Based on a novel by Claude Gritti, Les enfants de l’île du Levant, which was published in 1999, Isabelle Aboulker and Christian Eymery, the associate director of the CREA in Aulnay-sous-bois, have written an opera telling the little-known tale of a penal farming colony made up of minors. In 1850, an act stating that abandoned children, orphans and junior delinquents could be sent to agricultural penal colonies was passed. In 1861, sixty of them – the youngest of whom were not even 6 – left Roquette Prison in Paris to join a farming penal colony in Sainte- Anne on Ile du Levant. On the morning of 18th February, these children set off on foot, walking all the way to Toulon, before being taken on board a ship for the Ile du Levant, where the hell of a penal colony was awaiting them. Some died there, others managed to escape. This prison was to be closed in 1878 on the orders of the Ministry of the Interior, after the death of the Comte de Pourtalès, its owner. This is the tale that Les enfants du Levant brings back to life, in a score that is both gentle and melancholic, with clear, children’s voices, tinged with the clicking of crickets, and the sound of waves. It is a terrifying testimony to the condition of these children, which ended only in 1934, after a press campaign had unveiled and denounced how such colonies operated, gradually leading to their closure… This work will be embodied by the Children’s Choir of the Opéra de Lyon, a choir and singing school open to children from the age of 7.

Opera for children, 2001
Libretto by Chrisitian Eymery