Emilie July 22, 2012

'Emilie' is a modern one-singer, multimedia tour-de-force by Kaija Saariaho, about an extraordinary woman: French Enlightenment thinker Emilie du Chatelet. Emilie was many things: the brilliant physicist who first defined kinetic energy; mistress to Voltaire, among other luminaries; a prodigious mathematician and the translator of Newton's 'Principia Mathematica'; the author of a treatise on the happiness of women; a pioneer of what are now called financial derivatives, which she invented in part to pay off a $1 million debt to card sharks accrued in an unlucky night of gambling--all achieved before she died in childbirth in 1749, when she was 42. World-renowned soprano Elizabeth Futral sings the title role. The opera will be sung in French and English with English supertitles.