Thomas Le Colleter

Work on Poetic Text

A former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Thomas Le Colleter is a higher education literature professor and musician. Holding the agrégation in modern literature and a doctorate in comparative literature, he also holds three conservatory first prizes, in piano (CRR de Lyon, class of Hervé Billaut), piano accompaniment (CRR de Rueil-Malmaison, class of Angéline Pondepeyre), and Music History (CRR de Paris, class of Corinne Schneider).

A specialist in the relationships between music and poetry, he is the author of a doctoral thesis in comparative literature defended at the Université Paris-Sorbonne, devoted to the influence of music in the work of three major poets of the last century: Federico García Lorca, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Giorgio Caproni. The work was published in 2019 by Classiques Garnier under the title La matière ensorcelée. His academic research focuses more broadly on the connections between music and literature in the European sphere during the 19th and 20th centuries. He has authored around fifteen scholarly articles, published in various journals (Europe, Comparatismes en Sorbonne, etc.) and volumes, the most recent of which, Beethoven l’Européen, was published in 2023. His work focuses in particular on representations of composers (Monteverdi, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Ravel, Berg), as well as flamenco, in 20th-century French, Italian, and Spanish poetry. He regularly participates in musico-literary conferences at various French universities.

Furthermore, around ten years of regularly accompanying singers at the piano gradually led him to study lyrical singing, first at the CRR de Boulogne-Billancourt in the class of Blandine de Saint-Sauveur, then at the Conservatoire du 11th arrondissement of Paris (class of Julie Hassler). His passion for baroque music prompted him to deepen his knowledge of this repertoire, benefiting in particular from the guidance of Andreas Scholl, Gérard Lesne, Nicole Rouillé, and Maarten Koeningsberger during masterclasses. As a singer, he has performed as a soloist and chorister with various ensembles (Sagittarius, Bach Collegium Paris, Ensemble Sequentiæ, Ensemble Poséidon…) under the direction of, among others, Michel Laplénie, Christophe Coin, Patrizia Metzler, and Mathieu Bonnin. Between 2016 and 2022, he sang regularly with the Amsterdam Baroque Choir under the direction of Ton Koopman, which brought him to perform across Europe and around the world (Konzerthaus in Vienna, Warsaw Philharmonic, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, Forbidden City in Beijing, Shanghai Symphony Hall…), in a repertoire centered primarily on J.S. Bach (Cantatas, Motets, Passions, Mass in B minor…).
On a daily basis, he teaches literature and philosophy in literary and scientific preparatory classes at the Lycée Marcelin Berthelot (Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, Val-de-Marne), and has been leading a music culture workshop at Sciences Po Paris for over ten years, this year devoted to the question of narration and representation in Western art music, from Monteverdi to Boulez (17th–20th centuries).

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