Sonnambula opens their 2026–2027 season with the premiere of previously lost work by Baroque composer Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre. Four “airs” written for the court at Versailles, discovered to be printed at the back of a 1712 educational treatise in the collection of The Morgan Library & Museum, have remained unresearched, unrecorded, and unperformed. These airs shed light on how women composers navigated the porous boundaries between elite entertainment, teaching, and public musical life in early eighteenth-century France and are testimony to how Jacquet de La Guerre worked within this complex environment. Sonnambula is joined by mezzo-soprano Chloe Holgate, in a program that also features works by Jacquet de La Guerre’s contemporaries Marin Marais, François Couperin, and Michel Richard Delalande, as well as a world premiere by Stephen Anthony Weinfield.
This concert is preceded by a panel discussion on Wednesday, November 18 at 6pm at Columbia University's Maison Française, also free. Highlighting the significance of this discovery for music and feminist history, the panel brings together Sonnambula’s Artistic Director Elizabeth Weinfield and Morgan Library Curator of Music Manuscripts and Printed Music Robinson McClellan, alongside leading scholars Susan Boynton of Columbia University, Anne Higonnet of Barnard College, and Rebecca Cypess of Yeshiva University. This project is supported by a 2026 Chamber Music America Award, with additional support from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York State Council on the Arts. The concert is co-sponsored by the Maison Française, Columbia College, and the Center for the Core Curriculum.
Live at St. Paul’s Chapel.
If you don’t have a current Columbia ID, you MUST register by clicking the blue “register” button below. (Please do not use the same email address to register multiple people; this will confuse the system.) Registration will close at 11am sharp the day before the concert.
© Image of Sonnambula by Lawrence Sumulong for the Frick Collection; used with permission.