Henriette-Adélaïde de Villars, known under the stage name Beaumesnil, was born in Paris in 1748 to Jean de Villars, a colonel in the King’s army, and Antoinette Dallière, who was a Paris Opera soloist from 1747 to 1767. She began acting in plays at a young age. Trained in music (Charles-François Clément was noted as her instructor), she debuted at the Paris Opera in 1766 after being turned down by the Comédie-Française. She sang in revivals of Rameau and shone in new roles, such as the title role in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride in 1779. When she left the stage in 1781, she was awarded a pension and the title of ordinary musician of the King’s Chamber. From then on, she focused on composing, which she is said to have studied under Gluck. Her Anacréon was turned down by the Paris Opera in 1781. In 1782, her oratorio Les Israélites poursuivis par Pharaon was performed at the Concert Spirituel. In February of 1784, she put on an acte de ballet (one-act opera) at court, Tibulle et Délie (libretto by Louis Fuzelier), which met with success at the Paris Opera on March 15, 1784. She thus became the third woman composer to be granted access to this stage, after Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre in 1694 and Mlle Duval in 1736. Poet Pierre-Louis Moline celebrated her twin talents as a singer and composer, while critics lauded the resemblance between her style and Gluck’s. In 1792, the Opéra-Comique turned down two of her works. The second of these, Plaire, c’est commander ou les Législatrices (libretto by la Salle d’Offrémont), was performed on May 12, 1792 at the Théâtre Montansier. Her only surviving work is Tibulle et Délie, published in 1784. Despite her past successes, little is known about any possible later works by Henriette Beaumesnil, probably due to the serious health issues biographers have claimed she suffered later in life. She died on 15 July, 1803. She had married Louis-René Philippe, attorney and business manager for the Duchess of Bourbon, in 1794, and had had at least two children: Catherine, born 1766 (father unknown), and a son born of her liaison with Armand-Charles Tuffin, marquis de La Rouërie (1751-1793).

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]