Playwright, composer, and Boston native Bill Barclay has done much to re-establish the career of the long-forgotten French musician Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, with his play The Chevelier, which comes to Boston on October 24 & 25.

Playwright, composer, and Boston native Bill Barclay has done much to re-establish the career of the long-forgotten French musician Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, with his play The Chevelier, which comes to Boston on October 24 & 25.

Playwright, composer, and Boston native Bill Barclay has enjoyed unqualified success with the company he founded, Concert Theatre Works. Barclay long served as the music director at Shakespeare’s Globe Theater in London, and it’s his musical acumen as much as his writing that propels his play The Chevalier, a story that follows four well-known historical figures just prior to the French revolution. Two are immigrants: Queen Marie Antoinette, an Austrian by birth, and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, born in the French colony of Guadaloupe but among France’s most accomplished musicians and military men. As the play begins, a terrifying registry has been put in place to list all the people of color residing in France; it’s the prelude to a potential mass deportation, and though France has no slavery within its borders, that practice continues in its colonies. It’s not a certainty that Bologne’s celebrity, nor his role as a music tutor to Marie Antoinette, will be sufficient to protect him from the rising tides of racism.

A second Austrian plays a major role: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who, in 1778, lived next to Bologne. Barclay makes the case that Mozart, about 20 at the time, must have been musically influenced by his neighbor. (They’re roommates in the play.) So accomplished was Bologne as a musician and composer that fellow military man and acclaimed novelist Pierre Choderlos de Laclos — the fourth character in the play, and the author of Dangerous Liaisons — wrote librettos for his operas. Yet, Bologne was somehow nearly forgotten to history. “He didn’t have an entry in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians when I started” writing the play, Barclay tells QulturVultur in a Zoom interview. “He hardly had a Wikipedia page…. no one knew about him.”

That has changed. Barclay notes that his play has had a role in the chevalier’s modern-day reversal of fortune. He also points to the 2022 Stephen Williams-directed film Chevalier.

“We had gotten a New York Times review and [coverage by] NPR and BBC, and suddenly we were the hot act in town,” Barclay adds, before noting that the movie did not light up the box office. “One of the reasons it didn’t do so well is they didn’t use any of his music,” Barclay muses, “so the idea of coming to this as a music person was really important because we’re trying to superimpose his music over his life. What Concert Theater Works does best is illuminate great music from within.”

Concert Theatre Works is now a going concern, active in no less than five countries. Barclay’s long association with London’s famed Shakespeare’s Globe surely cannot hurt as far as the company’s international reach is concerned, and neither can Barclay’s prolific writing. “We have 30 shows,” the composer notes. “I write three a year.”

The Chevalier, which originally premiered at Tanglewood, was a commission of The Boston Symphony Orchestra. Even so — and despite Barclay’s notable tenure in the Boston theater scene in the early 2000s — the two-night run at Emmanuel Church on October 24 and 25 marks its inaugural Boston production. The show stars Brendon Elliott on violin, with Barclay, Thomas Brazzle, Merritt Janson, and David Joseph taking on the roles of the four characters. The Chamber Orchestra of Boston (David Feltner, Music Director) feature as well, as does Dr. Karen Walwyn, on piano and student musicians from Project STEP (Ian Saunders, Artistic Director).

Read on for Barclay’s comments on his (and the play’s) Boston homecoming, the historic figures at the crux of the story, and the parallels between the late 1700s and today.

QulturVultur: You’ve made quite a splash with this piece.

Bill Barclay: It’s the one that started it all for us. We took Farinelli and the King with Mark Rylance to Broadway in 2017, and at the Globe. Two Black women came up to me and said, “I have your next story: Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.” They were like, “We know no one knows who he is. This is the guy.” My jaw dropped to the floor. No one was playing his music in 2018, so I started going to my orchestral partners: The L.A. Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, some orchestras in Boston. The BSO was opening the Tanglewood Learning Institute [ https://www.bso.org/tli ] in 2019, so I went to them and said, “You need to make a piece about this guy, but also you should just play Bologne because you’ve never played him.” They said, “We have this new incubating place coming out. Would you like to do a show there?” I said sure. They said, “Okay, we’ll take your show about Bologne.” I said, “I don’t have a show about Bologne.” And they said, “Well, it’s opening in six months. Would you like a slot?”

People went mad for The Chevalier, and then orchestras started asking about it. We’ve toured it around with the London Philharmonic and [had] amazing performances in Chicago and Chatauqua and all around the country, and that’s what gave me the confidence to write more shows.

QulturVultur: What went into researching someone who was so little known when you began?

Bill Barclay: Gabriel Banat, who sat in the violin section of the New York Philharmonic for 20 years, wrote a biography, [The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow, 2006] which has all of these primary documents inside the biography. To find some of his music I was looking at microfiche from the Bibliothèque Nationale Française. I was in touch with the Bibliothèque Nationale to see if I could get copies of his music. I was having to read pirated copies of his music for which there was no recording.

I’m presenting his actual music. There’s the musicology side, making sure it was correct and shining these little jewels that I could build the play around; there was the writing of the play; and the amount of people of color, dramaturgs of color, directors, donors, actors, musicians who I begged, borrowed, and stole to look at it to make sure that it felt correct, and it felt lived in, and taking all of their suggestions. This project was a real growing up into a lot of new skills.

QulturVultur: Marie Antoinette, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, and Mozart were all contemporaries of Joseph Bologne. Did their lives interact in the ways the play depicts?

Bill Barclay: The relationship between Captain Laclos, and Bologne is very established, and Laclos was the center of the revolution; he brought Bologne in. The relationship between Marie Antoinette and Bologne was also established. We know that she requested him to be her music teacher, so we know that they had these private conversations. What did they say? How did he break from the royalty when, ultimately, he was fighting against the crown? That obviously involved a personal relationship, and that’s drama right there.

We know that [Mozart] was living under the same roof as Bologne for a few months [in 1778] in the Chausse d’Entene in Paris. [He was] desperately ill when he arrived. His mother had just died. He wasn’t getting any work. No one really wanted to collaborate with him; they just were not interested in this young German. He was poor and heartbroken, and Bologne was the most famous musician in Paris at the time. There are little moments of music that that Mozart wrote, like his Concertante in E flat, a double concerto, which was a form that Bologne popularized — he obviously finds out about the double concerto in Paris because Bologne has done it. Gabriel Banan has found little fragments of music that seem to infer that Mozart went to Bologne’s concerts and heard his music. I invent what they say, and I’m basing it on what generally could have happened and not trying to stretch the truth because this is an opportunity for most people to learn everything they’re ever going to know about [Bologne].

QulturVultur: Mozart is so funny, especially because of his anachronistic way of speaking.

Bill Barclay: I use contemporary language for Mozart because it’s fun. The important thing about the humor is what Shakespeare gave us: If you’re going to tell a sad story, you have to focus on the laughs, and if you’re going to tell a happy story, you have to focus on the stakes. The depths of this story are very painful; this guy did everything, and it was never good enough to get the job at the head of the Paris Opera, never good enough to be given the brass ring. But he was better than everyone at everything! He’s the best violinist. He’s the best composer in the 1770s. He’s the best fencer. He’s the most attractive guy. He’s the best marksman. He’s the best conductor. At the end of the piece, the one thing that he asks is that Marie Antoinette lean on her husband and end slavery in the colonial islands. The French are all so happy and pleased with themselves that there’s no slavery in mainland France, but Versailles is feeding its voracious appetite on sugar cane from Saint Domingue and Guadeloupe — where Bologne is from — and Martinique; for Boulogne that’s hypocrisy of the highest order. He can’t understand why the crown that supports him and truly sees him can’t end slavery there. It’s such a deep wound for him that in order for that wound to have value and to have pathos for the audience, I feel like the piece has to be light and be surprising like the music is. If it were lugubrious and a history lesson about a guy who never got what he wanted, I think we’d feel like it was pedantic and not theatrical.

QulturVultur: I saw a clip of the play on YouTube, and it reminded me of Hamilton. I’m wondering if Hamilton might have opened some doors stylistically or thematically for The Chevalier.

Bill Barclay: The period’s bang-on the same; it’s the 1770s, so the clothes put us there in many ways, and also a person of color in those clothes puts us there immediately. I’ve written a play with music; I’ve not written a musical, and there’s a universe of distinction there. None of the actors are singing there. They’re Broadway caliber actors who are expert at the naturalism required to pull off real believability in these circumstances. That’s not to say that Hamilton actors don’t, but it’s a different training that I’m looking for.

QulturVultur: This play is being marketed as an historical parallel to the way we push back on authoritarianism in our own time. Was that something you had in mind when you first wrote it?

Bill Barclay: To me, it’s about what equality really is. What does it really mean to be to be equal? My conversations with people of color in 2018 and 2019 were not about equity. The conversation was about, “Can we get to the equal part? Let’s just get to the part where this doesn’t matter.” You have to address it in specific ways when you look at, say, the lack of Black and brown participation in the orchestral ecosystem, because then it was like, “Okay there is an equity thing that has to happen there,” which is why we ended up raising money for the National Alliance for Audition Support . We started signing orchestras up in the National Alliance because that was the best good we could do. But on the social political side, it was frustration that we’re still having this conversation.

QulturVultur: You’re so prolific. You must already have other things lined up.

Bill Barclay: I’m creating an immersive masquerade ball for Opera Lafayette. It’s going to be in DC and in New York City this winter, and then we’re going to launch our new piece in the Berkshires this next summer, [in which] I’m playing Robert Schumann. There’s the book What Music Is, which I’m furiously trying to write, which I’ve been researching for 15 years. And then part of this music medicine trilogy we’re announcing in October is a new big concert with full orchestra about the Tao Te Ching. I’m trying to come up with a new translation of that for the show.

“Le Chevalier” plays at Emmanuel Church, Boston | October 24 & 25, 7pm. For tickets and more information, go to this website.