The movie Chevalier takes viewers to concert halls in 18th-century France, full of fanciful fashion, and zeroes in on the story of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. He was the illegitimate son of an African slave and a French plantation owner, credited as the first Black composer to receive widespread acclaim. GBH’s Arts and Culture Reporter James Bennett II joined GBH’s Morning Edition hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel to talk about the latest biopic to hit the big screen. This transcript has been lightly edited.
James Bennett II: So I want to start just by asking you both: when was the first time either of you heard about Chevalier?
Jeremy Siegel: I'm trying to think. I was familiar with the name — I started hearing the name much more surrounding this movie — but like, not much at all. And I actually texted my wife, Claire, who is into classical music and is a violinist and knows about classical music, how much she had heard about Chevalier. And her answer was like, next to nothing, basically. I mean, she admittedly doesn't know a ton about the lives of composers, but I was kind of surprised by that for someone who knows about classical music. What about you, Paris?
Paris Alston: For me, I remember I did an interview a couple of years ago with the conductor over at the Fall River Symphony Orchestra, Douglas McRay Daniels. I know they were doing a performance with music from Black composers, and I believe Chevalier was one of the ones they were including.
Bennett: Yeah. So I first came across him in the early-mid-2010s on a blog, back when the internet was sort of blogging. But it was in the context of like, you know, “Here's this guy. He did a lot of cool stuff, did a lot of cool music stuff” — but there wasn't really any engagement with the music, it was more of this kind of curiosity that a Black man was doing what we consider to be the domain of white men, especially in the 18th century and especially in Europe.
Alston: So what else do we know about Chevalier himself? Without giving too much away, what do we learn from the film?
Bennett: He was born in Guadeloupe to an enslaved woman, and his father was a French plantation owner. When he was young, he was moved to Paris where he was like, a big-deal athlete, especially in the fencing world. He's still in the fencing books today, in the world of fencing governing bodies. There are legends of him, swimming across the River Seine with, like, one arm tied behind his back.
But it turns out that he's a very good violinist. And not only that, but also an exceptional composer. And again, he's running in the upper strata of a French society, becomes more than a bit of a celebrity. He's rubbing shoulders with folks like Marie Antoinette. And doing the French Revolution, he kind of takes on some of these Enlightenment ideas and leads the first — not to say that he needed Enlightenment ideas to be like, “Slavery's bad.” I'm pretty sure he knew that, I want to make that clear. But he led the first all-Black armed regiment in European military history.
Siegel: So he has quite the story. I'm also just impressed by the fact that, like, that's the short version that you gave us for time. What a story. Now this is a movie. What did you think of it?
Bennett: The stakes felt high. The stakes are so high for this movie in a way that I haven't felt walking into a theater in a while.
Siegel: Why is that?
Bennett: Yeah, I was thinking about that, actually, on the way in, why they felt so high. And it's because I think we haven't gotten a good biographical representation of him on film before. If we wanted to know about Abraham Lincoln, it's kind of a wash, whatever. I know who Abraham Lincoln is. I know his deal already. But for someone who I think gets left out of the historical pop cultural narrative, it would have just been gut-wrenching for people to walk out and be like, either, “That movie was awful” or “Oh, that was like cute.” The stakes felt high.
Alston: That’s interesting, James, because to your earlier point, I mean, it's a story about someone who — I don't know if you would use the word infiltrating, but who is existing in a very white space. And this is a story about a Black person in that space. And so there's a lot of pressure there, I imagine.
Bennett: Yeah, absolutely. And I think biopics like this are hard to pull off, too, because they have to humanize the character in the movie, who's also a real person. And at the same time, it seems that every biopic follows a predetermined path. It's like the calling: I'm good at music; Here's a struggle, here's a challenge; I'm going to triumph. And it can get stale. And you're working against the clock. You only have a little bit of time to tell an entire life story.
And I talked to Tim Huling over at Berklee, who teaches in the scoring department. Here's what he had to say about the challenges of biopic making.
Tim Huling: When people make movies about musicians, there is always a question of: Why are they really making it? What are they really trying to say? And oftentimes the movie doesn't really exist to explore the musicianship of the musicians, the composers, whatever. It's a really interesting question of, is the movie really about a musician, or is it about some other set of ideas?
Bennett: So in this instance, it's about racism and it's kind of raging against that machine. Very briefly, like in a sentence, the movie is about this composer and he wants to be the director of the Paris Opera. So he gets into a contest with the composer Christoph Gluck to create an opera. And the better opera is going to be the director of the Paris Opera. And it clearly does not work out that simply.
Siegel: So I had mentioned that I was not familiar with the story, but familiar with his name being out there in the music world. This is probably doing a lot for knowing more about him and exposure to him in the music world. What's the state of his music at the moment?
Bennett: You can see his music being programmed a little bit more, recordings of this music coming out in 2021. The L.A. Philharmonic had an L.A. Phil premiere of a concerto — not the first thing that got played ever, but the first time he got played there in Los Angeles in 2021. Bill Barclay did a play called The Chevalier, also in 2021. And then the Handel and Haydn Society here in Boston last year did the overture to this opera, L'amant anonyme, which is incidentally his only surviving opera.
And what I'll say about that is that as the only surviving opera, it also just got its first recording, and that album dropped back in in in February. So you can actually go listen to that music now. And it is really interesting that you have this person, this giant of a figure, and there's only one of his six operas that we know of that are still around.
