Bordeaux Revives Augusta Holmès’s La Montagne Noire after Century of Neglect

The Opéra National de Bordeaux has staged the first performance of Augusta Holmès’s La Montagne noire since its 1895 premiere. This resurrection, supported by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, treats the score as a serious entry in the grand opéra (a genre of 19th-century opera characterized by large-scale casts, five-act structures, and historical plots) tradition rather than a biographical curiosity. Score on IMSLP. The work’s century-long absence from the stage reflects the institutional narrowing of the French repertoire after the First World War—a period when the aesthetic shifts of the Les Six generation marginalized the sprawling Romanticism of the late nineteenth century. Holmès, a student of César Franck, composed with a structural density that rivals Massenet. The failure was not in the music, but in a Parisian programming logic that favored neoclassical brevity over the expansive narrative requirements of the nineteenth-century stage.