Heinrich Marschner, the leading German composer of Romantic opera between Weber and Wagner, was a progressive innovator, bringing to his music a new dimension – the supernatural anti-hero enmeshed in horror, such as the protagonist of Der Vampyr (1828). Before his psychological operas, however, Marschner composed a series of overtures and stage works exploring more conventional material. Dario Salvi continues his exploration of Marschner’s overtures and stage music in this second volume featuring a programme of all world premiere recordings. Salvi conducts the Hradec Kralove Philharmonic Orchestra in its first recording on the Naxos label.

Orfa was Adolphe Adam’s penultimate ballet, with an intriguing scenario based on Nordic mythology. It shares analogies with Hesiod’s Theogony and Wagner’s Ring cycle in depicting the struggle between the older gods (Loki) and younger gods (Odin). Full of archetypal Romantic elements, Orfa was mounted with the lavish stage spectacle for which the Paris Opera was famous, and featured Fanny Cerrito in the title role. Adam’s writing shows increasingly vivid orchestral imagination, drama and tonal colour, with roles for several instrumental soloists. This world premiere recording uses a new edition copied from Adam’s original manuscript score held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Meyerbeer was a precocious composer and this album traces some of his very earliest works. Der Fischer und das Milchmädchen was his first stage work, a charming rural vignette that contains all the essential features of a ballet-divertissement couched in writing that enchantingly evokes the 18thcentury. Collaborating with his teacher, the Abbé Georg Vogler, Meyerbeer composed DerAdmiralin1811. The following year saw Wirt und Gast with the vivid Oriental exoticism of its Janissary music, while Romildae Constanza, his first Italian opera, shows his complete assimilation of Rossinian models.

Universally famous for his glorious overtures Light Cavalry and Poet and Peasant (Naxos 8.553935), Franz von Suppé was one of the greatest exponents of the golden Age of Viennese Operetta. But he was also a master of incidental music for popular plays, one of which is Mozart – an example of Künstler-Lebensbild (‘life portrait of an artist’). Suppé’s music subtly accompanies the stage action as the story of the composition of Mozart’s music unfolds, offering a potpourri of Mozart’s works served up with Suppé’s trademark flair. Die Afrikareise presents a piquant and brilliant travelogue.

From the mid-1820s onwards Auber’s career was filled with success. His opéras-comiques and grands opéras won repeated acclaim for their myriad qualities of Parisian elegance. The fifth volume in this series features two of his Sicilian operas and both centre on well-delineated female characters. Brimming with grace, charm and lyricism, the extensive ballet from Zerline exemplifies why Auber’s music was so popular. Philippe Musard’s Quadrille No. 2 on themes from Zanetta shows the extent of Auber’s contemporary popularity and is a revealing cultural souvenir of the period.

Daniel-François-Esprit Auber was one of the most famous composers of the 19th century, giving definitive form to the uniquely French genres of grand historical opera and opéra-comique. His overtures became famous all over the world for their dancing elegance and fluent melodies, a reflection both of his genial personality and of the Parisian taste and refinement of his day. This programme includes overtures and entr’actes from Auber’s most famous opera about the notorious robber-chief Fra Diavolo, and from one of his least known works, La Fiancée du Roi de Garbe. Volume 2 of this edition (8.574006) was acclaimed as ‘wonderfully articulated and lovingly brought to life’ by MusicWeb International.

Although Auber was one of the most popular of 19th-century French composers, his music is seldom revived in the opera house. This series is restoring his overtures and orchestral excerpts from operas, a swathe of refined and elegant music showing his importance in operatic history. Featured in this volume are the overture from La Muette de Portici, his revolutionary masterpiece, as well as premiere recordings of music from La Barcarolle and Les Chaperons blancs, exuding both the drama and the charm that permeate all his mature works.

The second volume in this series continues to explore little-known examples of Auber’s elegant and refined operatic music. Julie was his first stage work, its fantasia-like beauty foreshadowing the operas, opéras-comiques and lyric dramas to come. Striking melodies and haunting episodes abound in these overtures and entr’actes, and there is restrained yet fragrant Iberian colour in the overture to Léocadie. The Violin Concerto is lightly scored and gentle, with a tarantella-like finale full of folk vitality.

A native of St Petersburg, Ingeborg von Bronsart studied with Liszt in Weimar, her striking appearance earning her the nickname ‘Ingeborg die Schöne’. Goethe’s libretto for Jery und Bätely is a charming and bucolic tale of unrequited romance between a pretty Swiss milkmaid and an eligible bachelor who are ultimately brought together by some farcical matchmaking. Bronsart brings life to this story with exquisite music, from an exciting overture through an uninterrupted evolution in melody and harmony to a spine-tingling finale, delivering a Singspiel that helped establish her reputation as a successful composer for the stage.