Performance: Fleur-D'Épine [1776]
composed by Marie-Emanuelle Bayon-Louis

Fleur-D'Épine, a fairy-tale opera in two acts, was adapted from the popular story of Antoine Hamilton (1646-1720) by librettist Claude-Henri Fusée, Abbé de Voisenon (1704-1775). The story tells of the adventures of two young lovers: the brave Prince Tarare and the fairy princess Fleur-d'épine, the daughter of the good fairy Seraine. Fleur-d'épine is kidnaped by the evil fairy Dentue, who holds her captive and presses for her to marry her son Dentillon. When Tarare arrives to rescue Fleur-d'épine, Dentue decides she wants to marry him herself, and threatens to turn him into a monster if he refuses. In despair, Tarare receives unexpected help from a destitute old women who provides a small packet of salt to spoil the potion that would turn him into a monster. Meanwhile, Fleur-d'épine succeeds in lulling Dentillon to sleep, and she retrieves the key his mother has entrusted to him. When Fleur-d'épine and Tarare escape, Dentue's power is destroyed. The young couple marries and lives happily ever after.

The opera is among the most ambitious scores composed by a women of the period. The musical numbers include two duets, two trios, and two small choruses. The vocal lines show a strong Italian influence including some brilliant coloratura writing. Contemporary critics, in particular, praised the imaginative sequence in Act II wherein Fleur-d'épine lulls the dimwitted prince Dentillon to sleep by singing a strikingly virtuosic aria, "Quand l'hymen vient couronner l'amour." In the process of rescuing Fleur-d'épine, Tarare mistakenly wakes Dentillon and to save himself pretends to be an echo. The echo duet "Écho, que Fleur-d'épine est belle" provides a particularly creative adaptation of the popular form by exploiting the comic potential of the situation as a half-asleep fool conversed with a faux echo. Dentillon fails to notice that the "echo" is in fact answering his rhetorical questions, and making fun of himself.

Marie-Emanuelle Bayon-Louis, 1746-1825, was a French pianist and composer. A member of the 1767 salon of Mademoiselle de Genlis, she married the successful architect Victor Louis in 1770. Victor is best known today as the designer of the Grand Theatre in Bordeaux and his redesign of several other French theater spaces. In marrying Victor, Bayon-Louis presided over distinguished salons in Bordeaux and in Paris.

Little is known about her life: no surviving correspondences, memoirs, or other writings, as commonly exist for many women artists of the period, have been found. Active as a composer of chamber music at a young age, she published six keyboard sonatas as well three more with violin accompaniment. She also was the music teacher of Diderot's daughter Angélique, and is credited with bringing the forte piano into vogue in France. While salon performances of one divertissenment and two lost operas pre-date Fleur-D'Épine, the work was performed twelve times at the Comédie-Italienne during the 1776-1777 season and was later staged in Bordeaux and Brussels in 1784. Fleur-D'Épine is the first major work of an extraordinary flourishing of French opera by women between 1770 and 1820. Unfortunately, it appears that Bayon-Louis, even after the great public success of Fleur-D'Épine, abandoned composition. Owing to the lack of biographical materials, we can only speculate as to why she stopped composing. A dramatic decline in health certainly had its effect on Bayon-Louis, as we know that she lost her hearing towards the end of her life. It must also be noted that there is no evidence that she took advantage of her husband's distinguished connections to facilitate her own access to the theaters.

Incorporation of this work as part of the conference "Attending To Early Modern Women: Gender, Culture, and Change" is significant as the performance marks the work's modern premiere. The concert presentation (or semi-staged presentation) was performed with period instruments by "The Bach Sinfonia," a Maryland-based early music ensemble, under the direction of Daniel E. Abraham, a faculty member at The George Washington University and American University who is pursing a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Maryland. Considering the significance of this program as a modern premiere, the performance was preceded by a brief pre-concert discussion session. Given the general accessability of the musical style and subject, the pre-concert session entailed a brief panel session that aimed to consider what the resurrection of this work and the body of other operas by French women might represent in light of a growing canon of women composers and compositions. The pre-concert discussion also explored the general, the scholarly, and the musical decisions in reviving this 200-year old musical text and the implications it might have on our vision of early modern women in French culture.