Down a quiet Venetian alley, Palazzetto Bru Zane revives forgotten French Romantic music — a laboratory where research, performance, recordings, and exquisite print reconnect past and present.
Hidden behind a brick wall and a steel door with a discreet intercom down a Venetian alley, a wisteria-clad building houses Palazzetto Bru Zane — a small laboratory devoted to rediscovering lesser-known French Romantic music. From this base, the team researches, publishes, records, and supports performances of works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that might otherwise have gone unheard.
It’s a charming location, with a quiet courtyard, a dual entrance – one, naturally, for arrivals on gondola. Inside the annex to the Palazzo Zane Collalto, exquisite frescos dating back hundreds of years adorn whitewashed walls. A central staircase circles up towards a modest chamber music space at the top. The entire space is, like all of Venice, a magical world where everything has its place and everything looks utterly and unequivocally gorgeous.
Why Venice?
The question that dominates the curious on arrival is why French Romantic music finds its home here in a renovated Venetian casino. The French border is 250 miles from Venice (not including the ferry to the mainland) and feels – to British eyes post-Brexit, at least – separate. Yet mainland Europe is comparatively more porous. Frictionless movement makes artistic connection instinctive. A potent reminder of how island life can embed an entirely different mindset.
The answer as to why here is partly submerged in the foundations of this musicological endeavour. The considerable philanthropic giving of Fondation Bru, an organisation set up by Dr Nicole Bru, the widow of the pharmacist Dr Jean Bru, whose father Camille was credited with combining fizzy drinks with painkillers to bring about faster absorption in the body — hence the effervescent aspirin. It would be a stretch to say that pharmaceutical innovation gave rise to a musical renaissance, but the idea secures the organisation and its endeavour in the mind. Nicole and Jean Bru were ardent arts lovers and, after many visits here, became devoted to the city. If you’re looking to invest your money in something meaningful, why wouldn’t you invest it in somewhere that means something to you? Find the building, do the renovation work, and leave the marketing and the comms challenge to those with the know-how.
When we meet to talk, Artistic Director Alexandre Dratwicki is a confident, self-assured speaker making a convincing case for Venice before the second concert in the Cycle Folies Parisienne Festival currently underway. He happily entertains my naivety, pointing out the established connection between Paris and Rome over the lifespan of the now-defunct Prix de Rome. Then composers would be awarded the chance to spend two years in Rome soaking up the musical culture of Italy before returning to Paris, their musical appreciation expanded, deepened and, apparently, improved. Whilst Bizet and Gounod appreciated the experience, Berlioz and Debussy were less enthused, the latter describing his time there as a “sentence.” Regardless, the connection between France and Italy is artistically closer than the history books on Western classical music would have us believe about the stylistic differences.
Venice sharpens attention
There is, it’s already becoming clear to me after only 24 hours in the city, a benefit to being sited here too: the heightened senses make attention more immediate. Impressions are formed more readily; questions surface more quickly; connections are made, insights arrived at. If we had been in Paris, I’d be less likely to be quite so engaged. But take me to an entirely different location where around every corner everything looks like a film set, then I’m more likely to pay close attention and, as a result, ask more questions than I would have done if I’d hot-footed from Gare du Nord to a nondescript location in Paris.
Rediscovery as a mission
Bru-Zane’s not inconsiderable work spans multiple projects, each demanding different skill sets in score preparation, completion, production, finding performers, or simply funding. It also highlights an uncomfortable truth about the classical music genre today: just how much of it is repeated and how little commitment there remains in comparatively mainstream concert houses. It is as though our present-day love of the genre shuts out discovery, narrowing what constitutes the classical music canon. Dwindling public funding and consequent commercial imperatives compromise programming choices, restricting the opportunity for discovery.
It’s the invitation to discover something new that energises me so very quickly, I notice. In PBZ’s work, like that of other similar organisations and foundations, the canon is constantly evolving and not a fixed documented list. We forget that, just as we forget that composers wrote other works that didn’t get the exposure or the appreciation they perhaps deserved. As time has moved on, so those works seem to disappear, a composer’s reputation established or maintained simply by those works which remain in the public consciousness. Resurfacing that which has been forgotten then is the ongoing present-day equivalent of the experience of discovering classical music for the first time. A world waiting to be explored.
I put it to Alexandre and Director of Research and Publications Etienne Jardin that being introduced to the names of composers previously unknown to me simply highlights how pervasive conventional histories of Western classical music are, and how fixed our idea of the canon of repertoire is. “The canon is always evolving,” he replies, very matter-of-factly. Which inevitably raises the question: if it is, why do we get so tied up in knots about how we talk about the ever-evolving subject to people who come to it new? If I’m coming to it new here and feeling energised by discovery, isn’t the language we need to draw on that which celebrates discovery and our individual emotional response to it?
There is no time in our brief time together to explore this wider point, not least because both are quick and proud to point to a handpicked, shrink-wrapped selection from the Palazzetto Bru Zane back catalogue on the table in front of us: a CD box set of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète conducted by Sir Mark Elder from Aix-en-Provence; Bru-Zane’s landmark historical re-production of Bizet’s Carmen on Blu-ray; and a couple of hardback books spotlighting Louise Bertin’s 1831 Fausto and Saint-Saëns’s L’Ancêtre from 1906.
Did I know just how many operas Saint-Saëns actually wrote? In my mind I can only name one — Samson and Delilah — but keep quiet as I can’t be sure. It turns out there are thirteen. Which then begs the (usual and reductive) question: what was up with them that we don’t know about them? The answer lies not so much in what was wrong with them, rather the circumstances that lead some works to build popularity and those which don’t — a fascinating history in itself. “Which of these would you like to take with you?” asks Alexandre as we get up to leave. “All of them, if that’s OK,” I smile. If you don’t ask you deny them the chance to say no, so the saying goes.
It’s only when I get home that it strikes me just how precious these books are. Recently published, my copies of Bertin’s Fausto and Saint-Saëns’s L’Ancêtre are first and limited editions of a 4,500 print run. Shrink wrap torn off, the contents are translated essays and articles that contextualise those works that would otherwise not have been documented to any great extent. Richly illustrated history books accompanied by a CD recording slipped inside the front cover. These publications are extended sleeve notes on steroids — a pleasing thing to have in the hand, contextualisation that treads a line carefully between academic authority and audience curiosity. Balm for the soul in an artistic world where, in a lot of quarters, downplaying knowledge and expertise is the priority.
Distributing discovery
Philanthropy doesn’t simply enable, guarantee or protect — it can innovate too. The Bru-Zane print and audio experience is enhanced with an online presence that manifests its values. Its digital radio station — a curation of the music it has unearthed and supported in production — is available via its website. It not only aids discovery but creates a journey that mercifully avoids nauseating voice-overs or musical gear shifts that prioritise your fragile wellbeing over appreciation. As I write this, I’m listening to music by Fernando Sor (1778–1839), Cécile Chaminade (1857–1944), music for baritone and piano by Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947), and piano music by Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937). Until now I was unaware of anything other than organ music by Pierné. Job done, Bru-Zane Classical Radio. You may well be my new favourite thing.
I attend two concerts whilst I’m in Venice, both part of a festival celebrating “lighter” French music, including, in singing group Quartet Opale’s performance, music by Hervé (real name Florimond Ronger), who it turns out was overshadowed by the big name in the running order, Jacques Offenbach. It is Offenbach’s music which in comparison feels less interesting — clearer accompaniment allowing the melodic lines their space, but less satisfying musically in terms of how both piano and voices integrate.
Hervé and his counterparts Louis Varney, Robert Planquette, Étienne Rey and Victor Roger are all, it seems, writing more interesting material — more satisfying melodies, more harmonic complexity. Much of this is found in the material, but also in the energy Quartet Opale (soprano Jennifer Courcier, mezzo Éléonore Pancrazi, tenor Enguerrand de Hys, and baritone Philippe Estèphe) bring to the stage. Good music is only as engaging as the craft performers rely on to bring it to life. This music’s second chance at life depends on another element so often taken for granted: the performers. Here they’re tasked with bringing to life that which doesn’t already have a back catalogue, and doing so such that I want to discover more.
Legacy and renewal
Palazzetto Bru Zane isn’t simply a geographic outpost, but an artistic centre too, manifesting the very spirit of discovery and exploration that makes this artistic genre both tantalising and rewarding as an audience member. Even if its musical history isn’t rooted in Venice, it sits well here. It is as though it’s music written for here that needed vision, dedication and support to secure its place in history. Having experienced only a fraction of its output, Palazzetto Bru Zane’s work also highlights how safe the wider industry has become, how artistic programming is narrowed by commercial influences, and marketed by those who don’t really understand what’s important. What PBZ demonstrates here is that there remains much to discover. It just relies on people like them and the organisations that fund them to unearth it and secure that legacy for the future.
