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Daphnis, First of a Kind Elizabeth Dyer On a cold March morning in 2006, I entered the gravel courtyard of the University of Liège in southern Belgium in search of the music-dramas performed by the Jesuit College of Liège from 1555 to 1773. The Jesuits are a religious order founded in Rome in 1540, suppressed by Papal order in 1773, re-instated in 1814 and active to the present day. Developing during the sixteenth century into one of the chief educational arms of the Roman Catholic Church, the Jesuits established over seven hundred colleges and seminaries in Europe, Asia and the New World. Their schools charged no tuition and were open to the entire male social strata, offering instruction in music and dance in addition to theology, philosophy and classical literature. The first Jesuit dramatic performance took place in Messina, Italy in 1551. These productions were widespread by 1555, and by 1625 the Jesuit dramatic tradition was well-established with distinctive performance conventions. ‘Où sont les archives de Jésuites?’ I asked a passing student. With a smile for my accent, she pointed out a faded red door. Inside, rows of bookcases stood two stories high. Searching volume after volume, I found many programmes and libretti, but no music. In a corner stood a small locked case, and on my last afternoon I asked if I might search there, though I had previously been informed the case held no relevant documents. Permission readily granted, I unlocked the case and began pulling each volume off the shelf in turn. Shoved behind the last few books on the second shelf was a nondescript white-covered folio. Expecting yet more printed sermons, I opened the book at random... and saw handwritten music for a 1728 Jesuit drama entitled Daphnis, Pastorale. I photographed the entire volume in the waning afternoon light, thanked the archivist and ran to catch my train. Poring over the photographs at home, my excitement increased. Here lay high-quality music for a type of Jesuit drama I had not yet encountered. Daphnis, by an unknown composer (his name excised from the dedication page with a knife), is a medieval play adopted by the Namur Jesuit College, who preserved its original Central Walloon dialect in their annual performances. The Jesuit College of Namur performed this Daphnis on 19 May, 1728, to honour Thomas John Francis Strickland, an English Dominican priest recently appointed Bishop of Namur. The Namur Jesuit College sent as a gift a clean copy of the music manuscript to the English Jesuit College, who had recently taken refuge in the Jesuit College of Liège after fleeing an uprising in the northern Belgian town of Brugge. Their flight, similar to that in The Sound of Music, happened as the masters for each form took their boys for a walk – and simply continued walking until they reached Liège. The slender plot of the pastorale is a mythological explanation for and spring celebration of the annual breaking up of the river-ice and the subsequent return of prosperity to Namur. As the manuscript contains only instrumental and vocal music; the staging, scenery, performance practice, musical ornaments, supporting mute characters, costumes, etc. were by necessity derived from the libretto, in addition to detailed research of the performance practice of Belgian Jesuit colleges and contemporary Baroque French ballets and pastorales. One particular challenge was that, although the entire story concerns the imminent arrival of Daphnis, Daphnis himself does not appear in the manuscript. The programmes for other Daphnis productions revealed that a ballet typically concluded the performance, and therefore it was plausible that, following the choral finale in the manuscript, Daphnis entered and lead a ballet with instrumental music from the pastorale, a supposition supported by textual clues. However, many factors precluded creating, choreographing and performing a full ballet. Instead, I studied the ballets of other Daphnis performances and created a pageant in which Daphnis arrives onstage, receives his crown of wisdom from Minerva and Apollo, is re-united with the Nymphe, and presents his crown of wisdom to the Lord of Namur, followed by the final triumphant chorus. The symbolism implied in the libretto is thus performed in the pageant. At the time of writing, I have identified 5,526 of these forgotten works. The performance of Daphnis, made possible by grants from the Society of Theatre Research and the University of York, at the University of York on 27 November, 2008, was not only its first in nearly three hundred years, but also the first modern performance of a Jesuit drama.