a wagnérien". The opera has been revived from time to time, but has not gained a regular place in the international repertory. Arnold and Nichols write that some of Chabrier's best music went into his comic opera Le Roi malgré lui (Opéra-Comique, 1887), "but unfortunately the work is saddled with one of the most complex and incomprehensible librettos of all time". Ravel so loved the piece that he said he would rather have written it than Wagner's Ring cycle; reviewing a rare revival in 2003 the critic Edward Greenfield commented that despite the plot, the music made one see Ravel's point. After the same production, the critic Rupert Christiansen wrote, "Le Roi malgre lui doesn't know whether it's a Carry On farce by Offenbach or a nationalist epic by Wagner. Perhaps "grand operetta" is the best way of describing this problem piece". Chabrier's last opera was Briséïs, to another libretto by Mendès. Mortally ill, Chabrier could only complete the first of the projected three acts, and the remaining sketches were too inconclusive for any of his colleagues to attempt a completion. It was to have been a romantic tragedy, set in Corinth during time of the Roman Empire. The existing act is rarely staged, but a recording of a concert performance in 1994 has been issued on CD. Poulenc was unimpressed by the libretto, but Messager thought the music of Briséïs showed what heights Chabrier might have reached had he lived. Piano Although the piano works are not the best known part of Chabrier's oeuvre, Poulenc put the cycle Pièces pittoresques on a par with Debussy's Preludes in its importance for French music. In his introduction to a 1995 edition of the piano works, Howat writes that it was Chabrier, more than any other composer, who restored to French music "the essential French traits of clarity, emotional vitality, wit and tenderness" when other French composers were under the influence of Wagner or of dry academicism. Chabrier's early works were for piano solo, and in addition to a small corpus of about twenty completed mature works, some juvenilia have survived. Most of the piano pieces were published in the composer's lifetime, but five completed works and the unfinished Capriccio (1883) were issued posthumously. Some of the mature works are better known in their later orchestral versions, including the Joyeuse marche and the four numbers from the Pièces pittoresques that make up