French Opera Arias is a 51-minute studio album of music performed by Frederica von Stade and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of John Pritchard.

[1] The LP version of the album, designed under the art direction of Allen Weinberg, features a photograph of von Stade by Clive Barda on the front of the sleeve and an image of Paris's Palais Garnier on the back.

"Depuis hier je cherche en vain" from Roméo et Juliette was a rather similar piece, another aria from a charmer of a page boy, strikingly different from the Berlioz item that followed it.

from Beatrice et Bénédict was sung with "serious tenderness and urgency", and was just as affecting as the better known Berlioz aria on the B side of the record, Marguerite's Romance from La damnation de Faust.

Her reading of "Connais-tu le pays" was as beautiful as Lucrezia Bori's, and it was impossible to imagine that even the first Lucette, Julia Guiraudon, could have made a more spellbinding scene out of Cinderella's wondering whether her Fairy Godmother would deal with her mercifully.

And then there were two jeux d'esprit from Offenbach to end matters with a smile: "the Périchole swaying dangerously with her champagne and spilling never a drop, the Grande-Duchesse going about her indiscretions with irresistible style.

Von Stade had a miraculously firm grasp of her composers' different styles, portraying the Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein in absolute accord with Offenbach's idiom and "achieving a fine intensity of passion and grief in 'D'amour l'ardente flamme'.

It was phenomenal, he wrote, how Frederica von Stade had gone from the Metropolitan Opera auditions to global stardom in a mere seven years, despite rationing her public appearances and limiting herself to a relatively narrow repertoire.

She had no difficulty in rising to a high C. Her lucid diction made French music a good choice for her, and her interpretation of all the items on her album was well nigh impeccable.

[6] According to an unnamed reporter profiling von Stade for Time on 13 December 1976, the album showcased "a lustrous amber mezzo-soprano voice with an unusually sweet crystalline top and seemingly effortless agility".

[7] David Shengold mentioned the album in Opera News in December 2016, reviewing a box set of von Stade's Columbia CDs in which it had been reissued.

1866), with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré after Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ("Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship", 1795-1796) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Jacques Offenbach La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein (Paris, 1867), with a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy On 4 October 1976, Columbia released the album on LP (catalogue numbers M-76522 in Britain, M-34206 in the US) with an insert with notes, texts and translations.

[3] In 1998, Sony issued the album on CD (catalogue number SMK-60527) with a 20-page booklet including texts and translations and a memoir by von Stade recalling how her recording was made.