatic Arias (2007) Featuring Jean-Paul Fouchécourt Cover: Carol Rosegg

Le Magnifique (2012)

André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, composer Michel-Jean Sedaine, librettist Cover: The Composer AndréErnest-Modeste Grétry by Jean-Baptiste Stouf (17241826) Purchase, Josephine Bay Paul and C/ Michael Paul Foundation Inc. Gift and Charles Ulrick and Josephine Bay Foundation Inc. Gift, 1969 (69.77) – Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sancho Pança (2011) François-André Danican Philidor, composer Antoine-Alexandre-Henri Poinsinet, librettist Cover: Louis Forget

Oedipe à Colone (2006) Antonio Sacchini Cover: Oedipus and Antigone

by Johann-Peter Krafft (1780-1856) (The Art Archive/Musée du Louvre Paris/Dagli Orti)

Orphée at Euridice (2005)

Christoph Willibald Gluck Cover: Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld, 1861 by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875) (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA/Bridgeman Art Library)

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Opera Lafayette

Opera Lafayette’s 2022/2023 Season The Era of Madame de Pompadour Opera Lafayette’s 2022-2023 season illuminates the Era of Madame de Pompadour, the second of three festivals dedicated to different periods of 18th century French music and opera. In three distinct programs, Artistic Director Ryan Brown highlights the talents of young artistic associates and musical directors with flourishing careers in early music.

In the Salons of Versailles

A chamber program reimagining the varied intimate musical gatherings at the center of the court life c. 1750, led by violinist Jacob Ashworth and featuring soprano Emmanuelle de Negri.

Pergolesi!

A semi-staged program of the Italian composer’s extraordinarily popular comedy La Servante Maîtresse and a concert rendition of his beloved Stabat Mater, conducted by Patrick Dupre Quigley and featuring bass-baritone Jonathan Woody.

Actes de ballet: Rameau’s Io and De la Garde’s Léandre et Héro

The festival’s centerpiece is a double bill of two fully staged one-act ballets, the premiere of Rameau’s Io, an unfinished comedy recently completed with music from Platée, and the modern premiere of Pierre de la Garde’s Léandre et Héro, a lyric drama Madame de Pompadour herself performed and which recently came to light through efforts of Opera Lafayette and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Conducted by the French-American harpsichordist Justin Jonathan Taylor, the performances feature soprano Emmanuelle de Negri and the debut of tenor Maxime Melnik in the title roles.

Featured scholars for The Era of Madame de Pompadour include Julia Doe, Sylvie Bouissou, and Mathias Auclair.

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Opera Lafayette

In the Salons of Versailles The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Terrace Theater Friday, December 2, 2023 & El Museo del Barrio Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Pergolesi!

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Terrace Theater Thursday, February 2, 2023 & El Museo del Barrio Thursday, May 11, 2023

Actes de ballet: Rameau’s Io and De la Garde’s Léandre et Héro The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Terrace Theater Tuesday, May 2, 2023 Wednesday, May 3, 2023 & El Museo del Barrio Tuesday, May 9, 2023

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