La Ballonniste

An opera in three acts inspired by the life of Elisabeth Thible, first woman to fly in a hot air balloon (Lyon, 1784)

Lisa Bielawa, composer
Claire Solomon, librettist
Charlie Otte, production and design consultant

A Guggenheim Fellowship Project
Available for Commission

During the last years of the ancien régime, the Montgolfier Brothers invented the hot air balloon. Louis XVI permitted the first untethered flight in 1783 over the Palace of Versailles, to the amazement of the crowd. 

Instantly, the globe aérostatique floating uncontrollably through the skies became the ultimate symbol of absolute monarchy. Expensive, dangerous and purely ornamental, every self-respecting King in Europe had to have one.

King Gustave III of Sweden was vacationing at Lyon in Spring 1784 when he commissioned the ultimate accessory to his reign: La Gustave. On June 4, a crowd assembled at the Place de la Comédie, as amateur aeronaut M. Fleurant prepared to launch the balloon into space. At the last minute, his passenger, Count Jean Baptiste de Laurencin, lost courage. Local opera diva, Mme Elisabeth Thible, shocked the crowd by stepping forward to take the Count’s place. As the balloon rose through the air, Mme Thible sang an ecstatic aria from Monsigny’s now-forgotten opera La Belle Arsène:

Je marcherai sur le tonnere, Et je regnerai dans les cieux!
(I will walk on thunder, and I shall reign in the skies!)

La Ballonniste unfolds in three short acts, charting Elisabeth Thible’s rise from penury as the abandoned wife of a wax-worker to success in the Lyon Opéra and finally to stratospheric celebrity, passing through the science of hot air balloons, animal magnetism, and the difficulty of keeping up appearances for an absolute monarch. 

The libretto is sung in modern English, with passages in 18th-century French. Its dizzying ups and downs combine 21st-century staging and design with techniques and tropes of 18th-century opéra. Angelic choruses, supernatural elements, stage machinery, flying balloons, and projection mapping cross the centuries, informed by and incorporating literary and musical elements of Mme Thible’s milieu and her opéra comique métier. The score cites Arsène, and the libretto draws from a letter in which Mme Thible described her experience onboard La Gustave in her own words.

Set on the cusp of the French Revolution, La Ballonniste is an allegory for the end of absolutism with surprising contemporary resonance, staging the lush excesses of the ancien régime as freedom soars as a descant, above the skies, in a rapture of aesthetic pleasure.