ROMANTIQUE

A torrent of forgotten French opera on the Bru Zane label.

- BY ALEX ROSS

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.