To his contemporaries in Paris, the German-Jewish Giacomo Meyerbeer, whose medium was French grand opera, ranked with Michelangelo. By posterity’s lights, that may have been just a little over the top. Still, for artists who can handle the vocal and dramatic challenges, the opportunities are tremendous. The false prophet at the heart of Le Prophète is Jean van Leyden, taken from the pages of 16th-century Low Country history. Back in the Golden Age, the Metropolitan Opera cast the likes of Enrico Caruso, Jean de Reszke, and Giovanni Martinelli in the part; James McCracken blazed at the center of the house’s major revival in the 1970s. In Aix, the assignment falls to John Osborn, opposite Elizabeth DeShong in the arguably more moving part of his bereft mother Fidès (of old the domain of the redoubtable Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Margarete Matzenauer, in McCracken’s time a vehicle for Marilyn Horne, who blew their performance stats out of the water). Sir Mark Elder conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. Listen for the recurrent Anabaptist chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” (Come to us, to the waters of salvation), a theme Franz Liszt spun into a spell-binding fantasy and fugue for organ. —Matthew Gurewitsch