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

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