Program Notes

The idea for this program was born nearly a decade ago from a simple and naive question, “what music was performed in 18th-century America?” The ongoing journey to answer it has been more nuanced, unpredictable, and exciting than I could have originally anticipated. Émigré is an homage to an all-but-forgotten chapter of America’s musical history when, as historian François Furstenberg put it, the United States spoke French. 

Between 1789 and 1799, roughly 150,000 French citizens fled the dangers of the Revolution. These émigrés were royalists, republicans, constitutional monarchists, and everything in between and beyond. Despite their differing political leanings, all of them were unified by a fear that Jacques Mallet du Pan articulated in 1793 while in exile, “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”

Royalists sought intervention from Prussia and Austria while liberal-minded refugees attempted to stay under the radar in Great Britain. As France became more extraverted in its revolutionary ambitions, however, the European states became wary of the waves of political migrants spreading across the continent. Following the outbreak of war with France, Britain passed the Aliens Act of 1793, which discouraged further French immigration and stripped away protections for those already settled there. Seeing few other options, about 10,000 of the émigrés made the decision to sail west and spend at least part of their exile in the nascent United States. 

At the very same time the flying sparks of revolution triggered an exodus of even greater proportions from the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). In 1789, France’s fragile colonial caste system was threatened by the National Constituent Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Tensions heightened as white planters resisted efforts by the island’s free Black and mixed-race population to invoke the declaration and abolish discriminatory racial laws. 

Skirmishes broke out and the white supremacist regime that had brutally controlled the colony was overtly undermined. Then, in August of 1791, the colony was thrown into chaos as tens of thousands of enslaved Africans and Creoles rose up in rebellion. Within a year the self-emancipated armies controlled a third of the colony and refugees poured into America’s port cities. 

In all, approximately 30,000 émigrés came to America from France and Saint-Domingue, with the highest concentration arriving between 1792 and 1794. Displaced francophone aristocrats, planters, enslaved people, merchants, mechanics, artisans, artists, and musicians found themselves forced to start over in cities up and down the East Coast. What accompanied this humanitarian crisis, though, was an explosion of French culture. In the blink of an eye, America spoke French.

To this point, America’s concertizing musicians were overwhelmingly British and German immigrants and Anglo-Germanic Americans. “The French Revolution,” musicologist Oscar Sonneck explained, “interrupted this predominantly English current and visibly infused French blood into the [American] musical body.” Almost immediately after the first waves of émigrés arrived, advertisements appeared announcing concerts that featured French and Saint Domingan musicians in cities such as Charleston, Philadelphia, and Boston. 

On December 17, 1793, the newly arrived “Messieurs Petit, Le Roy, Foucard, and Villars, musicians, instructed by the most eminent professors in their line in Europe,” put on a concert for their benefit in Charleston, South Carolina. Their program is a perfect example of the form, repertoire, and pacing of concerts performed throughout this period:

“First Part
Grand Overture, music of — Heyden 
Clarinet Concerto, Mr. Foucard.
Quartetto (by Pleyel) Messrs Petit, Poition, Villars and Le Roy
A Song, by Mr. West, jun.
Violin Concerto and Marlborough, with the variations, by Ms. Duport, aged 13 years.
Overture of Carvane, music of — Gretrie

Second Part

Grand Overture, music of — Gretrie
Clarinet quartetto, by an amateur
A Concertant symphony for two violins and tenor, by Messrs. Le Roy, Poition and Villars
A Song by Mr. West, jun.
Violin concerto, by Mr. Petit
The concert will conclude with the Overture of Henry IVth.” [sic.]

Between 1793 and 1798, émigré concerts popularized music by eminent musicians of France’s Ancien Regime, such as André Grétry (1741–1813), Ignace Pleyel (1757–1831), Michel Yost (1754–1786), and Jean-Baptiste Davaux (1742–1822). Their concerts also introduced more obscure up-and-comers, like Mozart, to American audiences.

While performers on nearly all of the orchestral instruments had been working in America previous to the arrival of the émigrés, there is an obvious spike in references to virtuosic woodwind repertoire after 1793. The clarinet in particular was a heavily featured solo instrument. In 2004, musicologist Jane Ellsworth published a comprehensive list of American performance references between 1758 and 1820 that mention the clarinet. Ellsworth accounted for thirty-one performances featuring three clarinetists between 1758 and 1792. From 1793 through 1798, there were seventy-six performances featuring eleven clarinetists, six of whom appear to have been French or Saint Domingan. 

For a moment, America had orchestras, French theater, and a genuinely competitive concert scene. French theater was so popular, in fact, that in 1796 the English theater in Charleston was forced to close and merge with the competing émigré-managed company. American cities may have paled in comparison to the cultural centers of Europe, but the émigrés had found an audience. Politically, however, the winds were changing.

Just as the British Aliens Act of 1793 stimulated emigration to the United States, America’s own Alien Acts of 1798 would encourage an exodus. Policies enacted by the Adams administration led to a breakdown of diplomatic relations between France and the United States. The onset of the Quasi-War (1798–1800) further stoked anti-French sentiment, and newspaper editorials roused military preparedness while shaming Americans who embraced French tastes.

“... if the French were to give the signal for battle against the American army, these gentlemen (rather gentlewomen) would exclaim ‘the French music is exquisite.’”–Aristides (Alexander Contée Hanson), The North American (Philadelphia, PA), Friday, April 27, 1798

Alienated once again by a nation with whom they sought asylum, many of the émigrés packed up their lives and left. In another blink of an eye, America’s French moment had come to end. 

–Dominic Giardino, April 2024