Virginia Woolf, in her essay “The Lives of the Obscure,” savors the potential fascination of studying authors whom posterity has solid apart: “One likes romantically to really feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights throughout the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost—a Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert—ready, interesting, forgotten, within the rising gloom. Presumably they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Previous secrets and techniques properly as much as their lips. The divine aid of communication will quickly once more be theirs.”
Related emotions are stirred by the huge catalogue of the Bru Zane label, which, since 2009, has recorded no fewer than forty-four French-language operas from the prolonged Romantic period, lots of them as obscure as Laetitia Pilkington. Nowhere else will you discover Victorin de Joncières’s “Dimitri,” Louise Bertin’s “Fausto,” or Benjamin Godard’s “Dante.” You might know Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet, however you most likely haven’t heard their operas “Cinq-Mars,” “Le Timbre d’Argent,” and “Le Mage.” The volumes within the label’s “Portraits” sequence spotlight such liminal figures as Théodore Dubois and Max d’Ollone. The phrase “quantity” is suitable: most releases are geared up with deluxe hardback books working greater than 100 pages. In latest months, I’ve been wandering within the Bru Zane catacombs, the place the shuffling of the obscure turns into a stampede.
The label is an element of a bigger group known as Palazzetto Bru Zane–Centre de Musique Romantique Française, which researches, data, publishes, and promotes French music from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. The enterprise is funded by the heirs of the pharmaceutical pioneer Camille Bru, who invented the bubbling pill, and has its headquarters, curiously, within the On line casino Zane, in Venice. The enterprise has an obsessive, devotional facet. In an essay on Saint-Saëns’s “Phryné,” a diaphanous comedy about an ancient-Greek courtesan, Alexandre Dratwicki, Bru Zane’s creative director, speaks of “eradicating the veils of oblivion”; that phrase could possibly be hooked up to many of the label’s tasks, which lay siege to the idea of a hard and fast repertory of masterpieces.
French opera is at all times in want of an additional push, because it lacks the worldwide glamour of its Italian and German counterparts. Solely three French titles—Bizet’s “Carmen” and Gounod’s “Faust” and “Roméo et Juliette”—seem among the many Met’s twenty-five most carried out works. The post-Baroque French repertory has no towering titan on the order of Verdi in Italian opera, Wagner in German opera, or Mozart in each spheres. (Bizet might need turn into such a colossus had he not died at thirty-six.) On the similar time, the dearth of a middle of gravity encourages the sort of deeper excavation that Bru Zane has undertaken. Hundreds of operas had been produced in Paris throughout the lengthy nineteenth century, and it defies motive that solely a handful ought to thrive.
The posh of listening to recordings is that an opera needn’t have a decipherable plot or a believable setting to present pleasure. Within the case of Félicien David’s Pompeian spectacle “Herculanum,” for instance, you’ll be able to benefit from the high-Romantic hurly-burly of the music with out worrying about how any of it must be staged:
Massenet’s “Ariane,” a luxurious tackle Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur, appears nearly designed to be heard and skim quite than seen. The libretto, by Catulle Mendès, describes the underworld as “far-reaching, fuliginous, monumental, desolate, melancholy, catastrophic.”
Amongst Bru Zane’s unearthed scores, none could also be as traditionally vital as Bertin’s “Fausto,” which obtained three performances on the Théâtre Italien in 1831 after which vanished. Bertin got here from a outstanding household; her father, Louis-François, edited the broadly learn Journal des Débats. Stricken at an early age with polio, Bertin studied with Antonin Reicha, who additionally taught Berlioz, and by the age of twenty-one she had launched into her adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust,” many years upfront of Gounod. The opera was properly obtained, regardless of sexist feedback within the press, and Bertin went on to put in writing “La Esmeralda,” an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s “Notre-Dame de Paris,” with a libretto by Hugo himself. This work set off a basic Parisian opera riot, with audiences accusing Bertin of benefitting from her father’s affect. Alexandre Dumas was heard to yell, “It’s by Berlioz!”—to the misery of the latter, who admired Bertin’s expertise. She lived one other forty years however wrote little extra of consequence.
“Fausto” is notable for its blazing vitality, its jolting modulations, its seductive and spooky orchestration, its dramatic urgency. The finale of Act I, with lightning-strike fortissimo chords and cries of “Papè Devil!,” suffices to elucidate why Berlioz noticed Bertin as a kindred spirit. Arguably, “Fausto” has extra of an genuine Faustian tinge than Gounod’s remedy of the identical materials, though Bertin can’t match Gounod’s chart-topping tunes. If inspiration fades considerably within the opera’s later sections, Bru Zane’s performers, underneath the route of Christophe Rousset, sway the listener with their hearth and finesse. Because it occurs, Rousset additionally leads a Bru Zane recording of the long-unheard unique model of Gounod’s “Faust,” from 1859; there, grand-opera trappings give method to a extra agile, playful aesthetic, a lot to the rating’s profit.
A shocking variety of feminine composers had been in a position to make their method in France throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modern orchestras present rising curiosity within the symphonies of Louise Farrenc, the tone poems of Augusta Holmès, and the choral works of Lili Boulanger. These three and eighteen others seem on a nine-disk Bru Zane compilation titled “Compositrices.” One quantity within the “Portraits” sequence is given over to Marie Jaëll (1846-1925), who gained discover as a hyper-virtuosic pupil of Liszt and went on to forge her personal idiosyncratic character. The pianist David Bismuth samples a cycle of eighteen piano items after Dante, from 1894; “Appel,” from the “Inferno” part, is an eerie research in dissonant minimalism. In contrast, Charlotte Sohy (1887-1955) shows a nuanced mastery of conventional varieties. Her pensive, probing Symphony in C-Sharp Minor had by no means been carried out till the conductor Debora Waldman took it up and recorded it for Bru Zane.
Essentially the most charming of the obscure males is Baron Fernand de La Tombelle (1854-1928), a gentleman polymath who not solely composed and performed the organ but in addition wrote Alexandrines, sculpted, painted, spoke Occitan, took three-hundred-mile bicycle journeys, made astronomical observations, and accompanied people dancers on a hurdy-gurdy. He lived in a gorgeously adorned sixteenth-century château within the Périgord Noir, whose pâtés he chronicled in a brief treatise. Amid all that, he wrote music of beautiful craftsmanship, typically imitative, typically quietly unique. In his Piano Quartet, he builds a fancy cyclic construction out of archaic-sounding themes that appear to have wafted in from mist-covered fields.
When Bru Zane isn’t reclaiming forgotten composers, it units about revamping acquainted ones. Saint-Saëns, whose monumental output has been diminished to some hits (“Samson and Delilah,” the “Organ” Symphony, “Carnival of the Animals”), is the main beneficiary of this mission. Bru Zane has to this point traversed six of his operas, with a seventh, “L’Ancêtre,” arriving in September. Saint-Saëns lengthy had the status of being too skilled for his personal good, spinning emptily elegant spiderwebs of notes. However he may command grand historic canvases—most notably in “Henry VIII” and the Benvenuto Cellini epic “Ascanio”—whereas additionally concocting intricate fables similar to “Le Timbre d’Argent,” by which a ravenous painter positive factors wealth and kills one other soul every time he rings a silver bell. This was Saint-Saëns’s first opera, and the stressed brilliance of its invention cries out for extra consideration.
Listening to all the Bru Zane catalogue—upward of 2 hundred hours of music—is likely to be a slog if the label didn’t have a deep bench of expert performers on name. Such conductors as Hervé Niquet, György Vashegyi, Marc Minkowski, and Rousset elicit very important performances from the orchestras of Liège, Brussels, Montpellier, Budapest, Munich, and Monte Carlo, amongst others. Véronique Gens, Judith van Wanroij, Karina Gauvin, and Karine Deshayes flesh out numerous endangered heroines. (Deshayes can be dashing within the function of Fausto, which Bertin wrote for a boyish mezzo-soprano.) A couple of of the regulars put on out their welcome; in a usually electrical account of Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable,” the bass Nicolas Courjal saps pleasure with a fuzzy-voiced, insufficiently sinister flip as Bertram. However there are not any true duds within the bunch.
For me, the M.V.P. of the Bru Zane group is the tenor Cyrille Dubois, an impeccable purveyor of Gallic fashion. In a large swath of repertory—Antonio Sacchini’s Mozartean “Renaud,” Reynaldo Hahn’s neo-Baroque operetta “L’Île du Rêve,” Édouard Lalo’s post-Wagnerian “Le Roi d’Ys,” gemlike songs by Clémence de Grandval and Rita Strohl—Dubois maintains a silver-toned lyric line whereas enunciating the phrases with fastidious readability and activating their inside feelings. A singer like Dubois has the facility to name into query all the hierarchy of genius and mediocrity on which the notion of a restricted repertory relies upon. We’d like nice performances of lesser works greater than we want lesser performances of nice ones. ♦
