Mlle Duval

Mlle Duval was a French composer of the first half of the eighteenth century, associated with the Paris Opera as a dancer and, possibly, as a singer and harpsichordist. Little is known of her personal life: her given name has not come down to us, and the sources that mention her do not always agree on the details.

According to the handwritten notes of the Marquis d'Argenson, she was eighteen in 1736, when she composed Les Génies, ou Les caractères de l'Amour, a heroic ballet in a prologue and four entrées with a libretto by Fleury de Lyon. The work premiered on 18 October 1736 and was performed only nine times, although critics praised its music. Desfontaines compared some passages with Rameau's Les Indes galantes, and the Mercure de France of November 1736 praised the recitatives, the scenes and the choruses. The dedication names the Prince de Carignan as her patron. She was also the second woman to have an opera staged at the Paris Opera, after Jacquet de La Guerre in 1694.

Accounts of her stage career are contradictory. Some authors place her as a singer, others as an actress or dancer, and in 1775 she appears as a former actress of the Opera, under the name of a figurante. Léris states that she retired on a pension of 300 livres. There is no agreement about her death either: Fétis dated it to 1769, but Choron asserted that she was alive in 1770, so the date of her death remains uncertain after 1775.

Her legacy rests essentially on Les Génies, a work that retains interest as one of the few stage scores signed by a woman at the Paris Opera of her time. Some attributions to her name are doubtful: an aria published in 1776 is probably by Marie Elisabeth Cléry, and the treatise Méthode agréable et utile pour apprendre facilement à chanter juste is now attributed to the abbé Pierre Duval.