There Is More to French Opera Than “Carmen” and “Faust”
Virginia Woolf, in her essay “The Lives of the Obscure,” savors the potential fascination of reading authors whom posterity has cast aside: “One likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded ghost—a Mrs. Pilkington, a Rev. Henry Elman, a Mrs. Ann Gilbert—waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Possibly they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old secrets well up to their lips. The divine relief of communication will soon again be theirs.”
Similar feelings are stirred by the vast catalogue of the Bru Zane label, which, since 2009, has recorded no fewer than forty-four French-language operas from the extended Romantic era, many of them as obscure as Laetitia Pilkington. Nowhere else will you find Victorin de Joncières’s “Dimitri,” Louise Bertin’s “Fausto,” or Benjamin Godard’s “Dante.” You may know Gounod, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet, but you probably haven’t heard their operas “Cinq-Mars,” “Le Timbre d’Argent,” and “Le Mage.” The volumes in the label’s “Portraits” series highlight such liminal figures as Théodore Dubois and Max d’Ollone. The word “volume” is appropriate: most releases are equipped with deluxe hardback books running more than a hundred pages. In recent months, I have been wandering in the Bru Zane catacombs, where the shuffling of the obscure becomes a stampede.
The label is part of a larger organization called Palazzetto Bru Zane–Centre de Musique Romantique Française, which researches, records, publishes, and promotes French music from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. The venture is funded by the heirs of the pharmaceutical pioneer Camille Bru, who invented the effervescent tablet, and has its headquarters, curiously, in the Casino Zane, in Venice. The enterprise has an obsessive, devotional aspect. In an essay on Saint-Saëns’s “Phryné,” a diaphanous comedy about an ancient-Greek courtesan, Alexandre Dratwicki, Bru Zane’s artistic director, speaks of “removing the veils of oblivion”; that phrase could be attached to most of the label’s projects, which lay siege to the concept of a fixed repertory of masterpieces.
French opera is always in need of an extra push, since it lacks the global glamour of its Italian and German counterparts. Only three French titles—Bizet’s “Carmen” and Gounod’s “Faust” and “Roméo et Juliette”—appear among the Met’s twenty-five most performed 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 both spheres. (Bizet might have become such a colossus had he not died at thirty-six.) At the same time, the lack of a center of gravity encourages the kind of deeper excavation that Bru Zane has undertaken. Thousands of operas were produced in Paris during the long nineteenth century, and it defies reason that only a handful should thrive.
The luxury of listening to recordings is that an opera need not have a decipherable plot or a plausible setting to give pleasure. In the case of Félicien David’s Pompeian spectacle “Herculanum,” for example, you can enjoy the high-Romantic hurly-burly of the music without worrying about how any of it should be staged:
Massenet’s “Ariane,” a sumptuous take on Ariadne, Theseus, and the Minotaur, seems almost designed to be heard and read rather than seen. The libretto, by Catulle Mendès, describes the underworld as “far-reaching, fuliginous, enormous, desolate, melancholy, catastrophic.”
Among Bru Zane’s unearthed scores, none may be as historically significant as Bertin’s “Fausto,” which received three performances at the Théâtre Italien in 1831 and then vanished. Bertin came from a prominent family; her father, Louis-François, edited the widely read Journal des Débats. Stricken at an early age with polio, Bertin studied with Antonin Reicha, who also taught Berlioz, and by the age of twenty-one she had embarked on her adaptation of Goethe’s “Faust,” decades in advance of Gounod. The opera was well received, despite sexist comments in the press, and Bertin went on to write “La Esmeralda,” an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s “Notre-Dame de Paris,” with a libretto by Hugo himself. This work set off a classic Parisian opera riot, with audiences accusing Bertin of benefitting from her father’s influence. Alexandre Dumas was heard to yell, “It’s by Berlioz!”—to the distress of the latter, who admired Bertin’s talent. She lived another forty years but wrote little more of consequence.
“Fausto” is notable for its blazing energy, 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 Satan!,” suffices to explain why Berlioz saw Bertin as a kindred spirit. Arguably, “Fausto” has more of an authentic Faustian tinge than Gounod’s treatment of the same material, although Bertin can’t match Gounod’s chart-topping tunes. If inspiration fades somewhat in the opera’s later sections, Bru Zane’s performers, under the direction of Christophe Rousset, sway the listener with their fire and finesse. As it happens, Rousset also leads a Bru Zane recording of the long-unheard original version of Gounod’s “Faust,” from 1859; there, grand-opera trappings give way to a more agile, playful aesthetic, much to the score’s benefit.
A surprising number of female composers were able to make their way in France during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Contemporary orchestras show increasing interest in the symphonies of Louise Farrenc, the tone poems of Augusta Holmès, and the choral works of Lili Boulanger. Those three and eighteen others appear on a nine-disk Bru Zane compilation titled “Compositrices.” One volume in the “Portraits” series is given over to Marie Jaëll (1846-1925), who won notice as a hyper-virtuosic pupil of Liszt and went on to forge her own idiosyncratic personality. The pianist David Bismuth samples a cycle of eighteen piano pieces after Dante, from 1894; “Appel,” from the “Inferno” section, is an eerie study in dissonant minimalism. By contrast, Charlotte Sohy (1887-1955) displays a nuanced mastery of traditional forms. Her pensive, probing Symphony in C-Sharp Minor had never been performed until the conductor Debora Waldman took it up and recorded it for Bru Zane.
The most charming of the obscure men is Baron Fernand de La Tombelle (1854-1928), a gentleman polymath who not only composed and played the organ but also wrote Alexandrines, sculpted, painted, spoke Occitan, took three-hundred-mile bicycle trips, made astronomical observations, and accompanied folk dancers on a hurdy-gurdy. He lived in a gorgeously decorated sixteenth-century château in the Périgord Noir, whose pâtés he chronicled in a short treatise. Amid all that, he wrote music of exquisite craftsmanship, sometimes imitative, sometimes quietly original. In his Piano Quartet, he builds a complex cyclic structure out of archaic-sounding themes that seem to have wafted in from mist-covered fields.
When Bru Zane isn’t reclaiming forgotten composers, it sets about revamping familiar ones. Saint-Saëns, whose enormous output has been reduced to a few hits (“Samson and Delilah,” the “Organ” Symphony, “Carnival of the Animals”), is the leading beneficiary of this mission. Bru Zane has so far traversed six of his operas, with a seventh, “L’Ancêtre,” arriving in September. Saint-Saëns long had the reputation of being too expert for his own good, spinning emptily elegant spiderwebs of notes. But he could command grand historical canvases—most notably in “Henry VIII” and the Benvenuto Cellini epic “Ascanio”—while also concocting intricate fables such as “Le Timbre d’Argent,” in which a starving painter gains wealth and kills another soul each time he rings a silver bell. This was Saint-Saëns’s first opera, and the restless brilliance of its invention cries out for more attention.
Listening to the entire Bru Zane catalogue—upward of two hundred hours of music—might be a slog if the label didn’t have a deep bench of skilled performers on call. Such conductors as Hervé Niquet, György Vashegyi, Marc Minkowski, and Rousset elicit vital performances from the orchestras of Liège, Brussels, Montpellier, Budapest, Munich, and Monte Carlo, among others. Véronique Gens, Judith van Wanroij, Karina Gauvin, and Karine Deshayes flesh out various endangered heroines. (Deshayes is also dashing in the role of Fausto, which Bertin wrote for a boyish mezzo-soprano.) A few of the regulars wear out their welcome; in a generally electric account of Meyerbeer’s “Robert le Diable,” the bass Nicolas Courjal saps excitement with a fuzzy-voiced, insufficiently sinister turn as Bertram. But there are no true duds in the bunch.
For me, the M.V.P. of the Bru Zane team is the tenor Cyrille Dubois, an impeccable purveyor of Gallic style. In a wide 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 while enunciating the words with fastidious clarity and activating their interior emotions. A singer like Dubois has the power to call into question the entire hierarchy of genius and mediocrity on which the notion of a limited repertory depends. We need great performances of lesser works more than we need lesser performances of great ones. ♦
