Sometimes reviewers must eat their words. Last month, reviewing a performance of music by the 17th century French composer Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, I said that “London is unlikely to see her operas any time soon.” Wrong. Now, just a month later, De la Guerre’s only surviving opera, Céphale et Procris, is playing in London. I confess my sin of omission.
After impressing Louis XIV with her keyboard skills, Jacquet became a court musician at Versailles: French baroquerie doesn’t come more exalted than that. In 1694, she became the first woman to have an opera – Céphale et Procris – performed by the Paris Opera. She probably didn’t imagine that one day it would arrive on the backstreets of Dalston, but here it is, part of Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre’s annual festival of experimental and fringe opera.
