Composed: 1782
Premiered: 1782, Paris
Duration: 13 minutes

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a champion fencer before his 20th birthday. He was also a renowned boxer, dancer, and marksman, but his real love was music, and his prowess with the violin allowed him to become the leader of a powerhouse orchestra in Paris and a personal instructor to Marie Antoinette. She nominated him to become Music Director of the Paris Opera in 1776, but the prejudices he had transcended up to that point unfortunately proved to be too much: the prima donnas at the opera refused to sing for a mixed-race maestro.

Bologne’s French father owned sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and the son that he raised as his own was conceived with one of the African women he enslaved. Throughout his life, Bologne defied what should have been possible for a person of African descent under France’s Code Noir, and his determination to become an opera composer proved to be another success that he cleared with gusto. He staged his comic opera L’amant anonyme at a duke’s private theater in 1780, and he also published the opera’s three-part overture as his Symphony in D Major (Op. 11, No. 2). The overture’s exuberant energy and singing melodies make it clear why Bologne has often erroneously been called the “Black Mozart” – even though it was the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who picked up important ideas during his time in Paris from watching the Chevalier in action and not the other way around.

Bologne’s life was portrayed in the film Chevalier (2022) directed by Stephen Williams and premiered at the 47th Toronto International Film Festival.

Program note by Aaron Grad.