INSTRUMENTAL FIGURE

He was a musical prodigy, confidant of France's most infamous queen, and contemporary of Mozart. But his race and revolutionary actions saw his legacy almost entirely wiped from history by the establishment. Total Film meets star Kelvin Harrison Jr. and the film-making team behind Chevalier to discuss their electrifying 'rock star' portrait and all its contemporary resonances.

- JOSH SLATER-WILLIAMS

He just felt like a fucking superhero. And it was pretty incredible to me that not everyone knew or cared to know about him.’ A key producer and writer on Atlanta and What We Do in the Shadows, Stefani Robinson first learned of virtuoso violinist and composer Joseph Bologne when she was 15, reading a small but vividly described blurb in a book passed on by her mother. ‘I was in the orchestra growing up,’ she tells Total Film, ‘and so much of what we were doing while learning to play was learning the history of who these great contributors of classical music were. And he was just never part of the conversation. Everyone I spoke to about him had no idea this person existed.’

Considering the rarity of a prominent Black composer in 18th-century Europe, Joseph Bologne’s absence from the curriculum cannot solely be attributed to an artist simply fading into unimportance through natural means of changing tastes. Rather, there were active attempts at destroying his legacy, from the top of the French establishment. When Napoleon took power, he reinstated slavery after it had been abolished. And he, as part of his legislative abilities, decided to consign Bologne, his life story and music, to obscurity through the erasure of as much recorded material on the man as possible. ‘Our movie, in part, is an attempt to redress that erasure,’ director Stephen Williams says of Chevalier, the not-quite-biopic about a specific portion of Bologne’s life, written and produced by Robinson.