This album pays homage to the composer Adèle Hugo (1830-1915), the fifth child of the great poet Victor Hugo. Suffering from lifelong psychological instability, she spent half of her tragic life in mental institutions, from the age of 42 until her death aged 85.

Hugo was an exalted and sensitive temperament; she became passionately fond of music from an early age, studying the piano and then composition. Her musical manuscripts were recently rediscovered, and the Director of the Victor Hugo Museums in Paris and Guernsey entrusted them to composer Richard Dubugnon, so as to research and reconstruct the jigsaw of these often quite fragmentary scores, which had been lying forgotten for more than a century. What has emerged is a set of fourteen of her songs on poems by Victor Hugo and verses taken from his great novel Les Misérables, as well as five songs without words. Appropriately, the Orchestre Victor Hugo and its Music Director Jean-François Verdier have been involved in the project, and they invited Dubugnon to orchestrate the pieces, presented here by a multi-generational team of leading singers.

Chœur de l’Opéra de Dijon
Orchestre Victor Hugo
Jean-François Verdie