Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre

Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre (baptized March 17, 1665, Paris, France—died June 27, 1729, Paris) was a French composer, harpsichordist, and organist, who was the first woman to compose an opera in France.

Elisabeth Jacquet was born into a family of artisans that included both musicians and instrument builders. She emerged as a musical prodigy and made her debut as a singer and harpsichordist at the court of Louis XIV, apparently at quite a young age. At about age 15 she was taken into the court as a musician and placed under the care of the king’s mistress, Madame de Montespan. Jacquet left the regular service of the court in 1684 and that year married Marin de la Guerre, an accomplished Parisian harpsichordist, organist, music teacher, and composer from a well-established family of professional musicians. The fact that she dedicated nearly all of her published works to the king, however, indicates that she retained connections to the royal circle throughout her career. With Marin she had one son who died at age 10, having shown promise as a musician himself. Marin died in 1704.

Jacquet de la Guerre’s first published collection of compositions was the Pièces de clavessin (1687; “Harpsichord Pieces”), noteworthy especially because publication of harpsichord music was still rare in France in the 17th century, even for male composers. The work consists entirely of sets of dance pieces grouped by key, with each group preceded by an “unmeasured prelude,” a genre notated mostly in whole notes to indicate that it does not adhere to a strict metre and thus approximates improvisation. Jacquet de la Guerre’s next published instrumental work, a two-volume set that juxtaposed the French and Italian instrumental styles, did not appear until 1707. The first part of the set, entitled Pièces de clavecin qui peuvent se jouer sur le viollon (“Harpsichord Pieces That May Be Played on the Violin”), again consists of dance pieces in the French tradition. The other part, entitled Sonates pour le viollon et pour le clavecin (“Sonatas for the Violin and for the Harpsichord”), employs idiomatic string writing that shows influence from the Italian instrumental style; these Italianate features include quick passagework, harmonic sequences, and imitation between parts. As was typical in the 18th century, the accompanying harpsichordist played from only a bass line, improvising the harmonies and melodic figures to suit the violin line; this practice was called basso continuo. Jacquet de la Guerre is known to have composed other sonatas for one or two violins and basso continuo. Some of these may be dated to about 1695, while the composition dates of the others remain unknown.

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As a composer of vocal music, Jacquet de la Guerre was a pioneer. Her opera, Céphale et Procris (based on the myth of Cephalus and Procris, adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), a tragédie en musique in the mold of Jean-Baptiste Lully, is thought to have premiered at the Paris Opéra on March 15, 1694, though this date is transmitted only in a 19th-century source. Although the opera did not meet with much success, it has the distinction of being the first composed by a woman in France, and the music was published in the same year.

Jacquet de la Guerre also published sets of cantatas on both sacred themes (1708, 1711) and secular ones (1715); the volume of secular cantatas was dedicated to one of her patrons, Maximillian II Emanuel, the exiled elector of Bavaria who was then living near Paris under the French king’s protection. Her cantata style has been noted for its close attention to the meanings of the text and its dramatic use of French-style recitative (solo singing that imitates the rhythms and accents of speech). Some of her songs were included in anthologies produced in Paris and The Hague, and she also wrote a choral setting of the Te Deum, now lost, to mark the recovery of Louis XV from illness.

Jacquet de la Guerre performed frequently at concerts in her home and elsewhere, and her surviving compositions—whether in print or manuscript—likely represent only a fraction of the music she actually wrote. Her talents were widely recognized in her own lifetime and thereafter, and her unusual status as a woman in the world of professional music did not go unnoticed by her contemporaries. Shortly after her death the French scholar Evrard Titon du Tillet bestowed special praise upon her in his Parnasse françois (1732; “French Parnassus”), a compilation of biographical vignettes concerning eminent poets and musicians in France. He wrote,

One might say that never has a person of her sex had such great talent for the composition of music, and for the admirable manner in which she played on the harpsichord and on the organ.