Victor Hugo’s younger daughter Adèle (1830-1915) has long fascinated artists and biographers alike, and the tale of her struggles with mental illness and her disastrous, unrequited love for Albert Pinson, a British army officer whom she pursued across continents for some 15 years, has been told many times: most famously by François Truffaut in his 1975 film L’histoire d’Adèle H; most recently by writer Mark Bostridge (Ian’s brother) in In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter, published earlier this year.

Mention is frequently made of Adèle’s talent as a pianist in her youth, encouraged by her father, who adored Beethoven, numbered Berlioz and Liszt among his friends and adapted his own Notre-Dame de Paris as a libretto for Louise Bertin. What is less well known is that Adèle was herself a composer of songs (to texts by her father) and short chamber pieces, studying by correspondence with Adolphe Samuel from the Brussels Conservatoire, as well as consulting Ambroise Thomas at the Paris Opéra. Exact dates of composition are uncertain, though she was certainly working until around the time (1863) she left home to tail Pinson to Canada, as poems and songs assigned to Gavroche and Jean Prouvaire in Les misérables (1862) are among the texts she chose to set.

Unlike many of her contemporaries (Berlioz and Liszt included), she was not content simply to set her father’s love poetry but tackled his political verse as well, and in addition to the Revolutionary songs from Les misérables we also find her using poems from Les châtiments (1853), bitterly denouncing the Second Empire of Napoleon III. A sensuous chromaticism reminiscent of Gounod characterises her more Romantic songs, though when she turns to politics her style veers towards popular music, café concert and operetta, some of it with the pithiness of Auber, or even Offenbach. We can read biographical associations, in particular her obsession with Pinson, into the more impassioned mélodies such as ‘Encore à toi’, though the political songs reveal considerable astuteness, originality and sharpness of insight. Nothing here suggests someone conveniently dismissed as ‘schizophrenic’, as she frequently has been.

A weakness, however, is a pervasive fondness for unvarying strophic forms, which makes some songs overlong. This may be one reason why orchestral versions by Richard Dubugnon, with shifting instrumental palettes, are used here: the exact reasons for their deployment are unclear, though Dubugnon himself, entrusted with editing Adèle’s music by the Hugo Museums in Paris and Guernsey, argues that her piano-writing suggests imagined orchestrations that she was unable to realise. His arrangements are played with considerable panache by the Orchestre Victor Hugo (from Besançon, where he was born) under Jean-François Verdier.

The vocal line-up is classy. Karine Deshayes sounds resplendent in ‘Nuits de juin’, while Sandrine Piau does wonders with the Jean Prouvaire song, which collapses an entire lifetime into a breezy three-minute waltz. Laurent Naouri is given the angry ‘Hymne des transportés’, a big Meyerbeerian scena for baritone and chorus, stylistically at a tangent from everything else. Bright-toned Anaïs Constans is lovely in the Gavroche songs, and Isabelle Druet probes the melancholy of ‘Priez pour les morts’ with great depth of feeling. Best of all is Axelle Fanyo, passionate and declamatory throughout, so that the greatness of the poetry itself really hits home. The handful of instrumental pieces, a bit too closely recorded, are played with great elegance. There are no lost masterpieces here but it’s a fascinating disc, finely done.