Sophie Gail was born in Paris in 1775 to Claude-François Garre – a medical doctor and surgeon to the king who had been knighted in 1785 – and Adélaïde Colloz, an aristocrat who had received, according to her husband, “an education above her sex.” Her parents were great lovers of music – chamber music in particular. She learned piano and voice, practiced improvisation, and published ballads as early as 1790. In 1795, she married hellenist Jean-Baptiste Gail and bore her first son, Jean-François. The couple divorced in 1801. Like her salon-hostess forebears of the Ancien Régime, Gail lived a life of relative freedom: three other sons, fathered by three different men, were born between 1800 and 1805. Having lost her fortune during the turmoil of the Revolution, she made a living as a pianist and singer, published ballads, composed music for theatre, and wrote and performed a one-act opera for a high-society reception. She then decided to further pursue her training in composition, studying under Fétis, Perne, Neukomm, Catel, and Paër. On March 27, 1813, her one-act opera Les Deux Jaloux, on a libretto by Jean-Baptiste-Charles Vial, was performed at the Opéra-Comique. It premiered to great success, and would remain in the repertoire until 1839, with over three hundred performances. Her two following works for the Opéra-Comique, Mademoiselle de Launay à la Bastille (1813) and La Méprise (1814), were failures, as was Angela ou l’Atelier de Jean Cousin (1814), a collaboration with François-Adrien Boieldieu. She once again found success with the performance of La Sérénade at the Opéra-Comique on 2 April 1818, a work partly composed with Manuel García on a libretto by novelist Sophie Gay, friend of Balzac and mother of Delphine de Girardin. Gail was working on new material when she succumbed to lung disease on 24 July 1819, at age forty-three. She was still remembered as late as 1847, when Adrien de La Fage called her “the only woman composer to have truly found success in the theatre.”

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]