“I must admit I was in two minds when Laurent Brunner suggested that I record this accursed opera. Everything impelled me to refuse, until I read the score.”

So says conductor Hervé Niquet with regards to Gluck’s Écho et Narcisse. It’s a work that found little favour in its day, and you might question what the merit is in bringing it back now, but as Niquet points out, we owe a vote of thanks to the entrepreneurial Château de Versailles Spectacles for taking a chance on an infamous flop.

What seems to have been wrong with Écho et Narcisse is simply that it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. First staged in 1779, it was Gluck’s final work, written in the same year as the masterly Iphigénie en Tauride. The latter, a full-blown tragédie and the culmination of the composer’s program of operatic reforms, was a great success.

Alas, Écho et Narcisse was a thoroughly pastoral drame lyrique