We owe this performance of Passionément to Covid 19, as it happens. Bru Zane’s original intention was to give us the first recording of Saint-Saëns’s Déjanire (1911), to be made live in concert in Munich last December. Pandemic restrictions, however, prevented the performance of what is ultimately a large-scale tragédie lyrique, so Messager’s 1926 comédie musicale, with a short running time (under the stipulated hour and a half without dialogue) and needing only a small orchestra and six singers (there’s no chorus), was performed and recorded in its place. Of the original Déjanire cast, only Véronique Gens and Chantal Santon Jeffery found their way into the musical, though orchestra and conductor remained the same.

Passionément deals with Prohibition-era Americans losing their inhibitions on a trip to France, and its plot centres on the unscrupulous magnate Stevenson, who arrives in Deauville with his wife Ketty in an attempt to swindle the dashing Robert Perceval out of an oil-rich estate the latter has inherited. Thinking every Frenchman will automatically have designs on his wife, Stevenson demands that Ketty disguise herself as an older, less attractive woman, but when Robert encounters her without her wig and glasses she poses as her own niece and the two begin an affair, aided and abetted by the Stevensons’ servants Julia and Harris, but to the alarm of Robert’s married aristocratic mistress Hélène Le Barrois. While his wife discovers passion, meanwhile, Stevenson discovers alcohol, which sets him on the road to moral recovery.

It’s a less abrasive work than you might think from a brief summary of the plot, thanks to the vein of bittersweet sadness Messager brings to his depiction of the relationship between Robert and Ketty, who fall in love with each other on the understanding that their liaison must of necessity be brief. Until we reach the twist that signals a happy ending, Messager charts its course with swaying waltzes and reflective songs that suggest their growing awareness that its pleasures can only fade. It’s beguiling music thrown into relief by Stevenson’s sardonic couplets, the knowing, at times risqué wit of Julia and Harris, worldly wise ex-lovers themselves, and Hélène’s darker expressions of jealousy.

Unlike some musicals, it sits comfortably for operatic voices, largely because Messager saw the musical itself as a development or extension of opéra comique. There’s some fine singing here. Gens and Étienne Dupuis sound lovely in their scenes together, and his restrained ardour in the ‘Passionément’ waltz that gives the work its title is wonderfully seductive. Following early performance tradition, Éric Huchet adopts an American accent as Stevenson, and preens and swaggers arrogantly until the consumption of three bottles of champagne changes his opinions and his ways. Santon Jeffery sings with suitable hauteur as Hélène, while Nicole Car has fun with Julia’s bawdy couplets, all the better for being done straight rather than overtly suggestively. Armando Noguera has too little to do but sounds svelte as Harris. There’s stylish playing from the Munich Radio Orchestra, while conductor Stefan Blunier teases out all the subtleties of Messager’s beautiful instrumentation. The omitted dialogue is included in the accompanying book, and what you hear makes infinitely greater sense if you read it through before you listen.