The Paris Opera has staged iconic works like “Don Carlos” and “Les Troyens,” along with celebrated ballets such as “Les Indes Galantes” and “The Rite of Spring.”

But you’d be forgiven for not having heard of Antonia Bembo, whose 1707 opera “Ercole Amante” – “Hercules in Love” – will be staged at Paris’ Opéra Bastille for the first time on May 28, 2026. Born around 1640, Bembo and her opera remained obscure for centuries, due to the vagaries of her music manuscripts and the historical neglect of women composers.

I have been studying Bembo since 1990. At the time, scholars knew nothing about her life; she had merely been a name on the title pages to her music manuscripts. Once I confirmed that she was not born into, but had married into, the patrician Bembo family, I was able to not only identify her, but also tell her story in my 2006 biography, “Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo.”

Until recently, interest in Bembo and her music had been relatively modest, her name one among many historical women composers. A European premiere devoted to her work marks a major step forward.

Escape from Venice

Bembo’s obscurity was partly of her own making.

Trained as a musician in Venice, she fled from an abusive husband and settled in Paris in 1677. There, she sang before Louis XIV, who provided the means for her to live in a women’s residential community near the newly constructed Porte Saint-Denis, a triumphal arch along the Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle.

She wrote music by hand and gifted it to the king to thank him for his generosity, producing numerous cantatas, arias, celebratory motets and dramatic works. Nevertheless, she must have lived in constant fear of being found in Paris by her husband: Only when he died in 1703 did she feel free to assemble her manuscripts into finished, presentable volumes.

By the time of her death around 1720, she’d bound eight volumes of works. Four have lain in France’s National Library for centuries, two have been lost, and the two containing “Ercole Amante” were acquired at auction by the Music Department at the National Library in 1937. That same year, musicologist Yvonne Rokseth published an article in The Musical Quarterly in which she wrote about the contents of the opera, as well as the compositions in Bembo’s other volumes.

I was a graduate student at Duke University in search of a dissertation topic in 1990 when I came across Rokseth’s article. It was the first time I had heard Bembo’s name. I obtained the microfilms of Bembo’s music, and my adviser gave me the go-ahead to pursue a study of her life and works.

For months I searched for documents mentioning the composer at the Paris National Archives and came up empty-handed. During a short trip to Venice in 1991, I found a book of names of women who married into noble families. From its contents, I posited that she had been born Antonia Padoani and had married into the Bembo family. The following year, I had a breakthrough: I found an envelope of documents at the State Archives of Venice that revealed she had left most of her belongings at the Convent of San Bernardo in Murano. She’d also left her 14-year-old daughter, Diana, at the convent in order to protect her from her father.

With these hints, I was able to find more information about Bembo’s life in documents located at the Patriarchal Archive, the Correr Museum and the Marciana Library in Venice.

Over time, I was able to flesh out enough details from Bembo’s life and works to write my biography.

A life comes into focus

The only child of medical doctor and amateur poet Giacomo Padoani and his wife, Diana Paresco, Antonia Padoani received an education in music and grammar in Venice.

Giacomo Padoani arranged to have Francesco Cavalli, the foremost Venetian composer of the day, teach his daughter.

Famously, Cavalli had been called to Paris in 1660 to write an opera for the wedding of Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta, María Teresa. That opera, “Ercole Amante,” was based on a libretto, or script, by Francesco Buti.

Giacomo Padoani’s Venetian contemporary, poet Giulio Strozzi, also hired Cavalli to teach his daughter, Barbara. But whereas Barbara would go on to publish a series of her compositions, Antonia took a different path that likely disappointed her father. Instead of pursuing a career as a musician or a poet, she married Lorenzo Bembo. He gave her noble status and three children, but it came with a great deal of trouble.

In 1672, Antonia Bembo – then living in the back part of a house known as Cà Bembo in the neighborhood of Santa Maria Nova – sued for divorce, citing Lorenzo’s infidelity along with mental and physical abuse. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, so five years later, she slipped out of town to start her new life in Paris, leaving her husband and children behind.

In 1707, Bembo completed her composition of a new musical score for Buti’s opera libretto. Like Cavalli’s opera, it follows Hercules, who becomes obsessed with Iole, the daughter of a man he has killed. Iole happens to also be in a relationship with Hercules’ son, and Hercules’ pursuit ends up setting off a chain of rivalries among gods and mortals.

In some ways, Bembo improved upon Cavalli’s original opera. A story about an aging Hercules in the 1700s better coincided with Louis XIV’s life arc than when Cavalli had composed the opera for the 22-year-old king’s wedding. And whereas the French public had objected to the Italian language Cavalli used in his opera, Bembo’s union of Italian and French musical styles – reflecting what she had heard and learned in Venice and Paris – made it more accessible.

The time has come

So why is Bembo’s opera only reaching the stage in 2026?

First, her handwritten score was difficult to decipher. Unlike Barbara Strozzi’s scores, which were printed and published during her lifetime, Bembo’s manuscripts have presented challenges for performers. The Opéra de Paris created a performance score of “Ercole Amante” by employing an editorial team that corrected mistakes and rectified inconsistencies.

Second, women composers of early music operas – traditionally excluded from the operatic canon – have only recently started having their works staged. In 2023, for example, “Céphale et Procris,” an opera written by Bembo’s French contemporary Élisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre, along with Francesca Caccini’s “Alcina,” were performed at the Boston Early Music Festival.

With a star-studded cast and a large Baroque orchestra under the baton of Leonardo García-Alarcón, the staging of Bembo’s manuscript, which has lain dormant for centuries, is an occasion to rejoice.

Now, Bembo’s operatic masterpiece can claim its place alongside the legacy of her teacher, Francesco Cavalli. It also places her alongside Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier and Michel-Richard de Lalande as one of Louis XIV’s “artisans of glory” – the group of artists, architects, composers and performers who helped construct the image of the “Sun King” as a divinely ordained monarch.

Claire Fontijn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

For many dads, talking with their teenager about sex and relationships can feel like a minefield.

Popular culture doesn’t provide many good examples of how to have these conversations, and many fathers didn’t have these conversations at all with their own fathers.

For instance, in a 2021 study from Australia, 65% of fathers reported inviting their children to talk with them about sexuality, while less than 30% reported that their own fathers talked with them about it – a jump of 35% in one generation. This finding aligns with my own U.S.-based work, which finds a similar generational discrepancy.

This huge cultural shift is fascinating to me as a research scientist who studies adolescent development, sexual health and risk-taking, and family communication about sexuality and relationships. I’m a research scientist. In recent years I have delved into the role that fathers play, why that’s important, and what fathers need to support their teens’ sexual health.

Generational differences

Compared to fathers from the 1980s, current fathers are more actively involved in raising their children and see their parenting role as a meaningful one beyond serving as a financial provider. A 2026 paper from the American Institute for Boys and Men found that since the pandemic, college-educated dads have increased their time doing housework and childcare by over four hours a week.

Research shows these changes can make a difference. When parents work together to parent their children, children show stronger attachment to their parents and improved capacity to manage their emotions. This also applies to divorced parents, whose children show fewer mental health problems when their parents cooperate with each other.

Benefits for both fathers and teens

Fathers’ increased involvement in parenting extends to talking with their teens about sex and relationships, and research shows that both fathers and teens see benefits to this.

Fathers see it as key to supporting their teens’ healthy development, while teens value their fathers’ perspectives and experiences. While many fathers worry that their daughters don’t want to talk with them about sex and relationships, research shows that daughters want to hear from their fathers about these topics.

Sometimes the role that fathers play in talking about sex and relationships shows up in how they work together with their spouse. Collaboration in parenting extends to talking with their teens about sex and relationships. In a qualitative study of fathers with adolescent children, over 75% of participants described talking with their teen’s mother about sex and relationships. This often involved strategizing about how to talk with their adolescent about sexual issues or updating each other as to what they learned about their adolescent.

Beyond the general benefits of connecting with their kids, father-teen conversations about sex and relationships can protect teens from risky sexual behavior.

However, many fathers are unsure how to start these conversations, feel uncomfortable talking with their teens or don’t realize that their involvement matters. Compared to mothers, fathers have fewer resources to support these conversations, ranging from a lack of sex education programs to support fathers’ communication with their teens to less access to informal connections – such as moms’ often extensive text message chains – where they can discuss these topics.

Support for dads

Only a few programs specifically support fathers to talk with their teens about sex and relationships. These programs integrate feedback from fathers on what kinds of help they want and need to support talking with their teens about sexual topics. This includes tips for how to approach the topic with teens as well as opportunities to talk with other fathers.

For example, The REAL Men program is an in-person group intervention that provides fathers with sexual health information, guidance on how to talk with their teens about sex, and take-home activities to do with their teens. Another program for fathers, called IMARA – short for informed, motivated, aware and responsible about AIDS – was adapted from an HIV prevention program for mothers and daughters.

I lead a team that developed an online program called Connected Dads, Healthy Teens. It includes sexual health information, skill-building and practice talking with teens, as well as a peer support group for fathers to share tips, experiences and challenges in talking with their kids about sex and relationships.

Fathers and teens who participated in this program showed improvements in sexual health knowledge and confidence in and frequency of sexual health communication. These programs can help provide fathers with tools and confidence to talk with their teens in healthy ways about sex and relationships.

Communication from parents is most likely to lead to healthy teens when parents are knowledgeable, comfortable, trustworthy and responsive to their teens.

Similarly, teens prefer to talk with parents about sex when they see them as understanding, open and easy to talk to. As these findings suggest, many of the effective and engaging approaches fathers can use to talk with their teens about sex overlap with skills fathers already use to talk with their teens about other topics.

Listen first

So, when opportunity presents itself, take time to listen to your teen’s perspective before telling them your own, and try to restrain yourself from judging your teen for their relationship choices.

These approaches can help teens feel heard, validated and connected and make it more likely they will come to you when they have questions or concerns in the future.

And while it’s important to stay in the game and talk with your teen about sex and relationships, think about other trusted adults in your teen’s life who can join the conversation. Other people, such as grandparents, aunts and uncles, older siblings, coaches and religious leaders, can be supportive resources for talking with teens about these issues.

If you think you may not be the best person to talk with your teen about a specific topic, such as getting their period or a conflict in a dating relationship, consider reaching out to another person whom your teen feels comfortable with and providing background support for their conversations. This can help you stay engaged and be an active participant in promoting your teen’s health.

Though dads play an important role, it’s not all on them – or on any single person – to be there for their teen. The more supportive connections teens have in their families, schools and communities, the healthier they are.

Jennifer M. Grossman receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts.