The Color of Music

Here’s what’s missing from Heather Mac Donald’s cranky and overstated attack on ‘Chevalier’—and its real-life hero.

Kevin Harrison as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges in Chevalier. (Courtesy Searchlight Pictures)

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote about Chevalier, a heavily fictionalized biopic about the eighteenth-century violinist, composer, swordsman, and soldier Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the biracial son of a French plantation owner and an enslaved African woman. I noted that while Saint-Georges’s story is certainly worth telling and Kevin Harrison is mesmerizing in the lead role, the film ultimately fails because it tries to turn its hero’s complicated eighteenth-century life into twenty-first-century racial melodrama. (The film, directed by Stephen Williams, is available for streaming on Hulu.)

A recent review of the movie in City Journal by Heather Mac Donald, a forceful critic of progressive racial politics, is worth scrutiny as a striking example of how “anti-woke” culture criticism can be as blinkered and heavy-handed as its opposite. Mac Donald justifiably skewers the film’s distortions of the historical record, used in the service of a cliché-riddled narrative of racial persecution and racial awakening in which Saint-Georges trades powdered wigs for cornrows and incorporates African drumming into his music. But her counternarrative is no less flawed. Not only does she adopt a tone of sneering condescension toward Saint-Georges, granting him an “interesting life” but treating him as a thoroughly mediocre affirmative action baby; she also goes out of her way to minimize and even deny the reality of racism in eighteenth-century Europe.

Take the historical incident in which Saint-Georges’s appointment as director of the Paris Opera was sunk after three female stars complained they couldn’t possibly “submit to the orders of a mulatto.” The film, as I pointed out in my review, piles on extra humiliations: the petition now calls mixed-race people “subhuman,” the Opera directorship goes to Saint-Georges’s snidely racist rival Christoph Gluck, and the chevalier is racially insulted at a banquet and effectively unpersoned by the French elites. In reality, Louis XVI tried to smooth over the unpleasantness by giving the top Opera post to a court official (Gluck wasn’t even a contender), and Saint-Georges remained on good terms with the royal family and continued to enjoy prominence in the music world of Paris.

Yet Mac Donald isn’t content with pointing out these facts; she questions whether the incident was even racist:

Bologne’s race may not have been the critical factor in sidelining his candidacy. Some insiders feared that he would try to shake up the Paris Opera and centralize power in his own hands, according to musicologist Patrick Barbier. Defenders of the status quo, on this view, joined forces to eliminate the apparent threat posed by the upstart knight.

Mac Donald’s framing seems noticeably more negative toward Saint-Georges than that of her source: While Barbier stresses the chevalier’s promise to bring “new methods” to the prestigious but crusty institution, Mac Donald’s language implies a power grab. (She also leaves out the fact that Chevalier may be half correct in assigning the instigator of the complaint, the prima ballerina Marie-Madeleine Guimard, a personal motive—only it wasn’t rejection by Saint-Georges or an affair with Gluck as in the film, but a liaison with the official who eventually got the job.)

But that aside: Surely, when someone’s candidacy for a post is attacked in overtly racial terms, that’s a racist incident even if the underlying motive is something other than racial animus. And the 2006 biography of Saint-Georges by the late Romanian-American violinist, conductor, and musicologist Gabriel Banat, The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow, reveals that the racist rhetoric wasn’t limited to the petition. “La Guimard” may not have called Saint-Georges “a little monkey playing the violin” as her character does in the movie, but she did reportedly make the widely circulated quip that having Saint-Georges as head of the Opera would require audiences to accept “a Negro Venus tongue-bathing the face of a mulatto Adonis with kisses” on the stage. According to a contemporary diarist (quoted in Banat’s book), Saint-Georges, informed of the slur, improvised a scathing epigram (my translation):

Had Venus been the dull and trite Guimard,
We’d have a love that joys and graces lacks:
Arms, legs, and bodies, frightful to regard,
Would then become mere whips for flogging blacks.

The startling metaphor suggests that Saint-Georges was acutely aware of, and bitter about, the racism directed at him in the Opera episode—and why wouldn’t he be?

Yet Mac Donald insists that regardless of the Opera incident, there is no evidence whatsoever that racial prejudice hindered either Saint-Georges’s musical career or his reception among the Parisian upper crust; if anything, “he probably benefited from his exotic parentage.” (“Exotic parentage,” here, refers to being born into slavery.) How so? Apparently, it helped his success with “high-born females,” who were also “seduced by his athletic prowess, statuesque frame, and dancing skills.”

Apart from this disturbing evocation of the stereotypical black stud—and from the fact that we’re talking about the French aristocracy of the late ancien régime, so a prolific love life is hardly unusual—Mac Donald omits a key fact: As a biracial man granted noble rank, Saint-Georges was essentially unmarriageable. Marriage to a white woman was forbidden; marriage to a black or biracial woman would mean dramatic loss of status. In that sense, Chevalier’s portrayal of Saint-Georges as a man cruelly reminded of his “otherness” in a society where he can enjoy acclaim but can never fully belong does contain a fundamental truth. Forget the histrionic, made-up subplot in which the odious husband of Saint-Georges’s lover kills her dark-skinned baby. (It’s based on flimsy gossip that accused the jealous husband of letting the child die from an illness by refusing to fetch a doctor—a claim all the more dubious given the state of medicine and infant mortality at the time.) What’s real is that because of his background and skin color, Saint-Georges was denied an essential bond that was, for his white peers, not only about family formation and companionship, but about cementing their social connections.

There were other slights, too. For instance, a review of Saint-Georges’s 1787 musical comedy La Fille Garçon (“The Girl-Boy,” with a plot revolving around a cross-sex disguise) in one prestigious culture journal not only panned the music as unoriginal but took a swipe at his racial origin:  “It’s as if nature served the mulatto” so as to give them a “marvelous aptitude” for imitation but not the “élan of sentiment and of genius” necessary for true creativity. Since virtually none of Saint-Georges’s letters survive, we can only guess his reaction. But his involvement with abolitionist circles in London in 1787 and his later leadership in a regiment of black and mixed-raced soldiers in the French revolutionary army, the Légion Saint-Georges, strongly suggest that his consciousness of racial inequities was quite real, even without cornrows or drums. (Mac Donald elides Saint-Georges’s revolutionary career altogether by claiming that he was “imprisoned as a royalist . . . during the Reign of Terror”; in fact, the reasons for his arrest are unclear and probably had much more to do with the Jacobins’ paranoia about treason in the army.)

Lastly, another instance of Mac Donald’s bizarre denial of obvious racism is worth mentioning. She rightly mocks Chevalier’s absurd insinuation that the villainous Moor Monostatos in The Magic Flute was Mozart’s revenge against Saint-Georges for beating him in a (fictitious) violin “duel.” Then she makes the equally absurd argument that there’s nothing racist about Monostatos anyway: He’s simply a “stock comic type.” But it’s a very specific stock: We’re talking about a black buffoon with rapey designs on a beautiful white maiden and actual “black is ugly, white is beautiful” lines. (You don’t have to be wearing woke goggles to see this clearly: W.H. Auden commented on the Monostatos race problem in a humorous verse introduction to The Magic Flute written in 1956!) Of course we shouldn’t “cancel” Mozart over this, and he didn’t even write the libretto. But Mac Donald’s comparison of Monostatos to “bumbling or hysterical” white Mozartian characters such as Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro or Donna Elvira and Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni is simply baffling: Those are nuanced, complex characters who get their lyrical or tragic moments along with comical ones, and they are certainly not caricatured or defined in racial terms.

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IT’S TRUE THAT DESPITE racial slights and barriers, Saint-Georges managed to have an impressive career—which Mac Donald treats with palpable dismissiveness even as she uses it to prove that he wasn’t held back by racism. Thus, she describes the Concert des Amateurs, of which Saint-Georges became music director in 1773, as “one of Paris’s many orchestras”; in fact, one of the books she references, Robert W. Gutman’s magisterial 1999 biography of Mozart, describes that orchestra as one of only “two influential societies serving Paris’s public concert life.” She misquotes Gutman as saying that Mozart never met Saint-Georges; she also confidently asserts that “there is no record that [Gluck] ever met [Saint-Georges] or knew who he was,” even though both men had been part of Marie Antoinette’s musical gatherings.¹

Regarding Saint-Georges’s contributions as a composer, Mac Donald is particularly scornful:

His music can be mildly pleasing, not because of any unique gifts on [his] part but because the eighteenth-century Classical style in which he wrote is inherently delightful. Indeed, it is the banality that he achieves within that idiom that sets him apart.

We are each permitted our own critical tastes, of course. But Mac Donald’s derision is not generally held—as witness some of her own sources. For instance, Barbier, the renowned French musicologist, writes that Saint-Georges’s “violin concertos and symphony concertantes . . . still charm with their freshness of inspiration and the elegance of their solo parties.”

It’s ridiculous to suggest, as the movie does, that Saint-Georges, for all his talent, was superior to Mozart and Gluck. But there’s a middle ground between hype and dismissal. Banat, Saint-Georges’s first serious biographer and certainly a serious musician, readily conceded that “he’s not a Mozart” (and shot down some of the more outré claims embraced in the Williams film—for instance, that Saint-Georges’s later obscurity was due to deliberate racist erasure under Napoleon). However, Banat also saw Saint-Georges as a genuine innovator in violin technique (“a bridge between Italian virtuosos like Vivaldi and Locatelli and Beethoven”) and in the development of the symphony concertante.

“In the George Floyd era, it was inevitable that the half-black [Saint-Georges] would be exhumed from obscurity,” writes Mac Donald (in the second of her two snarky and gratuitous references to Floyd). But in fact, efforts to reclaim Saint-Georges’s legacy antedate that moment by . . . oh, at least a century. The distinguished French musicologist Lionel de la Laurencie devoted a highly complimentary essay to Saint-Georges’s life and work, with comparisons to Gluck and Haydn, in the Musical Quarterly in 1919. And what some have called a “boom” in recordings of Saint-Georges’s compositions began in 1996 in the Czech Republic, hardly Woke Central.

Is the recent Saint-Georges revival due in large part to his being Europe’s first classical composer and virtuoso performer of African origin? No doubt, though it also coincides with a more general rise of interest in eighteenth-century classical music. The vagaries of posthumous oblivion and fame are capricious; Antonio Salieri got a revival largely because of a play and movie exploiting the entirely false rumor that he killed Mozart. (Amadeus defames Salieri at least as much as Chevalier defames Mozart and Gluck.) If a fact of Saint-Georges’s biography that exposed him to very real humiliations and social disadvantages in life now boosts his recognition, I’m not sure that’s a cause for outrage. Besides, as Mac Donald grudgingly acknowledges, his story—the real one, not the lurid fictions of Chevalier—is genuinely fascinating.

There has been a fair amount of inflammatory and irresponsible stuff written recently about classical music being essentially white supremacist. Mac Donald is right to be appalled by it, and she has a point that Chevalier’s vilification of Mozart and Gluck feeds into that trope. But surely celebrating the achievements of an extraordinary eighteenth-century musician who was black can also be a way to counteract such claims: Saint-Georges shows us that classical music belongs to everyone regardless of race or origin. And surely one can push back against “everything is racist” attacks on the Western musical tradition without either denying the racism that did exist or disparaging black musicians who overcame great odds to contribute to that tradition.

1. For what it’s worth, I may have erred in the opposite direction when I wrote in my Chevalier review that Saint-Georges and Gluck were friends: While this claim crops up in a variety of places, it does not seem to be solidly sourced.