Rémy-Michel Trotier was born in 1970 in France. He graduated in 1993 from the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures and specialised in city planning. From 1995 on he designed and administered information systems for the Bureau d’Information et de Prévision Économique. At the same time, he studied music through singing and composition. Since 2000, with the Académie Desprez, Association Française pour le Rayonnement du Théâtre du Château de Drottningholm et du Musée Suédois du Théâtre, he has been exploring XVII^th and XVIII^th century opera. He graduated in 2006 from the Sorbonne with a Master’s dedicated to Voltaire and Rameau’s Samson. His research focuses on French declamation before 1800.

After a cycle of French melodies, Rémy-Michel Trotier composed several musical works using baroque repertoire as a reference for conception and instrumentation. In 1993, he set in music Rilke’s L’Attente au Bord de l’Aujourd’hui for counter-tenor, clarinet, viola da gamba and organ; this cantata was performed in Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpetrière in Paris. In 1995, he realised vocal cadenzas for a production of Haendel’s Alcina at Operastudion in Stockholm. He designed in 1998, for the Gardens of Kleve in Germany, music based on Ovid’s Metamorphosis. In 1999, his composition for piano and electronics, Des Mirages, was first produced during the summer academy directed by Michael Jarrell and Jacopo Baboni Schilingi in Szombathely (Hungary). More recently, he studied harmony and composition with Stéphane Delplace in Paris.

In 1999, Rémy-Michel Trotier took part in the foundation of the Académie Desprez where he set up the musical studies programme. In Drottningholm, he studied with particular attention the wind and thunder machineries and made an inventory of their sounds. In 2001, at the State Opera of Prague, as musical assistant for Gilbert Blin’s new production of Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso, he worked on the dramaturgical relation between space and music and laid out an authentic sound environment integrating Drottningholms Slottsteater’s recorded machineries. In 2003 he composed an electronic piece, La Machine des Orages, combining these sounds to those of the glassharmonica of Thomas Bloch – a piece broadcast by Swedish Radio.

In the Académie Desprez, under the direction of Gilbert Blin, Rémy-Michel Trotier conducted research related to XVII^th and XVIII^th theatre and opera. For the Boston Early Music Festival’s 2001 production of Lully’s Thésée, conducted by Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, he edited and translated Quinault’s libretto and was the pronunciation and declamation coach. Soon after, Rémy-Michel Trotier reconstructed Voltaire’s tragic theatre declamation for University of Leiden’s symposium The Leiden Theatre Perspective.  

In 2002 and 2003, he closely studied scenic decoration and worked on stage perspective in the XVIII^th century. For the Sveriges Teatermuseum he made an inventory of iconographic sources related to the Bibiena. The works of these italian decorators permitted him to draw the preliminary frame of stylistic reference to the stage design of Vivaldi’s Rosmira fedele, produced in 2003 at the Opéra de Nice by conductor Gilbert Bezzina and stage director Gilbert Blin. In 2006, for Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Prag Estates Theatre, Rémy-Michel Trotier was consultant for the reconstitution of the original sets ; he worked in the same field in 2007 for Haendel’s Teseo in Opéra de Nice.

For the Académie Desprez, Rémy-Michel Trotier has led a long-term reflection on the use of original sources by modern critics. In 2004, he implemented for the Académie Desprez’ research group a bibliographical database: la Base bibliographique partagée, based on a process using the Internet to share references. More recently, he also collaborated with the I.R.P.M.F. (Institut de recherche sur le patrimoine musical en France) on the project directed by Anne Piéjus of a database “Vie musicale et spectacles dans le Mercure galant”. Currently, Rémy-Michel Trotier is developing a software program – Paroles & Musique – allowing statistical analyses and documented comparisons between opera librettos and scores from the XVIII^th century.

Since 2004, in the Académie Desprez, Rémy-Michel Trotier is director of the livrets collection, which proposes facsimile editions of opera librettos, presented with a foreword that examines the context of the work. In this collection he himself presented Voltaire and Rameau’s Samson, establishing a new chronology in the writing of this opera. At the Sorbonne, Rémy-Michel Trotier is working under the direction of Dr. Raphaëlle Legrand on the dramatic works of Rameau. His current research is devoted to defining a model of XVIII^th century declamation.