Alfredo Catalani is one of those composers who is only known for (and only put on stage for) a single work, in this case La Wally of 1892, although his repertoire in fact runs to six lyrical works, written between 1875 and 1892 - the composer died the following year, at the age of just 39. Edmea was first performed in Milan in 1886 and met with genuine international success, the work being put on in St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Nice, even Germany, and all over Italy. This went on until Puccini arrived to sweep almost all his immediate predecessors before him with his superb talent. We had to wait until 1989 for the work to be performed again, in Lucques, as it happened, and it is precisely this production which makes up this album, recorded live. Alright, so these are not the greatest singers on the planet; but while we wait for a very hypothetical new production, this album has the immense advantage of actually existing, and bearing witness to a whole spectrum of Italian lyrical creativity between the last of Verdi and the first of Puccini, so more properly classical, but not yet truly verist. The subject matter of Edmea is borrowed from the piece The Danischeffs by Alexandre Dumas and Pierre Newsky: a young woman, adopted by a noble family, falls in love with (and is loved by) her guardians' son, but she is married off by the father to one of the family's old servants. She slowly goes mad - tries to drown herself in a river - but then comes to her senses after coming across her first love, whom the father had sent away; and after a thousand misadventures, once the servant is dead and the marriage annulled, the two lovers can unite. Not without first blessing the good servant who had apparently never wanted to marry the girl, and preferred to die in blissful celibacy than to come between the young lovers. Curtain falls on an ambiguously happy end. © SM/Qobuz