Prologue pour un Marco Polo.

Until recently, gay composer Claude Vivier was Canada's best-kept musical secret. Stabbed to death in his Paris apartment in 1983 at the age of 34 (the 19-year-old murderer, who may have been a prospective lover, was later caught and sentenced), the Quebec-born Vivier lived theatrically, worked methodically, loved fleetingly, and wrote music of haunting originality. But until a few months ago, Americans remained unaware of his tragically muted genius.

Vivier was almost completely ignored here, and his few Canadian-produced recordings were nearly impossible to obtain. Then, with no fanfare, Philips Records released stateside an Amsterdam-made CD containing four vocalized versions of Vivier's works. Taped in 1995, the recording features American soprano Susan Narucki and those great contemporary music specialists, the Schonberg Ensemble, conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw. It's a major discovery.

Vivier had intended to incorporate the four works (written in 1980 and 1981) into an opera on the life of Marco Polo. The longest piece, "Prologue pour un Marco Polo," is set both to verse (by Paul Chamberland) and to a language of Vivier's own devising (Philips, unfortunately, omitted the texts), an exotic blend. The harmonies are luxuriant, the orchestration is arresting--the music seems to rise from some great abyss--and conventional Western counterpoint is disdained.

The record prompted New York Times music critic Paul Griffiths to write an absorbing review, which was a mere fragment of an extended profile of the composer written for and, for some reason, never published by The New Yorker (One hopes the piece, a splendid introduction to Vivier, will someday be given the exposure it merits.)

The strangest attribute of this quartet of works--which also includes "Bouchara," "Zipangu," and "Lonely Child"--is its incredibly appealing universality. With the battle lines contemporary music drawn among minimalism, new romanticism, postmodernism, serialism, and whatnot, Vivier seems to cut a wide path through cultures, trends, and biases. You can find aspects of chant and the now Eastern European mysticism here--qualities that probably appealed to the bean counters at Philips--but this is really music for the ear rather than the cerebrum.

Tracing Vivier's education helps to explain the unique, eclectic sound he created. He studied first with the doyen of Quebecois composers, Gilles Tremblay, at the Montreal Conservatory, moved to Europe in 1971 to work with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and delved into electronic music in the Netherlands with Gottfried Michael Koenig. In 1977, Vivier toured Asia and Iran before settling in Bali for a few years, a sojourn that, in his own words, proved personally and professionally enriching. About Vivier's personal life as a gay man, reports offer few details, except that he apparently came out practically as soon as he was old enough to tell the difference between garcons et jeune filles.

The Canadian Music Council named Vivier Composer of the Year in 1981, and as is traditional in a civilized country, government grants and commissions soon came his way. In 1982 he moved to Paris; at the time of his murder he was working on his second opera, about the death of another gay composer--Tchaikovsky, who was believed by musicologists then to have committed suicide.

Death (and immortality and childhood) remains central to Vivier's music, most of which is rooted in the voice. Still, the mood is far from meditative. Vivier wrestles with his personal demons constantly and probes the internal landscape almost obsessively, and the tension finds release in vocal lines of astonishing virtuosity. In "Bouchara," Narucki draws barely a breath for 12 minutes. But the best of Vivier is in "Lonely Child." Metallic chords punctuate a soaring soprano cantilena, rupturing our reverie with increasing ferocity; and the voice dissolves in a wheezing wind motive, then a single chord interval that suggests eternal peace. The world and the hereafter have been reduced to their essence.