Daniel-François-Esprit Auber—now there’s a composer who knew how to please an audience without troubling them overmuch. The man who gave us Fra Diavolo and Le Domino noir occupies a peculiar position in the French operatic pantheon: enormously successful in his day, virtually invisible in ours except as historical footnote. This Naxos disc, coupling excerpts from Zanetta (1840) and Zerline (1851) with a wonderfully frivolous quadrille by Philippe Musard, makes a case—not entirely convincing, but pleasant enough—for reconsidering these theatrical confections.
The problem with Auber, if we’re being honest, is that his facility sometimes masks a certain… what shall we call it? Emotional reticence. He writes melodies that glide past the ear with Gallic elegance, orchestrates with unfailing good taste, and never commits the vulgarity of demanding too much from his listeners. In Zerline, which takes up the bulk of this disc, we get all the expected ingredients: a perky overture that wouldn’t frighten a dowager, dance numbers that sparkle without sweating, vocal numbers (here reduced to orchestral excerpts, alas) that charm without penetrating. The ballet music has that characteristic Auber shimmer—high strings and woodwinds creating a confectioner’s paradise of sound.
Dario Salvi and the Janáček Philharmonic approach this repertoire with appropriate lightness of touch. The overtures receive crisp, well-articulated performances that emphasize rhythmic snap over romantic indulgence. Listen to how Salvi shapes the woodwind solos in the Zerline excerpts—there’s genuine personality in those phrases, a sense of musicians enjoying themselves rather than merely executing period pieces. The strings could use more sheen in the upper registers, and the brass occasionally sound a touch cautious in their balances, but the overall effect is winning.
Zanetta receives shorter shrift here—just the overture and a handful of excerpts totaling thirteen minutes. It’s harder to judge the opera’s qualities from such fragments, though the overture suggests the same virtues and limitations as its companion piece. What strikes one is how thoroughly professional everything sounds: Auber knew his craft the way a master cabinetmaker knows joinery.
The Musard quadrille proves unexpectedly delightful—a potpourri of themes from Zanetta repackaged for the ballroom. Here we encounter Auber at one remove, his melodies transformed into frankly commercial product for the dance-mad Second Empire. Musard, that shameless popularizer, understood what the public wanted: tunes you could hum while whirling around a parquet floor. There’s something touching about the whole enterprise, this ecosystem of theatrical music feeding the social dance repertoire.
Release quality from Ostrava’s House of Culture is clean if not particularly atmospheric—one wishes for more bloom on the strings, more sense of acoustic space around the woodwinds. The documentation is adequate, though one hungers for more context about these operas’ original reception and interpretation history.
Should you investigate this disc? That depends on your tolerance for expertly crafted but emotionally lightweight fare. Auber’s music makes no claim to profundity; it aims to entertain, and by that standard it succeeds admirably. The performances are stylish enough, the programming intelligent. But I confess that after an hour of this music, I found myself craving something with more bite—Berlioz, perhaps, or even Meyerbeer at his most grandiose. Auber’s civilized pleasantries, skillfully presented though they are, leave one feeling rather like a guest at a very proper tea party: well-fed, impeccably hosted, and vaguely restless.
For completists of French opera-comique or students of mid-nineteenth-century theatrical practice, this disc offers genuine value. For the casual listener, it’s a charming diversion—nothing more, but certainly nothing less.
