 Specializing in French Baroque opera, Opera Lafayette was founded in Washington's Capitol Hill neighborhood in 1994 by Ryan Brown as the Violins of Lafayette, named after the Marquis de Lafayette.It adopted its current name during 2001 and, in 2005, released its first recording on the Naxos label, Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Orphée et Euridice".In 2012, Opera Lafayette staged its first international performance, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny's "Le roi et le fermier" ("The King and the Farmer"); this "forgotten" Monsigny work was performed at the Royal Opera of Versailles using recently discovered backdrops from a 1780 staging of the opera.