Louise Bertin

The music of composer Louise Bertin has been almost forgotten despite her prominent place in the intellectual life of her day and has remained largely undiscovered despite the ongoing revival of music by female composers. Bertin studied with the musicologist and composer François-Joseph Fétis, who, in 1825, even financed a private production of her first opera, Guy Mannering, based on a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Bertin, still in her early twenties, seemed to be on her way to a career as a prominent opera composer. She set to work on Fausto, an opera based on Goethe's Faust, set to her own Italian-language libretto. Around 1831, Bertin befriended novelist Victor Hugo, who adapted his novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame as an operatic libretto, and the opera La Esmeralda was launched in 1836. She also wrote two volumes of poetry. Bertin died in Paris on April 26, 1877.