Mélodies Sur Des Poèmes De Victor Hugo

This album is a tribute to composer Adèle Hugo (1830-1915), the fifth child of the great poet Victor Hugo. She suffered from lifelong mental instability and spent half of her tragic life in psychiatric institutions, from age 42 until her death at 85. She had a sublime and sensitive temperament; from a young age she was passionate about music, studying piano and later composition. Her musical manuscripts were recently rediscovered and the director of the Musea Victor Hugo in Paris and Guernsey entrusted them to composer Richard Dubugnon to investigate and reconstruct the puzzle of these often very fragmentary scores, which had been forgotten for more than a century. The result is a collection of fourteen of her songs on poems by Victor Hugo and verses from his great novel Les Misérables, as well as five songs without words. The Orchestre Victor Hugo and its music director Jean-François Verdier were involved in the project and invited Dubugnon to orchestrate the pieces, which are presented here by a cross-generational team of leading singers.