We hear a lot these days about new operas, but precious little about older operas from the relatively golden days of musical composition between the wars, operas that remain new to us because they have been so little performed under adequate conditions. Two shining examples of these rarely revived riches came to light at the beginning of May in Manhattan: a pair of short operas by Darius Milhaud (1892-1974), presented at Florence Gould Hall by the French Institute/Alliance française and L’Opéra français de New York. Milhaud, of course, was a marvelously gifted French composer, whose music was formed by an idiosyncratic mixture of Provençal folk music, Brazilian dance rhythms, jazz, and twentieth-century modernism, all brought together by a strong Conservatoire education and Gallic cosmopolitanism.

The two operas, Le pauvre matelot (to a libretto by Jean Cocteau) and Esther de Carpentras (to a libretto by Armand Lunel), were written in 1926 and 1925, respectively. Le pauvre matelot brilliantly uses French sea tunes to describe a chilling story of a sailor’s return home after a long absence. Unrecognized by his wife, the sailor first must test her fidelity by posing as a rich friend of her supposedly destitute husband; when the sailor goes to sleep, his wife kills him and robs him, thinking that by so doing she is ensuring a prosperous life with her husband. Estheruses Franco-Jewish chants to retell, in the medieval ghetto world of Carpentras, the biblical story of Esther’s successful attempt to save her people