This album pays homage to the composer Adèle Hugo (1830-1915), the fifth child of the great poet Victor Hugo. Suffering from lifelong psychological instability, she spent half of her tragic life in mental institutions, from the age of 42 until her death at 85. She became passionately fond of music from an early age, studying the piano and then composition. Her musical manuscripts were recently rediscovered, and the director of the Victor Hugo Museums in Paris and Guernsey entrusted them to composer Richard Dubugnon for the purpose of researching and reconstructing the jigsaw of her fragmentary scores, which had been lying forgotten for more than a century. What has emerged is a set of fourteen of her songs on poems by her father and verses taken from his great novel Les Misérables, as well as five pieces for solo instrument and piano.

The artists assembled to record this program include the Orchestre Victor Hugo and its music director Jean-François Verdier, and leading French singers including Karine Deshayes, Axelle Fanyo, Sandrine Piau, and Laurent Naouri.