Lucile Grétry’s Le Mariage d'Antonio (1786) was one of the most important works in what became an efflorescence of French opera by women that began around 1770, reached its peak during the revolutionary decade, and finally subsided around 1820. This phenomenon of opera by women was as astonishing at the time as it is in retrospect. No arena in eighteenth-century French culture was more public than opera; it was the locus of cabals, intrigues, and eruptions of invective in print—some of which bec...