If Mascagni and Leoncavallo (of "Cav and Pag" fame) are sometimes unfairly known as one-work composers, no such unfairness could be claimed in the case of Gustave Charpentier. While studying with Massenet in Paris he became enamoured of the Bohemian lifestyle of Montmartre and began to see himself as a rebel, railing against society’s strictures. He won the Prix de Rome in 1887 and began composing Louise - which exemplified his philosophy precisely - at the same time; it was not completed until 1898, when it was accepted by the Opera Comique. It was presented there as the first opera of the new century, on 2nd February 1900, and was a resounding success. With its theme of freedom and the liberation of women, in hand with its luscious, sometimes post-Wagnerian score, it found a welcome place, and when Charpentier died in 1956 Louise was just short of its 1,000th performance at the Opera Comique.

 Charpentier referred to Louise as a "musical novel," perhaps to set it apart from the type of operas which had held the stage for the previous 300 years. In his work there would be no royalty, no gods, no stilted dialogue, no deus ex machina. In Louise we meet street-vendors, seamstresses, rag-pickers, painters, poets, philosophers, and most importantly, four flesh-and-blood characters Louise, a young girl in love with the Bohemian painter Julien, her loving, hard-working father who tends to see things conventionally and is afraid for Louise’s future, and her suspicious, argumentative, controlling mother. But in truth there is a fifth character - Paris. It is the allure and freedom that Paris represents which is so seductive to Louise and such anathema to her parents; indeed, not only do Julien and Louise sing to Paris during their love duets, Paris is actually heard at times, calling to Louise, inviting her to emancipation. Along the way we come upon the hopes and aspirations of everyday people; there is no tidy ending, no-one dies, there’s no melodrama. Louise leaves her parents’ home to live what Julien believes early in the opera. Tout etre a le droit d’etre libre (Every one has the right to be free). This is the ’credo’ of Louise.

 The composer Paul Dukas said of Louise: "the first and last acts are those of a master; the middle two are those of an artist, while the whole is the work of a man." And indeed, the two outside acts, taking place as they do in the most mundane circumstances (and most working-class of households) depict their situations so superbly that we get the entire picture of Louise’s life at home, complete with her longing and impatience, her parents’ small-minded thinking and Julien’s passion; while in the second and third acts we have the entire panoply of Paris laid in front of us - the low and high lives, the sadnesses and joys, and some street spectacle which has yet to be better exhibited in opera. The displays of his craft are evidenced throughout, with influences from Wagner, in his use of leitmotifs, and Berlioz’s striking ways with orchestration, but always with his own, special, soaring lyricism. There are few more rapturous moments in all of opera than Louise’s aria Depuis le jour and the almost twenty-minute love duet which immediately follows. And yes, Charpentier remained a man at all times, devoted to his socialist beliefs, wedded to Paris, and probably telling us a story in Louise which was at least semi-autobiographical: some time in 1885 he began a long affair with a seamstress in Montmartre, and he sets the opera specifically between April and July of that year.

 Charpentier never again achieved the acclaim he was awarded with Louise; an attempt at a sequel, Julien, in 1913, was momentarily successful but was never revived. He lived out his last fifteen years as a semi-recluse in the Paris which had so animated and inspired him to compose his naturalistic masterwork, Louise.