Program Note

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.

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.