By Andrew Clark [Financial Times, 2 March 2010]

She was learned and sexually liberated, a product of the 18th century but a role model for our time - “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”, according to Voltaire, her sometime lover. History has tended to place Emilie du Châtelet (1706-49) in Voltaire’s shadow, but she stole the limelight at Monday’s premiere of a new opera by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.