Marguerite (Piano/Vocal Score)

Marguerite is a monodrama - a mad scene - commissioned by Newfoundland’s Opera on the Avalon for the wonderful soprano Madison Montambault, as part of its Emerging Artist Program. The 2024-2025 concert season included several commissions for singers in the program, each composition based on a character from the true story of Marguerite de La Rocque, a young French noblewoman who, in 1542, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada with a male relative, identified in various accounts as a brother, a cousin, or an uncle; whatever the case may have been, he was charged with colonizing the area. When he discovered Marguerite’s affair with a young man aboard ship, he marooned her, her lover, and her maidservant on the legendary Isle of Demons, off the coast of Newfoundland. Marguerite’s lover and maidservant died, and when she later gave birth to a daughter the child died as well. In this tale of love, betrayal, heartbreak, and survival, Marguerite lived for several years on the island, up against the harsh northern environment and the ever-present possibility of death. Lisa Moore’s fanciful and colorful libretto breathes life into this tale to imagine how Marguerite may have dealt with her solitary life, and with her grief over the loss of her daughter, fighting despair while hallucinating vivid images of her lost daughter and seeing demons on the island, with whom she played cards, all the while knowing that if she could just win against them, they would give her back her daughter (as impossible as this actually was). In this monodrama we find Marguerite at her breaking point, her mental acuity lost and her emotional stability upended. Despite her hopelessness, she declares that she will never leave her island jail before she is able to win back her daughter. In Marguerite, we see a young woman at the mercy of men in power...no voice in her own future, just exile...a total loss of control, until she is marooned. It is then that she overcomes man’s plans for her by overcoming both physical dangers and those within her mind. After more than two long years, she was found and rescued by fishermen and returned home to France.