SWITSER+KNIGHT

Émilie is a modern one-singer opera about French Enlightenment thinker Émilie du Châtelet. Émilie was many things: the brilliant physicist who first defined kinetic energy; mistress to Voltaire; prodigious mathematician and translator of Newton’s Principia Mathematica; author of a treatise on the happiness of women; pioneer of what are now called financial derivatives - all achieved before she died in childbirth in 1749, when she was 42. The video content was created using pages from her original journals, which we were granted access to by the Morgan Chase Library.