La Ballonniste
- or -
Balloon (A Hot Air Opera)

A heartfelt comedy in three acts centering on 18th century French opera singer Élisabeth Tible: the 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 Co-Commission

Based on a true event, the opera opens in 1784, Lyon, on the cusp of the French Revolution, as balloon madness sweeps France.

King Gustave III of Sweden is vacationing at Lyon. Though his hosts have commissioned an enormous wax head in his honor, Gustave has his heart set on the ultimate accessory to his reign: a hot air balloon. As aristocrats scramble to conscript local workers into building it, local opera diva, Élisabeth Tible, determines to get aboard by any means necessary. She shocks the crowd at the Place de la Comédie, rising through the air, singing an ecstatic aria from Monsigny’s now-forgotten 1777 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 takes its themes from comic entertainments of the ancien régime (the “old regime” of kings, about to be overthrown in the French Revolution), satirizing the blurry line between power and truth, science and magic, and the hubris of Europe’s ruling class in an era of vast inequality much like our own.

Élisabeth is fashioned on the heroines of 18th century French opéra comique; and its tropes and techniques inform every aspect of the opera, with buffoonery, animated wax statues, revolutionary chorus and demonic orchestra, neoclassical deus ex machina, and multiple musical styles in unholy alliance, plus an audience singalong at the end. We follow Élisabeth as she breaks free of a waxworker husband (a creator of lifelike effigies who prefers women inanimate); finds an ally in artist-aeronaut Fleurant; and finally defies gravity and the rigid class structure to fly free and sing her prophetic vision from the air.

The globe aérostatique, as the first gas balloons were called, was an instant craze and the ultimate autocratic status symbol: expensive, dangerous, drifting uncontrollably through the skies to the amazement of crowds up to 400,000 people, the ballon symbolizes absolute power and its fragility. La Ballonniste is a romp, but it is also an allegory for the end of absolutism with resonance in our own time. It stages the lush excesses of the ancient régime as freedom soars as a descant, above the skies, in a rapture of aesthetic pleasure.

The libretto is sung in modern English, with passages in 18th-century French. The score cites Arsène, and the libretto draws from a letter in which Mme Tible described her experience onboard La Gustave in her own words.

With support from: The NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment in association with The New York Foundation for the Arts