Louis-Etienne Ernest Reyer 1823- 1909

[adriano]

Reyer's Opera "Salammbô" is another excellent work!
There is a broadcast of a Marseille performance of September 2008, conducted by Lawrence Foster.

Orson Welles originally wanted an aria from this work to be used in his film "Citizen Kane" - but it was decided to create a new piece in the style of French post-Romantic opera - instead of recurring to the original score. Bernard Herrmann supplied a wonderful and gorgeously orchestrated piece! In the film, the singer (Kane's wife) sings dreadfully. The aria was then performed "correctly" by Eileen Farrell in a CBS 1943 broadcast and recorded  in 1974 by Kiri Te Kanawa. It's on that famous RCA LP (later re-issued on CD) "The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann", conducted by Charles Gerhardt and produced by George Korngold (the composer's son). As a text, Herrmann used a pastiche from the classic tragedies of Racine.
As far as I remember we already have an earlier thread on this composer and on this subject in here!

Of "Sigurd" I suppose you know that there is that excellent and famous performance conducted by Manuel Rosenthal (French Radio, 1973, published on various bootleg LPs and CDs) - plus a Geneva concert performance of 2013, a broadcast which I may have offered in here years ago.

[Ebubu]

"but it was decided to create a new piece in the style of French post-Romantic opera - instead of recurring to the original score. Bernard Herrmann supplied a wonderful and gorgeously orchestrated piece!"
Which sounds furiously like a Massenet piece !

"and recorded  in 1974 by Kiri Te Kanawa."
Here's another gorgeous version by Venera Gimadieva at the Prom's :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFtHTZnbF0

[UnsungMasterpieces]

It looks like Sigurd has been performed a few times in Marseille, in April 2025. Hopefully a recording will eventually surface.
https://opera-odeon.marseille.fr/programmation/sigurd

[Alan Howe]

Indeed, but it will require singers of a type which is hard to come by these days in both the Italian and German repertoires, let alone the French. In the past the great Guy Chauvet sang the title role, but where is his like today?
This is Chauvet as Sigurd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HZZMWgsh1A