Sophie Gail (1775 – 1819): Bolleros
There is a temptation to regard social progress as an inevitable part of history, whereas it is often much more fragile than we think and all too easy to put into reverse.
In later blog posts we will encounter several mid-nineteenth century female composers who struggled to make themselves heard above the clamour of a deeply male-centric society. One might have assumed the problem would have been even worse in the hundred or so years before this – but in fact it was quite the opposite. Throughout the eighteenth century it was not unusual to find women (at least those from affluent backgrounds) encouraged and even empowered to express themselves creatively. As a talented singer and highly successful composer of opéra-comique, Sophie Gail rode the wave of this more enlightened generation, both in the final years of France’s Ancien Régime and then through the early, hopeful period of the French Revolution and its more democratic values.
Gail’s personal circumstances were favourable in other ways. Her father was a top surgeon (and also one-time physician to Louis XVI), while her mother hailed from a background of jurists and state servants, having received “an instruction above her sex” in the (possibly mischievous) words of her husband. The family moved in fashionable artistic circles and the evidently talented Sophie was soon receiving piano and singing tuition from some of France’s best. She published her first music at the age of 14 and was just 19 when she married a professor of Hellenistic studies, a man who was twenty years her senior. The marriage was not a happy one, the spouses quickly showing a marked incompatibility in their outlook and personal tastes, and in 1801 they divorced.
With her family having in the meantime lost most of their fortune in the years following the Revolution, Sophie’s future well-being looked far from certain. Having to earn a living from her music for the first time would however turn out to be a liberation. For the next half decade, she would tour all over Europe as a professional singer and pianist, while supplementing her income with published piano music and songs. The one concession Gail still made for her gender was in allowing herself to be treated as a kind of honorary “amateur”. All of her music was printed anonymously, while press reviewers were not allowed to mention her name.
Not that Gail was in any way the downtrodden type. With her reputation growing, she established a salon in Paris that quickly became a focal point for some of the foremost singers of the day. She lived colourfully and passionately, giving birth to four children from four different fathers. She took further lessons in composition, her most celebrated teacher being Francois-Joseph Fétis – a Belgian composer and celebrated critic, who would later appraise his pupil’s abilities: “the combination of talents found in her made her very remarkable. Deeply musical, she accompanied the score with aplomb and intelligence, sang with taste and with great expression, trained very good pupils, and composed with ease pretty things that obtained a decided vogue.”
Gail saved her most significant compositional output for the last six years of her life. Her opéra-comique, Les Deux Jaloux, caused a mild sensation when it was first staged in 1813. Critics compared it favourably to Mozart, and it would enjoy a run in Paris for the next twenty-six years, long outliving its creator. As another critic wrote retrospectively, Gail “proved that a young [female] composer can fight with men, at least on the theatre of the Opéra-Comique… Sophie Gail’s name was in everyone’s mouths, her music on every piano.” According to Fétis, the work’s success was “all the more remarkable because it was the first of its kind that a woman had obtained.”
Although two subsequent opéra-comiques would be relative failures, Gail returned to form with La Sérénade in 1818, to a libretto by her near namesake Sophie Gay. A popular romantic novelist and playwright, Gay was in some ways Gail’s literary equivalent. The partnership between the two women (they would become known as “Sophie de la Musique” and “Sophie de la Parole”) could have been the start of something great – instead, and somewhat poignantly, it would turn out to be something of an ending. The values of the Revolution were changing quickly in France. As Jacqueline Letzter explains in Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the French Revolution, Gail and Gay “were the last women opera composers and librettists to have lived through the Revolution and to have known firsthand the empowering effects of its rhetoric for women. Women of the next generation would be raised under the repressive Napoleonic gender ideology that discouraged woman from competing with men in public life.” The restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814 only pushed the country further back into conservative values – a perhaps inevitable reaction to all the revolutionary tumult of the previous twenty five years. In the 1820s, the elderly French portrait-painter, Vigée Le Brun, commented sadly that while women had “reigned” forty years earlier, they had since been “dethroned”.
Sophie Gail had set a standard which few were allowed to follow. Anyone daring to do so could be subject to the harshest possible criticism, such as composer and poet, Louise Bertin, who felt so personally bruised by the French critics after penning four operas in the 1820s and 30s, that she found herself scarcely able to write another note for the last forty years of her life.
Gail herself would not live to see this decline. Her own life was cut short in 1819 after falling fatally ill with a lung condition. Her old teacher, Francois-Joseph Fétis, would write an extensive (and affectionate) obituary of her, one which would sit in the weighty Biographie Universelle des Musiciens for many decades: “Endowed with great wit and amiable character, she seemed to attach no value to these advantages… She had many friends, and she had the rare happiness of keeping them.”
This Bolleros dates from a time when Gail was still mid-career and yet to write her highly successful operas. A charming setting of anonymous love poem “Jeune beauté, cause de mon martyre” (“young beauty, cause of my martyrdom”), it is scored for soprano and harp accompaniment. The soaring soprano melody, with its heartfelt ache, gives us a hint of the lyrical gifts that made Gail so popular in her day, while the catchy, pulsing harp rhythms suggest her deep love of Spanish music. In all, the song is an attractive and intriguing glimpse into Sophie Gail’s art, a composer whose music to this day remains largely unperformed, unrecorded and unknown.