Mademoiselle Beaumesnil

Henriette Adélaïde Villard or Henriette-Adélaïde de Villars, known under the stage name of Mlle Beaumesnil (30 August 1748 – 5 October 1813), was a French opera singer and composer.

When the latter left the company in 1778, however, Rosalie Levasseur was preferred and Beaumesnil protested publicly in a letter to the Journal de Paris on 27 December[3] to the effect that she had suffered an act of injustice.

She gave rise to a bitter quarrel, also managing to get some sort of compensation by being entrusted the female lead in Gluck's unsuccessful last opera Echo et Narcisse in September 1779, and did not carry out her threat to resign until 1781, when she finally left the stage.

[6] The two women firmly refused the mediation efforts of the conductor of the Paris Opera orchestra Jean-Baptiste Rey who had turned up at the scene of the duel.

In 1784, however, she set again to music the libretto[9] of the third entrée of Colin de Blamont's Les festes grecques et romaines, under the title of Tibulle et Délie, and her composition was successfully given at the Paris Opera to serve as a companion piece for Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide on 15 March 1784.