Pirrhus was the first opera by Pancrace Royer to be performed at the Académie royale de musique (the Paris Opéra), and his only tragédie en musique. The work tells the story, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, of the love between Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, and his Trojan prisoner, Polyxène, daughter of King Priam. In 1730, Royer was still at the beginning of a career that was to prove brilliant, not only as a composer of operatic works and harpsichord music, but also as a renowned teacher and director of the Concert Spirituel. Despite the composer’s youth and inexperience in the operatic field, Pirrhus enjoyed a dazzling performance, with the company’s finest singers and new sets created especially for the show. It was not a success, however, unlike the composer’s later heroic ballets, Zaïde (1739) and Le Pouvoir de l'Amour (1743). This failure was generally attributed to the weakness of the libretto, apparently written by an author then unknown to the public: Fermelhuis. Pirrhus, composed three years before Rameau’s first opera Hippolyte et Aricie (1733), is a fascinating blend of styles, combining conservative and innovative elements, including certain characteristics of harmony, orchestration and musical gesture generally associated with Rameau.

Lisa Goode Crawford is Professor Emerita of Harpsichord at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (USA), where she has contributed greatly to the development of the internationally renowned Early Music Department. She has already published Royer’s Pièces de clavecin in the Le Pupitre collection (Heugel), and has also recorded them for the Gasparo label. In 2002, she produced and directed Le Pouvoir de l'Amour at Oberlin, in collaboration with the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles and the New York Baroque Dance Company, and in 2006 published the critical edition of this ballet-héroique in the same collection. In 2012, she co-directed Pancrace Royer’s tragédie lyrique Pirrhus with Michael Greenberg, in a concert version at the Château de Versailles with the ensemble Les Enfants d'Apollon, from which the recording released by Alpha in 2014 emerged. She pursues her career as a harpsichordist - as a soloist and with ensembles in the USA and Europe - as a teacher and as a member of international juries.