On and behind the stage

Photo by Odile Motelet

Marie-Elise Boyer is a French pianist, répétiteur, vocal coach, and French diction coach whose work spans opera, art song, chamber music, and contemporary repertoire. She is a Faculty Vocal Coach at New England Conservatory in Boston, where she earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in Collaborative Piano in 2025.

Before moving to the United States, Boyer spent nine years working in German opera houses. She held répétiteur and French diction coaching appointments at Theater Kiel, Theater Bremen, and Staatstheater Nürnberg, and later returned to Staatstheater Nürnberg as a guest while also working at Staatsoper Hamburg and Landestheater Coburg. Her opera repertoire extends from Baroque through contemporary works and includes Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Richard Strauss, Bizet, Janáček, Britten, Berg, and Martinů. Alongside singer and ensemble preparation, she has performed production keyboard parts on fortepiano, tangent piano, harpsichord, celesta, glockenspiel, carillon, organ, and piano, both in the orchestra and on stage.

She received advanced répétiteur training at the National Opera Studio in London after earning a Master of Performance with Distinction in Répétiteur Studies and a Master of Music with Distinction in Piano Accompaniment from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In 2019, Cape Town Opera invited her to work with its Young Artist Programme. Her subsequent coaching activities have included the Neil Semer Vocal Institute in Italy, a Mozart recitative residency at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and vocal coaching work at New England Conservatory.

Native French, Boyer is fluent in English and German and has professional operatic working knowledge of Italian. She has coached French language and diction for productions at Theater Kiel, Theater Bremen, Staatstheater Nürnberg, and Staatsoper Hamburg.

Alongside her opera work, she is an active art-song and chamber-music pianist. With soprano Leah Gordon, she won First Prize at the 2018 Concorso Internazionale Elsa Respighi in Verona and was a finalist at the 2019 International Johannes Brahms Competition in Pörtschach. She also performs with her sister, mezzo-soprano Sophie Boyer, as Les Boyer Sisters, with programs that foreground women composers and French repertoire. A committed advocate for new music, she has collaborated with living composers and recorded newly composed songs on poems by Lucien Guérinel for the Polymnie label.