The Met’s performance series, MetLiveArts, will present a site-specific performance by three-time GRAMMY®-winning singer and composer Cécile McLorin Salvant, in the Unicorn Tapestries Room at The Met Cloisters. The performance will be released on three consecutive Wednesdays this month on The Met’s YouTube Channel. Beginning today, November 1, followed by November 8 and 15, these digital premieres feature Salvant alongside several of her closest collaborators as she reimagines some of the songs from her 2023 album Mélusine while drawing inspiration from the beloved Unicorn Tapestries. Filmed in the Met’s Unicorn Tapestry galleries in July 2023, Salvant re-envisions three compositions—“Mélusine,” “D’un feu secret,” and “Dame Iseut”—specifically for the galleries as she reflects on the mythological grandeur of the storied tapestries.
This performance marks Salvant’s return to The Met following the 2018 presentation of her acclaimed work Ogresse, a long-form musical fable based on oral fairy tales from the nineteenth century that explores the nature of freedom and desire in a racialized, patriarchal world.
Performance Schedule
Wednesday, November 1: “Mélusine”
The European folkloric legend of Mélusine—a woman who becomes half serpent each Saturday due to a childhood curse—forms the basis for Salvant’s album. Mélusine weds Raymondin on the condition that they never see each other on Saturdays. In this original composition, Salvant, accompanied by a lone theorbo (a French baroque lute), tells of the sorrowful moment when Raymondin betrays his promise, spying on his wife as she bathes nude.
Wednesday, November 8: “D’un feu secret”
Salvant’s long relationship with Baroque music shines in this reinterpretation of an air de cour—a song to be sung for kings and queens and nobility—by royal music master Michel Lambert (1610–1696). Like many airs de cour, “D’un feu secret” tells of love’s tender joys and fiery pains: “I could heal if I stopped loving altogether, but I like the disease more than the remedy.” Salvant is joined by two instruments that would have accompanied the air in its premiere: a theorbo (a type of Baroque bass lute) and a harpsichord (featuring frequent collaborator Sullivan Fortner in his harpsichord debut).
Wednesday, November 15: “Dame Iseut”
Salvant’s upbeat “Dame Iseut” casts a twist on a work of 12th-century trobairitz (female troubadour) Almucs de Castelnau. Usually of noble lineage, trobairitzes were the first known female composers of Western secular music, often performing for noble courts in what is now the South of France. For “Dame Iseut,” Salvant sings the work’s original lyrics in Occitan—an endangered Romance language—as well as in a new Haitian Creole translation by her father, the Haitian-born physician Alix Salvant.
These performances are free and will premiere on The Met’s YouTube channel. The videos will remain online indefinitely.
About MetLiveArts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's concert program was founded in 1954 and has since expanded into a groundbreaking series that explores contemporary performance through the lens of the Museum’s exhibitions and gallery spaces. MetLiveArts invites artists, performers, curators, and thought leaders to collaborate with The Met, leading to the creation of commissions, world premieres, and site-specific dance, music, and theatrical experiences that have received international recognition and have been among some of the most singular and memorable performances in New York City.
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November 1, 2023
Contact: Meryl Cates
Communications@metmuseum.org
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