ABSTRACT
Adolphe Adam was best known as an outstandingly prolific composer of more than 80 operas and ballets, but he was also highly active in unearthing and restoring the music of others. During the 1840s and 1850s, he produced cosmetic reworkings of the operas of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry, Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, Nicolas Dalayrac and other leading composers of the eighteenth century, and arranged Rameau’s ‘Dans ces doux asiles’ from Castor et Pollux into a choral piece that became a concert favourite in mid-nineteenth-century Paris. This activity attracted a certain amount of opprobrium, both from those who had no interest in older music and from those who regarded the works of past masters as sacrosanct.1 In his memoirs, therefore, he was at pains to defend this practice, arguing that he brought new levels of scholarship, scrupulousness and sensitivity to bear, which distinguished his reworkings from the clumsier efforts of previous generations.
