Biography
Louise-Angélique Bertin was born on 15 February 1805 near Paris, the daughter of Journal des débats editor Louis-François Bertin and the pianist Geneviève-Aimée-Victoire Boutard, who gave her her first music lessons. Lasting effects of childhood polio limited her mobility throughout her life but did not stop her composing: she studied with François-Joseph Fétis and with Anton Reicha, the teacher of Berlioz and Liszt. Her stage career began with the operas Guy Mannering (1825, after Walter Scott) and Le loup-garou (1827), followed by Fausto (1831, after Goethe) and, in 1836, her best-known work, La Esmeralda, to a libretto written specially for her by Victor Hugo. After that opera's scandal, Bertin turned increasingly to poetry; her collections won recognition from the Académie française, and Charles Gounod later set her poem 'Si la mort est le but' to music. She died in Paris in 1877.
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