Did Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever meet? Contemporaries, both prodigies and musical savants, one French and the other Austrian, Bologne and Mozart did indeed cross paths at least once in 1778, for about three months when they both were hosted in the French quartier, Chaussée d’Antin, in Paris. Mozart lived at the home of Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, who was also well acquainted with Bologne. Joseph Bologne lived across the courtyard, working as the music director of Madame de Montesson’s private theater, which the two residences shared. Bologne was over a decade Mozart’s [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de SaintGeorges, was one of the innovators that helped to define what is now known as the Classical Period in music – spanning approximately 1750 through 1820.  His earliest works were a series of string quartets and several sonatas written for keyboard and violin, composed in 1770-71. They demonstrate a distinct break from earlier Baroque Period conventions. His sonatas poised the keyboard and violin as equals, differing from the basso continuo Baroque style, which used a steady undercurrent of unobtrusive accompaniment. Bologne wrote some of the first-ever French string quartets, designing formal schemes that are now [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges’ legacy is broad. He was a biracial Frenchman, child prodigy as both a champion fencer and a virtuoso violinist, and later a celebrated and sought-after music director, composer, and officer in the French Revolution. He lived during a time that was full of innovation amid great political struggle and war across the Western world. Joseph was born on Christmas Day in 1745 on a coffee and sugar plantation on the Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe to Georges Bologne de Saint-Georges and a teenaged, enslaved Senegalese woman named Anne, known as Nanon. Despite being married to [...]

“Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me!” Eurydice implores her soon-to-be husband, mere minutes into Act I. Foreshadowing the moment of the backwards look, the moment which centuries of artists have repeatedly sought to capture, her words prompt us to ask several questions. Does she want Orpheus to lead her out of the underworld? What do we assume about what she feels in that fateful glance, that instant which symbolizes—as Greek mythology does so well—the eternal and unchanging capacity of humans to err? Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s version of the ever-popular tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is, [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a busy man. A fixture on the musical scene of eighteenth-century Paris, he might be found seated in the violin section of the orchestra Le Concert des Amateurs; performing the solo part of his many virtuosic violin concertos; directing a theater; or composing a string quartet, a symphony, or an opera. (And this is to say nothing of his astonishingly varied extramusical pursuits as a champion fencer, a soldier, and a political thinker.) Bologne’s atypical status – he was a Black composer in an overwhelmingly white art form, and he was accomplished in [...]