‘We are all outsiders, aren’t we Chevalier,” Marie Antoinette remarks to Joseph Bologne in Bill Barclay’s The Chevalier, a play with music, first seen in Tanglewood in 2019, and now in London, in an abridged version, for a single evening after a performance in Snape last weekend. It forms part of the reassessment of Bologne’s extraordinary career. One of the first ever classical composers of colour, he was the leading violinist of his day and, for a while, Antoinette’s music teacher. The title Chevalier de Saint-Georges was bestowed on him by Louis XV for his prowess at fencing. Later, after the revolution, he led the first Black army regiment in Europe.
Barclay sets his play in 1778/9, when Mozart was also in Paris, living in the same building as Bologne, who was then teaching Antoinette at Versailles. All three are in different ways outsiders, their lives scrutinised by Choderlos de Laclos, a disaffected insider, author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and later Bologne’s librettist.
