Video summary of the concert "Kourou - Music in the Wreck of a Migration Dream, French Guiana 1763 - 1765" on May 9th, 2024, at the Chiesa di San Martino in Mensola (Florence), with Arlequin Philosophe conducted by Pedro Memelsdorff, organized by I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Presentation of the concert program written by Pedro Memelsdorff:

The migration of thousands of heartbroken, dispossessed or persecuted people crossing oceans, which sadly characterizes our times, knows many precedents. An almost forgotten case occurred in 1763, after France’s defeat following the Seven-year war, when a French-colonial campaign recruited some 20,000 Europeans and sent 11,000 of them to the French Guiana: the so-called Affaire Kourou. These migrants were for the most part impoverished farmers and unemployed people from France’s neighboring Germanic areas including the Rhineland, Alsace, Flanders, Switzerland, Northern Italy and Austria. But some of them were artists: painters, designers, stonecutters, sculptors or musicians who were attracted not only by the promise of lavish salaries, but also by the government’s advertising of a new El Dorado, an economic and political center that would soon become as rich as other French-Caribbean colonies: Guadeloupe, Martinique, and above all Saint-Domingue. As recorded in migrant camps hastily built near the French ports (Rochefort, Bordeaux, La Rochelle and others), over forty composers or musicians subscribed, including distinguished harpists, harpsichordists, guitar players, organists, violinists, and trumpet, horn, flute or percussion players. 

The intendant and ad interim governor of the “New French Guiana” was Jean Baptiste Mathieu Thibault de Chanvalon, a Martinican naturalist and agronomist who was also attracted by literary, artistic and above all musical concerns. From December 1763 his Guianese habitation (plantation residence) hosted the violinist and composer Monsieur de Tremais, one of the most eccentric and fashionable Parisian followers of Tartini, who helped Chanvalon creating a vibrant center of domestic chamber music. His are a number of violin-sonata and trio-sonata collections as well as at least two violin concertos printed in Paris in the 1730s-50s. 

Chanvalon also promoted public music, however. Following his plan, a rudimentary ‘theater’ was built in the center of the “New Colony’s” capital, Kourou; and an organ and two sets of bells were imported for the new cathedral—a recycled chapel built some fifty years earlier by Jesuits and Amerindians. In fact, despite his allegiance to the multi-religious spirit of the migration campaign, Chanvalon supported the wealth of Catholic religious music. He provided Cayenne’s four chapels with new liturgical furnishings and chant books, and freely distributed an agricultural handbook for the new settlers, which occasionally included a so-called Messe en cantiques à l’usage des nègres: a French paraphrased Catholic mass to be sung for (and by) brutally enslaved people of African ascent who worked at the settlers’ and Jesuits’ coffee and sugarcane plantations. 

The Messe en cantiques, a unique collection of French opera arias, choruses and instrumental pieces set to new French liturgical texts, became doubly emblematic: conceived in the 1740s as a tool of Jesuit inculturation, it was soon appropriated and sung in runaway villages of the Guianese hinterland, where self-emancipating slaves fled to escape their exploitation. The Messe en cantiques, in other words, became part of an Afro-European syncretic spirituality. In the words of the contemporary witness M. Le Tenneur, criminal lieutenant of Cayenne in 1748: 

Le jour de la Feste Dieu, au premier coup de canon pour la sortie du SaintSacrement de l’Eglise, ils [les marrons du village] se mettent tous à genoux et vont en procession autour de leurs cases en récitant des cantiques, les femmes portant des croix. 

(The day of Corpus Domini, after the first cannon shot accompanying the exit of the Blessed Sacrament from the church, they [the runaways in a forest village] kneel down and go in procession around their houses reciting cantiques, while women carry crosses). 

The “New Guianese Colony” grew fast, but was soon completely annihilated. By December 1764, one of the most atrocious epidemics recorded in the history of French colonies had killed almost 9,000 of the new migrants. A further 2,000 escaped to the Antilles or were sent back to Europe, where severe fines or even imprisonment up to six years awaited them in their Germanic hometowns. No statistics, sadly, were ever gathered for Amerindian or Afro-Guianese victims. 

Some survivors found good fortune, however. One of them was Philippe Hinner, enfant-prodige harpist who had reached Kourou at age nine with his parents and three younger siblings, voyaging on the same vessel as the new governor, Étienne François Turgot. The epidemic claimed the life of every member of Philippe’s family. Orphaned in 1764, he was sent to France in April 1765, first at Turgot’s private court and later welcomed and hosted by the royal family, where he soon became musicien du Roy et de la chambre de la Reine. In 1775 he married the noble Louise-Marguerite-Émélie Quelpée de Laborde—one of the Queen’s femmes de chambre—and the first of their four children, Laure, was baptized by Louis XV and Marie Antoinette themselves in 1777. Hinner died at age thirty in 1784, after a meteoric career, leaving two comédies melées d’ariettes, eleven œuvres and a long series of miscellaneous collections consisting in harp, two-harp or harpsichord sonatas—occasionally with violin—or obbligato accompaniments for the most celebrated arias and romances of the time. They include at least one Adagio melody by Monsieur de Tremais, who had worked for Turgot as well, and whom Hinner must have met in Kourou. Hinner’s daughter Laure, later known as Madame de Berny, finally, had no lesser success: she became the memorable dilecta, partner and muse of Honoré de Balzac.

Our project is inspired by the complex musical life of the ephemeral and fateful colonie libellule of Kourou between 1763 and 1765. 

Its first section evokes the soundscape experienced by the newly arrived migrants: military marches brought to the Guiana by the French-colonial Saintonge army in the 1760s, a uniquely surviving Afro-American love song recorded in the 1770s in neighboring Dutch Suriname, and some recently reconstructed movements of the aforementioned Messe en cantiques. 

The second section stages a domestic concert as it could have been performed at the Governor’s residence. It includes some pieces by virtuoso violinist Monsieur de Tremais and the nine-year old child harpist Philippe Hinner— musicians that are here associated with their Guianese misfortune for the first time. Specifically: once brought to Paris as a survivor, young Hinner composed a poignant lullaby on the theme of M. de Tremais’s Opus 1, I. 

The merry amusements of the house concert are gradually overwhelmed by the unleashing of the epidemy—here evoked by the newly composed percussion solo Sauterelles—thus leading to the third and last section of the program. In it, François-Joseph Gossec’s Dies irae (the Day of Wrath) stages the storm of the epidemic, whose victims are then mourned by his Lacrymosa: a piece quoting Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as a sort of musical Laocoon or exemplum doloris: the paramount musical representation of human suffering. 

Finally, Gossec’s movements are followed by excerpts of André Grétry’s sublime grand motet Confitebor tibi Domine. They shall here pay tribute to the destiny of those thousands of sub-proletariat, steered migrants who—then as today— dreamed of a better life than the one they had left behind. 

A last note: after the failed migration project had ruined French Guiana’s reputation, the colony became host to one of the cruelest prisons ever, the infamous penal colony of Isle du Diable, just in front of the remains of wrecked Kourou. The same prison inspired Henri Charrière’s pseudo-autobiography of 1969, and Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1973 film Papillon. Indeed, the latter’s leitmotiv, Jerry Goldsmith’s Waltz of Freedom, frames our program, turning it into a flashback that discloses what Charrière ignored and the film omitted: the tragic 18th-century prehistory of Isle du Diable, that is, the Affaire Kourou.

Pedro Memelsdorff