Nowadays, the word “refugee” tends to conjure images of tent cities and dire political situations of the Third World. However, the word entered the English language directly as a result of a single European displacement event—the flight of the Huguenots from France in the late seventeenth century. The Huguenot episode was the culmination of what might be called the age of “religious cleansing” in the European absolutist era, and it proved to be the last mass exodus before the major refugee flows of the late nineteenth century.

The importance of the Huguenots has remained unaccounted for when considering the spread of French music, especially opera, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Addressing this gap, Ahrendt will relate the tale of one particular Huguenot refugee, Jean-Jacques Quesnot de la Chenée, who capitalized on his Frenchness in rather unique ways. Variously an impresario, novelist, librettist, and spy, Quesnot’s shifting identities within the Huguenot diaspora highlight the strategies he and his fellow refugees employed after their flight from France. His status as an expatriate calls into question certain conventional notions of the meanings of operatic performance at this time. By detailing the circumstances behind two of Quesnot’s productions based on Allied victories during the War of the Spanish Succession, Ahrendt demonstrates that the French nation-state is an inadequate framework for understanding “French” opera in the early eighteenth century. Ahrendt will show that the conventions, language, and music of French baroque opera were employed to radically different political ends in works written for audiences in the Dutch Republic and the Allied-administered Southern Netherlands.

Rebekah Ahrendt is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, “A Second Refuge: French Opera and the Huguenot Migration, 1685-1713,” focuses on the role played by Huguenot communities in the production, dissemination, and reception of French opera outside of France. Today’s presentation is largely based on research conducted while affiliated with the OGC, thanks to a Short-Term Stay fellowship from the University of Utrecht. In the coming months, she will continue her research and writing in Berlin on a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst. She also performs professionally on viola da gamba.