Reflections an Opera Lafayette Newsletter FROM SAINT LOUIS TO SAN LUIS In 1976 as a student at a quartet seminar near Taos, New Mexico, I met the founding director of the Wurlitzer Foundation. The Foundation provided residencies for artists, much like MacDowell or Yaddo on the East Coast, and its director was a polymath with a larger-than-life personality who become a mentor to me for the next 20 years. As it happens, one of the books he had written was on the work of Agrippa D’Aubigné, the 16th-century French poet who was the grandfather of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s last and secret wife, and one of whose descendants was Adrienne de Noailles, the wife of the Marquis de Lafayette. It was not the first time French culture appeared unexpectedly in the southwest US, either historically, or in my own subsequent musical discoveries, as we’ll soon see with regard to Opera Lafayette’s featured opera next season – André Grétry’s 1770 Silvain. Silvain was one of Grétry’s many international “hits,” and a favorite not only of Marie-Antoinette, but of 18th-century audiences as far east as St. Petersburg and as far west as New Orleans, being the first recorded opera performed in this French, Spanish, and soon-to-be American city in 1796. In our polyglot American culture, Ceran St. Vrain, Charles (or Carlos) Beaubien, and Jean-Baptiste Lamy are not well-known names outside western historical circles, but they were 19th-century men who made an indelible mark on a region until then known and inhabited only by indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists. To that mix, these Frenchmen added their own ingredients, seeking fortunes and converts, and bringing ambition, trade, idealism, and greed to a place that was for them an unknown frontier. Whereas St. Vrain traded with indigenous peoples and was a key figure in establishing the Santa Fe Trail, and Lamy the wellknown archbishop of Santa Fe and the subject of Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop, Beaubien was new to me. His family established settlements in Quebec along the St. Lawrence, and like his French colleagues, he set his sights on the Southwest, and traveled there via Saint Louis. An entrepreneur of huge ambition, Beaubien figured out how to finagle enormous land grants from the Mexican government in the 1840s totaling Photo by Lisa Mion. continued on the following page
Photo by Ryan Brown.
FALL 2021 The Blacksmith Page 2 Fête de la Musique – A Worldwide Event Page 3 Opera Starts with Oh! Expands its Roster and Embarks on a Season of Hybrid Learning! Page 4 Giving Thanks Pages 5-8 Ryan Brown, Artistic Director