‘The undertaking was a bold one’

Louise Bertin’s opera seria Fausto appears as very much an outlier in the operatic output of nineteenth-century France. As the work of a woman composer, based on a play by Goethe that had rarely been adapted for the operatic stage at the time, premiered in Italian and in a theatre dominated by internationally renowned composers from south of the Alps, the score has the potential to arouse interest, as it did in its day. But, having fallen into oblivion at the same time as its creator, it was lost for a long time in the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France before resurfacing a few years ago, when the score was digitised and made available to the public. It is high time we listened carefully to this music, which is far less sugary and conservative than misogynistic observers might imagine.