Le Pelletier, Charlotte, 1778-1855

Charlotte Le Pelletier was born sometime in 1778 in Perrigny, France to Charles Leon de Taillevis, Marquis of Perrigny, and Anne Marie Madeleine de La Tuste. Her parents died during the Reign of Terror. She married Victor Le Pelletier in 1797 and together they had a son, also named Victor. The couple moved to Saint-Domingue in 1801 because the Perrigny family owned plantations worked by enslaved people there, but the Haitian Revolution had already begun at that time. Charlotte’s husband was killed at Torbeck in 1803 while serving in the French National Guard. The death of her husband spurred her to flee with her son and her brother, Abbe George Taillevis de Perrigny to Baltimore, Maryland. In January of 1810, Charlotte began publishing a “Journal of Musick” under the name Madame le Pelletier. It was a subscription journal that consisted of thirty-one different musical works that were sent to her subscribers one to three pieces each month. The entire collection was later gathered together and sold in a single volume. She had planned on publishing a second series of the Journal, but it was never published. The works within her Journal were mostly French or Italian compositions that were not available in America, including some taken from the French “opera comique.” Also within the Journal were two of Charlotte Le Pelletier’s own compositions, to include her Fatasie sur un Air Russe for the pianoforte, which may be the earliest American piece of theme and variation music composed by a woman. Sometime before 1816, however, Madame le Pelletier returned to France. She died in Blois in 1855.