Soprano en Feu

While Freemasonry's secrecy has always aroused distrust, its enlightened principles and belief in virtue, liberty, fraternity, and equality have attracted large numbers of intellectuals and artists; one of its most famous adherents was Mozart. However, his opera The Magic Flute was not the first to be inspired by its teachings but was preceded in 1749 by Rameau's Zoroastre. Its initial reception was so cool that Rameau and his librettist, Louis de Cahusac (a prominent Mason) undertook extensive revisions. The new version was produced–by coincidence or fate?–in 1756, the year of Mozart's birth, and became a great success.

Vaste opéra-ballet composé à quatre mains par A. C. Destouches et M.-R Delalande, les Éléments se déchaînent sous les archets de l'ensemble Les Surprises. Louis-Noël Bestion de Camboulas en a concocté une version « de salon » regroupant les plus beaux extraits de ce chef-d'œuvre inédit au disque.

French love songs from three centuries, interspersed with reflective lute solos, constitute an Idylle for mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford. As they explain: “The emotions of love are explored in different forms – languor, desire, fascination, happiness.” The word ‘idyll’, evoking a blissful, tranquil experience, derives from Ancient Greece and poetry on a pastoral theme. Desandre and Dunford spin a thematic and musical thread between eras and styles, starting with a sequence of 10 airs de cour from the 17th century. Spanning the era from the 1860s to the 1920s are arias and songs by Offenbach, Debussy, Hahn and Messager, and the album then fast-forwards to the 1960s and two iconic French chanteuses, Barbara and Françoise Hardy. Dunford supplies instrumental interludes in the form of two dances by Robert de Visée, a court musician for both Louis XIV and Louis XV, and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1 and Gnossienne No 1.

Guilty of allowing the sacred fire to go out while declaring her love to the general Licinius, the Vestal Virgin Julia is sentenced to be buried alive. But her execution is averted by a divine intervention, which rekindles the altar flame and absolves the victim. The simple plot of Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale achieved resounding success in 1807 thanks to the highly skilled treatment of the characters’ psychology and the transparency of the political allusions – Licinius is an allegory of Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Yet the work is more than a mere piece of propaganda: it represents one of the links between the tragédie lyrique of the Ancien Régime and the future grand opéra à la française, even anticipating Bellinian bel canto.