In 2023, Opéra Royal, purveyor at Versailles of concerts and spectacles fit for the roi soleil, launched a partnership with the French Centre des Monuments Nationaux to present vocal and instrumental music at Le Thoronet in Provence, a 12th-century Cistercian abbey whose pure spatial harmony has inspired modern architects from Le Corbusier to Tadao Ando. Like the fat-cat Benedictines, from whom they split off, the “White Monk” Cistercians in their paupers’ undyed sheep’s wool followed a practice of work and prayer (“Ora et labora”!), but in radically stricter form, and their unadorned variant of monophonic Gregorian chant was radically stricter, too. Would the monks of old have approved or indeed permitted an evening’s potpourri by rediscovered “prima donna” composers of the 17th to early-19th century, working mainly in a gallant pastoral vein? Don’t ask. For period-music connoisseurs of a feminist bent, the household names here are Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, a favorite of Louis XIV since her debut at Versailles at the age of five, and Frederick the Great’s talented sister Wilhelmine of Bayreuth (who built her Baroque UNESCO World Heritage opera house well over a century before Wagner came scouting locations for his revolutionary Festspielhaus). But have you a prior acquaintance with Mesdemoiselles Duval and Laurent, Madame Papavoine, Guesdon de Presle, or Maddalena Laura Sirmen? Here’s your chance. —Matthew Gurewitsch