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In the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris, I found myself listening to a lot of French music and thinking about the Leonard Bernstein quote going around on Facebook: "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." This list came to seem like my natural response. A very small response, I know. This list is chronological and leaves off people I should probably include. The forty [note: now forty-one] composers listed below are merely a start.

Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...

Antonacci/Gillet/Richards/Cavallier/Monteverdi Choir/Orr/Gardiner

(Fra, 2DVDs)

This was recorded last year at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, where Carmen had its premiere in 1875. It in no way attempts historical reconstruction, but aims for a sense of the original scale and scope of a piece that has been performed as everything from the most intimate of chamber works to an epic, with a cast of thousands. John Eliot Gardiner conducts Richard Langham Smith's new critical edition with fiery precision, while the period sound of the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique adds rawness to the prevailing sensuality. Adrian Noble's production, hampered by its vortex-cum-bullring set, doesn't ideally anchor the work in the French naturalist tradition, but Anna Caterina Antonacci and Andrew Richards generate such a terrific erotic charge as Carmen and José that you understand why its first audiences found it obscene. Anne-Catherine Gillet's Micaela is timorous rather than morally strong,...