About the work
Messidor is an opera in four acts by Alfred Bruneau to a libretto by Émile Zola, premiered in 1897 at the Paris Opéra. The work is one of the rare direct collaborations of Zola with opera and combines naturalist social subject matter with symbolist dream drama.
Plot
In a village in the Pyrenees that lives by panning for gold, a modern gold mine threatens to destroy the traditional way of life and thus the livelihood of the peasants. Against a background of love, rivalry and social conflict — the title "Messidor" refers to the harvest month of the Revolutionary calendar — the characters struggle for justice and reconciliation between the old world and the new.
Cultural significance
Messidor is a remarkable document of naturalism in opera and of the artistic partnership between Zola and Bruneau. The work united Zola's socially critical concerns with the operatic genre and is regarded as a bold, if rarely performed, experiment of the French fin de siècle.