dead. He decides to assume the hermit's identity. Jule and Phrosine arrive to ask the hermit if he has seen the fugitive Mélidore. The "hermit" tells them that Mélidore has drowned. Phrosine is distraught but then she recognises Mélidore's voice. The two secretly make a plan to see each other again. Mélidore says he will light a beacon on the island every night which will guide Phrosine as she swims across the Straits of Messina to him. Act 3 Scene: Another part of the island It is night. Mélidore lights the beacon just before a storm blows up. Mélidore prays for Phrosine's safety. However, the storm extinguishes the beacon. A boat arrives, but it contains Jule, not Phrosine. Jule explains how he had seen his sister swimming across the strait and pursued her in the boat. Phrosine swam towards him as she mistook Jule's torch for the beacon. Jule refused to let her get into the boat and left her to drown. Mélidore leaps into the sea to save her and drags her to land. The repentant Jule finally agrees to the couple's marriage, as does Aimar who turns out to have survived. Music Mélidore et Phrosine was a boldly experimental work. Elizabeth Bartlet, writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, comments : "Méhul’s experiments of the mid-1790s demonstrate how daring he was, particularly in a sometimes shocking use of dissonance, the deliberate incompletion of formal expectations for dramatic effect and the orchestral expression of extreme psychological states to a degree surpassing previous works. In Mélidore et Phrosine the composer achieved a musical unification through themes and motifs, tonal structures and modulation schemes not hitherto attempted in the genre." According to Winton Dean, "The harmonic style of Mélidore et Phrosine is bolder than anything in Rossini, Bellini or Donizetti, and even than early Beethoven." Hector Berlioz, an admirer of Méhul, praised the composer's innovative orchestration:"the music [of Mélidore et Phrosine] is often inspired and contains orchestral effects entirely new at the time, such as the use of four horns in their hollowest hand-stopped notes to accompany, like an instrumental death-rattle, the voice of a dying man." Edward Dent described the opera's place in the development of musical Romanticism: "Mélidore et Phrosine has in fact almost all the ingredients we look for in a typical Romantic opera; but perhaps we do not recognise them, because they are definitely