This is a real rarity: an opera by Vincent d’Indy, composer, co founder of the Schola Cantorum in Paris, editor of operas by Monteverdi, Rameau and Gluck. It comes from a concert performance at the Montpellier Festival in 2010. L’étranger was first performed at La Monnaie in Brussels in 1903; the novel by Albert Camus, published in 1942, is not connected. D’Indy’s inspiration was apparently Ibsen’s Brand but for the opera-goer it is Wagner who comes to mind.

A middle-aged stranger comes to a village by the sea. He is shunned by the locals, who suspect him of sorcery on account of his inexplicable command of the waves and his uncanny success when out fishing. Vita is drawn to him despite being about to marry André, a handsome customs officer. The stranger loves her but draws back on account of their difference in age. When she asks him his name, he replies ‘I don’t have one. I am he who dreams, I am he who loves. Loving the poor and the disconsolate…’ He gives her the magic emerald with which he has calmed tempests and saved lives. When she casts it into the sea and a storm blows up, the stranger summons the lifeboat. Vita confesses her love and joins him: they rescue a boat in distress, but disappear. On the shore, a sailor intones the De profundis.

There is a clear parallel with Der fliegende Holländer, the Stranger, Vita and André matching the Dutchman, Senta and Erik. And there’s a dash of Lohengrin plus, with the emerald having been used by Christ, Parsifal too. D’Indy was devoted to Wagner’s music and there are Wagnerian echoes here and there; the storm at the end perhaps Wagner as refracted through the Saint-Saëns of Samson et Dalila. But there is Gregorian chant and folksong as well.

I found the opera second-rate, rather as, say, Pfitzner’s Palestrina is second-rate: accomplished, much huffing and puffing, some haunting moments, nothing truly memorable. It has splendid advocates in Lawrence Foster and his forces. Ludovic Tézier, in particular, sings ravishingly and tirelessly as the Stranger: his two big scenes with Cassandre Berthon’s Vita are as passionate as one could wish and the orchestral playing is just as fiery.