Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

Joseph Bologne was born on the twenty-fifth of December 1745 at the sugar plantation of Baillif in the French colony of Guadeloupe, the son of Georges de Bologne Saint-Georges — a wealthy planter and member of the colonial assembly — and Anne dite Nanon, an enslaved Senegalese woman of the household. He was carried to France with his father in 1753 at the age of seven, and his mother followed in 1755.

He was placed at thirteen at the Académie royale polytechnique des armes et de l’équitation of the swordsman Nicolas Texier de La Boëssière in Paris — the principal fencing academy of the late ancien régime. He emerged at twenty as the most decorated fencer of his generation in Europe and was named in 1764 a gendarme of the king’s guard, with the title chevalier.

He took up the violin under François-Joseph Gossec and the harpsichord under Jean-Marie Leclair in the same Parisian decade. He published his first two violin concertos in 1773 and his Symphonie concertante in G major in 1775. He was appointed in 1773 director of the Concert des Amateurs at the Hôtel de Soubise — the principal subscription orchestra of pre-revolutionary Paris — and led it through the most ambitious symphonic programming of the Parisian 1770s, including the Paris premieres of works by Haydn.

He composed six opéras-comiques for the Comédie-Italienne between 1777 and 1788 — among them Ernestine (1777) on a libretto by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and L’Amant anonyme (1780), the only one to survive complete.

He served at the outbreak of the Revolution as colonel of the Légion Saint-Georges — a 1,000-man free-Black regiment of the Army of the North — between 1792 and 1793, and was imprisoned at Houdainville for eleven months under the Terror.

He died at Paris on the tenth of June 1799 of an ulcerated bladder, at fifty-three.

He is honored here as the first composer of African descent to lead a major European orchestra.