Loïsa Puget was born in Paris in 1810. She was musically trained by her mother, singer Jeanne-Françoise Stassny. She found some renown in 1830 with her ballads, a genre of song in vogue since the late 18th century and the main style practiced by amateur musicians of the time, due to the growing adoption of pianos into the homes of the expanding bourgeoisie. She met with enormous success, and published between three and four hundred ballads, most of them set to lyrics written by the man she ended up marrying in 1845: man of letters Gustave Lemoine. The press dubbed her “the queen of ballads,” and her fame crossed borders, even reaching the United States where her most successful works were published in English. In 1836, her success granted her access to the Opéra-Comique, with the performance of a one-act opera, Le Mauvais Œil, on a libretto by Scribe and Lemoine. She took this opportunity to perfect her abilities by training in orchestration with Adolphe Adam. The opera, which starred her friend and famous singer Laure Cinti-Damoreau in the lead role, was well-received by critics, who opined (including Hector Berlioz in Revue et gazette musicale de Paris) that Puget had done well in her trial run and now needed to establish herself through further works with better librettos. However, and unlike most of her opéra-comique-composing peers who had the opportunity to have several works performed before achieving success, Puget did not reappear at the Opéra-Comique for reasons yet unknown. She continued her career as a composer of ballads, however, reaching the acme of her success in 1842 before going out of style around 1852. The Puget-Lemoines briefly returned to opera in 1869 with an operetta, La Veilleuse ou Les Nuits de Milady. They were very present, however, on theatre stages of the 19th century via their ballads, which were gleefully pilfered by vaudeville theatres.

– Florence Launay –

[Traduction en anglais : Raphaël Meyer]