Music director Peau Halapua, who'll perform live on stage for the new theatre show, Emilie. Photo / Michael Craig
Music director Peau Halapua, who'll perform live on stage for the new theatre show, Emilie. Photo / Michael Craig
Violinist Peau Halapua talks to Joanna Wane about using music to bring an extraordinary woman and her legendary 18th-century love affair to life on the stage.
There’s been another #MeToo movement quietly gaining ground in the past few years to reclaim history’s invisible women — the ones remembered, if atall, as a footnote in the lives of famous men.
Sculptor Camille Claudel, overshadowed by her status as Rodin’s “muse and mistress”. War correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who was briefly married to Ernest Hemingway. Scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose key contribution to the discovery of the DNA double helix was ignored when two male colleagues won the Nobel Prize. Nasa’s team of brilliant black women, featured in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, who played a crucial role in launching astronaut John Glenn into orbit.
Add 18th century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Emilie du Chatelet to the list. She wasn’t merely the famed Voltaire’s bit on the side but his collaborator and intellectual equal in a spirited relationship that lasted 15 years. Not only does her translation of Newton’s Principia from Latin into French remain seminal today, she also wrote a study on the nature of happiness for women and, as a teenager, used her mathematical skills to devise highly successful gambling strategies so she could afford to buy books.
Du Chatelet and Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer famous for his wit, were a lively, charismatic couple, by all accounts. So although Auckland writer, director and composer Sophie Lindsay places du Chatelet at the heart of her new play, Emilie, it’s more rom-com than earnest period drama.
A painting of 18th-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Emilie du Chatelet by Maurice Quentin de la Tour.
Lindsay, who grew up in Vanuatu, speaks French as her first language. As part of her research for the play, she read Voltaire’s letters to du Chatelet and visited the isolated chateau at Cirey, where the pair conducted scientific experiments. A key element in the telling of their story is a series of instrumental pieces she’s composed that will be performed live on stage by violinist Peau Halapua and cellist Sarah Spence.
Halapua, who’s also the music director for Emilie, arranged the music, “teasing out” Lindsay’s ideas. “The way I’ve been conceptualising bringing the musical element to life - and this is where you might say my Pacific heritage comes in - is to think of it as a heliaki, which is a layering of meaning using musical metaphor throughout,” she says.
“It’s a love story and there’s deep emotion in there, but it’s also fun to watch, a really lighthearted, rollicking romp. The music is a way of keeping everything light and witty, but it can also bring in an element of sorrow, or a memory, adding a little umami to the fun.”
Born in Tonga, Halapua spent her school years in the UK and Hawaii before doing a music degree at the University of Auckland (her mother, Janet, is a former maths teacher from Thames), followed by a Master in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music in the United States.
Her father, Sitiveni Halapua, who died in January, was a prominent Tongan academic and pro-democracy politician who spent many years as director of the Pacific Islands Development Programme. His final book, The Art of Talanoa, a philosophical look at the power of storytelling in what he called “conflict transformation”, was published last year. By then, he was already seriously ill with cancer, says Halapua, who worked closely with him on the project. “He was also a fantastic banjo player. We always had lots of singing as a backdrop to our lives.”
Halapua during a break from rehearsals for "Emilie" at Auckland's Westpoint Performing Arts Centre. Photo / Michael Craig
Halapua was 5 when a violin arrived in the post as a gift from her grandmother in New Zealand. The family was living in Fiji at the time and she’d never seen or heard a violin before. She fell in love with it instantly. When they moved to the UK, where her father did his PhD in economics at the University of Kent in Canterbury, she came under the wing of a local woman who taught at the prestigious Yehudi Menuhin School.
“My parents did the ironing and painted her house, and we did gardening every now and then in exchange for free lessons. We lived in a little terraced house and I’d play all the time. The neighbours would be banging on the walls at 8pm and I was completely unfazed. I feel sorry for them now!”
Her younger sister, Langakali, is a fellow violinist, currently on a conducting fellowship with the NZ Symphony Orchestra. The sisters have a publishing company, Talanoa Books, which released their father’s book and produces a series of Pasifika children’s picture books, The Island Fables, retold and illustrated by their brother, Lisala.
The original music for Emilie was composed by Lindsey on piano then workshopped in her living room between Covid lockdowns with Halapua and cellist Rachel Wells, who recently had her second baby so won’t be performing in the production itself.
In any musical collaboration, each person has a role to play, says Halapua — and history, too, is an ensemble piece. “Emilie is definitely one of those hidden figures, but for her, it wasn’t about being the hero of her own story. She was part of something bigger and it’s a pleasure to bring a story like that out into the open.”
* Emilie, with Beth Alexander in the lead role and Justin Rogers as Voltaire, is on at Auckland’s Q Theatre, September 19-23.
“Judge me for my own merits or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to [my husband] or that famed author [Voltaire]. I am in my own right a whole person.” – Emilie du Chatelet
