BONAPARTE, Marie Julie

Marie Julie Clary, historically known as Julie Bonaparte, was a French queen consort and amateur composer who lived from 1771 to 1845. While certain historical music catalogs associate her with a narrower window of active publication or documentation between 1798 and 1820, she is most widely recognized as the wife of Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Through her marriage, she attained the titles of Queen of Naples and Queen of Spain. However, she deeply preferred a quiet, private life at her estate in Mortefontaine and never actually set foot in Spain, which earned her the historical moniker of "the absent queen".
Beyond her imperial duties and political salon connections, she was an accomplished musician who engaged in composition. Her most notable surviving musical contribution is a collection of vocal works titled Sept Romances Composées & Dédiées à S. M. L'impératrice et reine (Seven Romances Composed and Dedicated to Her Majesty the Empress and Queen). These pieces showcased her command of the French romance, a popular, melodic genre favored in courtly circles during the First Empire. Following the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in 1815, she went into exile, living in Frankfurt and Brussels before spending her remaining decades in Florence, Italy.