Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre isn’t a name many will recognise — despite an opera that reached the Paris stage in 1694, two books of biblical cantatas published three years apart, in 1708 and 1711, and a career that ran for decades either side of those dates.
The point this episode seeks to highlight is that legacy isn’t always guaranteed. You’ll need more than talent writing and managing business, but history needs to preserve your role and if it doesn’t you’ll need some champions further down the line.
Taken into Louis XIV’s court in her teens, she went on dedicating nearly everything she published to the king, managing the patronage as deliberately as she wrote the music. But history has to a large extent still buried her achievements.
This podcast episode highlights a forthcoming run of stage settings of three of these biblical cantatas in a production entitled ‘Belly of the Beast’
It is the work of writer and producer Toria Banks (Hera) and director Jennifer Fletcher, who working with Mahogany Opera and Dunedin Consort stage Jonah, from the 1708 book, and Adam and Jephtha, from 1711. None of them has been performed in English before. Adam, as far as anyone in the room can establish, hasn’t been performed at at all since the eighteenth century.
Banks wrote the English text — her second outing with de la Guerre’s biblical cantatas, after staging two others from the 1708 book, Susanna and the Elders, and Judith, in 2023. This distinctive production will run in six venues in Edinburgh, Aldeburgh, Spitalfields, Perth, Glasgow, Whitehaven.
