Arsène Alexandre is now wholly forgotten—his name has disappeared from all but the weightiest tomes. His single claim to fame is having written Karadec, a boring play produced at the Théâtre moderne, Paris, in 1892, for which d'Indy provided incidental music. Critic Francisque Sarcey, writing in Le Temps, noted of d'Indy's score, "One of the entr'actes, the last, revived the audience's attention, which had dissipated from scene to scene; we were held by it and genuinely moved...." Scored for a small theater orchestra, the work at length, which includes songs, choruses, preludes, and interludes, was published in vocal score (that is, with piano accompaniment) and dedicated to Julien Tiersot, a fellow Franck pupil and authority on French folk song. Tiersot had, in fact, collaborated with d'Indy on the latter's first collection of folk songs, Chansons du Vivarais et du Vercors (1892), for which Tiersot provided an introduction and notes. Not a fertile melodist, d'Indy resorted to folk song at all stages of his career for vital melodic material, or, as one commentator put it, "The popular songs and dances from the regions of France run through Vincent d'Indy's music like streams of life." His "greatest hit," so to speak, is pointedly titled Symphonie sur un chant montagnard française (1886), followed in 1888 by the engaging but almost unknown Fantaisie sur des thèmes populaires françaises for oboe and orchestra. Set in Brittany, Karadec gave d'Indy license to make liberal use of Breton folk song, which he did with an expert deftness lending the three numbers he chose for presentation at a Société Nationale concert on May 2, 1891—the petite suite occasionally heard today—an ingratiating charm out of all proportion to d'Indy's own valuation of the score as "du toc," that is, brummagem. But Karadec represented an intrusion upon composition of the ambitiously monumental Fervaal. A Prélude encloses some conventional theatrical gestures between one of d'Indy's most striking gambits, a catchy, stalking theme. Already aired in the Prélude, the central berceuse-like Chanson is briefly but richly worked to a warmly telling climax. And "Noce Breton"—Breton wedding—opens with more conventionally searing drama before giving way, incongruously but happily, to a suavely spirited folk dance. Scored for strings, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two French horns, two kettledrums, and a triangle, the freshness and aquarelle-like picturesqueness of the Karadec suite audibly owes far more to the example of Carmen than to the oft-cited "diverses allusions" to Die Götterdämmerung.

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