and Véronique, show a difference in style, "bringing an altogether fresher approach to the genre." Towards the end of his career Messager successfully moved to "comédie musicale", the French form of musical comedy. Ballets apart, Messager composed thirty works for the stage; they fall into several different, or sometimes overlapping, genres; the most numerous are opéras comiques (9), opérettes (7) and comédies musicales (3). The composer remarked late in his career: Early stage works Although Messager called some of his early stage works opéras comiques they have, Gervase Hughes suggests, more in common with opérette than their composer acknowledged. Nevertheless, Messager introduced adventurous modern harmonic details in his early pieces, and strove to raise the artistic standards of opérette to that of opéra comique while retaining the essential panache of the genre. Hughes finds the first stage works uneven in quality but La Fauvette du temple (1884) to contain two fine expressive duets as well as waltzes and polkas with "an Offenbach lilt". Hughes judges the next two scores, La Béarnaise and La Fauvette (both 1885), less satisfying but nonetheless at least as good as anything by Messager's older contemporaries Planquette, Serpette and Lecocq. Wagstaff writes that the composer's most enduring work is the ballet score Les Deux Pigeons (1886). The piece is based on the fable The Two Pigeons by Jean de La Fontaine. The music is best known in the five-movement suite arranged from the full score, which includes the "Entrée de tziganes". Messager revived the ballet in 1906 in London and in 1912 in Paris in a shortened, two-act version. In 1961 John Lanchbery revised this for Frederick Ashton's new version of the ballet, with a closing reconciliation scene from earlier music and a passage transcribed from Véronique. This was first given at Covent Garden, is revived regularly by the Royal Ballet and has been staged by such other companies as CAPAB and Australian Ballet. Isoline (1888), a musical fairy story ("conte des fées"), is neither an opérette nor an opéra comique. Writing in 1908, Fauré called it "one of the most poetic, most expressive works that have been written in France in the last twenty years", but it made little impact. The score remained in obscurity until 1930 when Reynaldo Hahn staged the ballet section of the work at Cannes. The whole piece was revived at the Opéra-Comique in 1958; it failed again, but the ballet,