La Ballonniste

La Ballonniste is a new opera-in-progress by composer, producer, vocalist, and 2023 Guggenheim Fellow Lisa Bielawa, with libretto by Claire Solomon. Set in 18th century France, this comic opera takes as its subject Élisabeth Tible, the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon, with the French Revolution as its thrilling backdrop. Bielawa says she was inspired by elements as disparate as 2023’s Barbie and Gogol’s The Nose, and she speaks highly of the “sense of adventure and discovery” in the University Opera. This workshop presentation is free, no ticket required. More info here: music.wisc.edu.

media release: Guggenheim and Rome Prize-winning composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa – described as “a dynamic and innovative composer” by The Boston Globe – will workshop her opera-in-progress, La Ballonniste, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from September 4-24, 2024, collaborating with University Opera at the Mead Witter School of Music, and joined by the opera’s librettist Claire Solomon and dramaturg Cori Ellison.

The development period will culminate with a workshop performance of La Ballonniste on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 7:30pm in Collins Recital Hall at the Hamel Music Center (740 University Avenue) featuring University vocalists May Kohler, Ben Johnson, Brendin Larson, Alex Cook, and others to be announced. The work-in-progress performance is open to the public to attend, free of charge (no registration required).

Lisa Bielawa’s music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the recipient of the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and an OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. Recently she completed a Loghaven Artist Residency and was part of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps. She received a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser. For her Guggenheim Fellowship period, Bielawa is writing and developing this new opera as well as a book of prose vignettes from her experiences and encounters with music in a variety of international settings.

La Ballonniste is a heartfelt comedy centering on 18^th century French opera singer Élisabeth Tible: the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon. The opera opens in 1784, Lyon, on the cusp of the French Revolution, as balloon madness sweeps France.

The opera takes its themes from beloved entertainments of the ancien régime (the “old regime” of kings that was about to be overthrown in the French Revolution), satirizing the blurry line between power and magic and the hubris of Europe’s ruling class, in an era of vast inequality, much like our own. Élisabeth is fashioned on the heroines of opéra comique, her métier; its tropes and techniques inform every aspect of the opera, with buffoonery, animated wax statues of royalty, a revolutionary chorus and demonic orchestra, a neoclassical deus ex machina, and multiple musical styles in unholy alliance. We follow Élisabeth as she breaks free of a controlling husband, who – as a “waxworker” or creator of lifelike wax effigies – prefers inanimate women; finds an ally in artist-balloon pilot (aeronaut) Fleurant; and finally defies both gravity and the rigid social class structure of her day to fly free and sing her prophetic vision from the air.

The “globe aérostatique,” as the first gas balloons were called, was an instant craze and the ultimate autocratic status symbol: expensive, dangerous, drifting uncontrollably through the skies to the amazement of crowds up to 400,000 people, the ballon symbolizes absolute power and its fragility. La Ballonniste is a romp, but it is also an allegory for the end of absolutism with resonance in our own time. It stages the lush excesses of the ancient régime as freedom soars as a descant, above the skies, in a rapture of aesthetic pleasure.

“The discovery of this forgotten woman’s story, brought to life with such humor and humanity in Claire’s superb libretto, has taken me to totally new musical places,” Bielawa says. “Inspirations range from Shostakovich and Gogol’s The Nose, Leonard Bernstein’s Mass and the Barbie movie. These characters are full of lovable foibles and I frequently catch myself laughing while I work, but there is also tenderness underneath the sonic playfulness. It is a supreme luxury to be able to develop these characters and ideas with members of the University Opera community. Their sense of adventure and discovery is unlike any other opera department I have encountered. It’s going to be a very fun ride!”

More about Lisa Bielawa: Composer Lisa Bielawa consistently incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the pandemic, Bielawa cultivated a virtual community using submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents through her work Broadcast from Home, now archived by the Library of Congress.

Bielawa’s music has been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, National Cathedral, Rouen Opera, MAXXI Museum in Rome, and Helsinki Music Center, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, ROCO, and the Orlando Philharmonic. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall in Armenia, the Venice Architectural Biennale, American Music Week in Salzburg, the INFANT Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and more. www.lisabielawa.net