JC
Telegraph Arts published a piece on a forgotten “mulatto” musician. This article takes an interest in the artists who were overshadowed by the likes of Mozart and Haydn, but then focuses specifically on the most marginalized of the overshadowed — Le Chevalier de St-George, the son of a French aristocrat and a slave woman. A *very* old school, classic, dramatic, “rising above the odds” story…but it also makes it clear that he was subject to privilege via his aristocrat father. Also, see if you can find the implied hybrid vigor.

He was born Joseph Boulogne in the French colony of St Domingue (Haiti), the son of a minor French aristocrat and member of the Parlement at Metz and a slave woman known variously as Anne and Nanon. It would be hard to imagine a more inauspicious beginning. Imagine what young Joseph’s life-chances were; he might well have been drowned at birth, to avoid the shaming revelation that his father had been consorting with slave women.

And yet, somehow, Joseph Boulogne managed to overcome all this, and become one of the most striking and successful figures in pre-revolutionary Paris. Some of that success - but only some - can be put down to luck. He may have been a mulatto, but he was still the son of an aristocrat. This meant that when his family moved back to Paris in 1753, the eight-year-old Joseph could be enrolled at an elite academy for the nobility, where he soon became known as the Chevalier de St-George. The other piece of luck was good genes on both sides (his mother was reputed to be a great beauty).

The young St-George, by now a captain in the elite King’s Guard, excelled in other ways, too. He would swim across the Seine with one hand tied behind his back, was an agile skater, and apparently never missed a shot.

Sometimes, his race counted against him. When he applied to become musical director of the Paris Opera, the sopranos protested that it would “degrade their honour and the delicacy of their conscience to be given orders by a mulatto”.