The search for Rita Strohl is only beginning. The French composer, a contemporary of Claude Debussy, has returned to the world of music after more than eight decades. Agnès Boucher, an author of detective and historical novels, has published the first biography of Strohl, the result of three years of research into both the person and the artist. Boucher, who is not a musicologist or musician, aims to reintegrate Strohl into our collective memory and inspire musicians to explore her previously unexplored operas. She describes feeling the music of Strohl in her "guts," a powerful compliment, as this inner vibration is rarely deceptive. Rita Strohl, born Rita (likely a shortened form of Marguerite) Larousse Villette, was the daughter of a painter. She first married Émile Strohl, a naval officer, with whom she had four children before his early death. She later married Richard Burgsthal, a virtuoso pianist, painter, and glassmaker, who was twenty years her junior. The couple had an intense artistic collaboration before divorcing in 1930. A fiercely independent artist, Strohl was born in Lorient and raised in the Paris region starting in 1877. She cannot be reduced to her Breton origins, her two husbands, or even her four children, of whom only the last lived with her. Her work, considered modernist by her contemporaries, was rediscovered in 2024 with nearly six hours of her vocal, chamber, and orchestral music published in three volumes by La boîte à pépites. The "Douze chants de Bilitis," composed in 1898 and premiered in 1900, was the most frequently performed work of her lifetime, coinciding with the premiere of Debussy's "Trois Chansons de Bilitis." Starting in 1904, already a widow, Strohl continued to break free from the constraints placed on women of her era, dedicating herself to operatic cycles with religious and esoteric themes, blending the grandeur of Wagnerian total art with Buddhism. A part of her creation, by its grandeur and strangeness, remains an unexplored territory. The title À la recherche de Rita Strohl captures the biographer's approach, which involved extensive research, including meeting descendants, accessing family archives, cataloging publications, and visiting sites such as the famous Grange à Bièvres, a theater with a 120 square meter orchestra pit. The theater, initiated just before World War I, had an inaugural and final concert in 1923. It was there that the Strohl-Burgsthal couple, in the ideal of total art Wagnerian, between Christian mythology, Celtic legends, and Eastern esotericism, worked to create these operatic cycles, with Burgsthal imagining and sketching the sets. The most fascinating moment in Rita Strohl's romantic life is the period around 1910 with Gustave Fayet, one of the first collectors of Vincent van Gogh, who supported the restoration of abbeys and allowed her husband to create important stained glass windows. Fayet, also interested in esotericism, believed in the couple's talent and became one of the financiers of the Grange. The name and importance of Gustave Fayet are themselves undergoing rediscovery, with a prestigious exhibition at the Fondation Louis-Vuitton set to begin in the autumn. Throughout her life, Strohl's work was performed, both her chamber and symphonic compositions. Sporadically, certainly, not without prejudices that often had more to do with her gender than her talent: the critics of the time, meticulously transcribed by Boucher, give a good idea of what any creator, and particularly any female creator, must face in a patriarchal society.