A brand new play centres on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the good musician who shared a flat with Mozart and befriended Marie Antoinette
A report by Ivan Hewett for London’s Telegraph.
There are some musicians whose lives are so filled with pleasure, romance and hazard that you could hardly imagine they’re not fiction. One in every of them is the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, who was well-known throughout Europe throughout his lifetime, vanished for 2 centuries, and is now being rediscovered.
Born plain Joseph Bologne to a plantation proprietor and his slave spouse within the French colony of Guadeloupe in 1745, he settled in France as a free man, the place he was quickly ennobled due to his world-beating fencing abilities. He pursued quite a few different careers with equal brilliance: virtuoso violinist, composer of operas and a dozen violin concertos, orchestra director, live performance promoter, anti-slavery campaigner, and latterly the commanding officer of the primary black regiment within the French military, defending the fledgling Revolution from its enemies.
Now Bologne’s story is being dropped at the stage by the American musicologist and director Invoice Barclay. His play The Chevalier, which has already been seen within the US, opens subsequent month at Snape Maltings in Suffolk and he tells me of his embarrassment when Chi-chi Nwanoku (head of the Chineke! orchestra) and Globe trustee Margaret Casely-Hayford approached him with the concept for a brand new work. “How may I, an professional in 18th-century music, by no means have heard of this individual?”
The truth that such a staggeringly proficient musician, described by the longer term president of the US John Adams as “probably the most completed man in Europe”, merely disappeared from the document has multiple rationalization. “Racism is actually the most important issue,” says Barclay, “but additionally the entire musical tradition in France in Bologne’s interval, which was main as much as the French Revolution, has merely disappeared from individuals’s consciousness. Mozart’s star was rising as Bologne’s was waning, after which alongside got here Beethoven, and so the entire centre of gravity shifted to Vienna.”
Barclay focuses his drama on a key interval in BologneA’s life within the late 1780s, when he shared a flat with Mozart. The opposite two characters on this four-hander play-cum-concert are Marie Antoinette, the doomed queen who could probably have had an affair with Bologne, and Choderlos de Laclos, military officer and creator of the scandalous epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, who wrote a libretto for considered one of Bologne’s operas.
“I needed to concentrate on three outsiders,” says Barclay. “In addition to Bologne, there’s Laclos, whose immoral novel made him unacceptable in well mannered society. There’s Marie Antoinette, the Austrian-born queen who needed to face actually horrendous misogyny, and I believe was woefully misunderstood. She realises there are limits to her energy, and turns into an arts philanthropist, which is how she will get concerned with Bologne and Mozart – who can be an outsider in Paris, and fairly an boastful one, however assembly Bologne results in a type of humbling, when he realises that Bologne needed to battle towards the type of prejudice that he won’t ever should face.”
Bologne himself is represented twice on stage, as soon as because the swashbuckling, impossibly romantic human being, and once more as a violinist. The musician who has to emulate Bologne’s well-known virtuosity is Braimah Kanneh-Mason, the violinist and second-oldest of the mighty Kanneh-Mason septet of musical siblings. He tells me: “I’ve to mess around 10 items at sure moments within the drama. There’s a motion from a Sinfonia Concertante, which is a type Bologne really invented, and a motion from the A serious Violin Concerto, plus plenty of smaller items.”
How would he describe their type? “Bologne was an astonishing violinist, and his concertos are much more virtuoso than Mozart’s, filled with flashy passages and plenty of written-out ornamentation which is difficult to play. However he knew find out how to write an excellent tune as effectively.”
As for Bologne the person, the duty of bringing this staggering over-achiever to life falls to Nigerian-born, New York-based actor Chukwudi Iwuji, best-known for his quite a few roles on the RSC, and who additionally starred within the current HBO Max sequence Peacemaker. He says that, as a black actor: “I confronted sure challenges once I began out, however to grasp the challenges going through Bologne you need to multiply that by about 300, simply to start to get an thought of his bravery, his confidence, his worry. I imply what a unbelievable dreamer, to imagine he may take over the Paris Opera, that he may tackle a queen eye-to-eye – effectively this man will need to have had a hearth in him that was fairly unquenchable.”
Bologne by no means received to take over the Opera, as the feminine singers declared they might not in all conscience undergo the orders of a “mulatto” – one piece of proof that Bologne’s life was removed from plain crusing. Nevertheless, Iwuji says: “Hazard didn’t terrify him. My intuition in portraying him is that stagnation was most likely his largest worry. He felt he needed to be all the time striving to enhance each aspect of his character, he had this fixed restlessness. His brilliance made him enticing to individuals, but additionally there’s a type of untouchable high quality in him, as if he have been holding himself aloof.”
The world, nonetheless, now appears able to embrace Bologne. His music is having fun with a revival, with quite a few recordings and performances within the offing. And because of this play, the extraordinary man behind the music will lastly be revealed.
The Chevalier is at Snape Maltings, East Suffolk, on March 19 (brittenpearsarts.org) and St Martin within the Fields, London WC2 on March 21 (stmartin-in-the-fields.org)