Baritone and conductor Arnaud Marzorati and his ensemble Les Lunaisiens have been specialising for more than a decade now in the re-examination of popular song in a series of discs that have covered music heard in streets, cafés and goguettes (working men’s singing clubs) throughout French history. Previous recordings have included music from the Revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848, street songs dealing with homelessness and an album devoted to Georges Brassens. For their latest album, however, they turn to Balzac and the background to the immense novel cycle La comédie humaine that occupied him for most of his creative life.

This is neither an examination of Balzac’s own musical taste nor an exploration of the treatment of music in his fiction, which would give us something very different: an emphasis on Rossini, a close personal friend; Berlioz, whose Grande Messe des morts Balzac much admired; and more guardedly Liszt, whose relationships with Marie d’Agoult and George Sand are held up to withering scorn in Balzac’s 1839 roman-à-clef Béatrix. What we have instead is ‘a contrapuntal interplay between the novels and the songs’ that illuminates the social background and dominant themes of the books.

In essence, this is a portrait of a society fixated with money where everyone is on the make. The programme is bookended by Marc-Antoine-Madeleine Désaugiers’s evocations of Paris at dawn and dusk, a heaving metropolis where the last noctambulists head home as the first workers emerge on to the streets, and where sexual favours are bought and sold as night falls. Auber’s ‘Amour et folie’ depicts a woman dumped at a ball by her lover, a Rastignac type with his eye to the main chance. Pierre Dupont’s ‘Les louis d’or’ depicts a Faustian pact with the devil for the sake of gold, echoing the narrative of La peau de chagrin. And the woman coldly dismissing three prospective male lovers in Pierre Alexandre Doche’s ‘Madame Barbe Bleu’ is named Mariquita, as is the murderously jealous lesbian marquise in La fille aux yeux d’or.

Vautrin, La comédie humaine’s gay anti-hero, was modelled in part on Eugène-François Vidocq, a career criminal later turned police chief, and Marzorati includes a caustic ballad taken from his memoirs about crime being at once exhilaratingly transgressive but ultimately not paying. A third of the programme consists of songs by Pierre-Jean de Béranger, the great chansonnier of the period and its effective social conscience. He and Balzac faced each other across a political divide: Balzac was essentially a Legitimist; Béranger was primarily associated with the Orléanist movement around Louis-Philippe. But they shared a common awareness of social corruption, and Béranger’s songs, like the angry ‘Les escargots’, echo the novels’ scathing depictions of bourgeois self-interest.

The singers are classy. Marzorati’s past collaborators include Isabelle Druet and Stéphanie d’Oustrac, and here he adds Lucile Richardot, Cyrille Dubois and Jérôme Varnier to the list. Punching out a text is even more important here than sustaining a melody. None of the singers disappoints; some even take you by surprise. Richardot, so closely associated with Baroque respectability, sounds gleefully filthy in Béranger’s bawdy ‘Ma grand-mère’, in which an old woman regales her scandalised family with her sexual history. And I suspect even Dubois’s most fervent admirers may be taken aback by the righteous fury that erupts in Béranger’s rabble-rousing ‘Les quatre âges historiques’.

The underrated Varnier sounds bitterly sardonic in ‘L’or’, sad yet noble in ‘Le corps et l’âme’, both again by Béranger. Marzorati himself, his voice knowing, streetwise, lived-in, does wonders with Vidocq’s ‘Chanson’ and directs his small instrumental ensemble with tangible exuberance. Period instruments are used, including an 1844 Pleyel piano and an ophicleide from 1860, and the playing is faultless. It’s an album of barbed wit, political anger and deep social awareness that actually works wonderfully well in its own right. But it also sends you back to Balzac, wanting to read him again.