Sergei Rachmaninoff had a soft spot for Switzerland. The Russian composer honeymooned there and once mused that he'd like to be buried in Lucerne - though he ultimately ended up in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y., proving that even legendary composers can't always control their final resting place.

In the early 1930s, Rachmaninoff bought a plot of land on the shores of Lake Lucerne and built a Bauhaus-style villa. The location may have had a sentimental bonus: a short boat ride away was the house where Richard Wagner and his family lived from 1866 to 1872. The Rachmaninoffs' 1902 honeymoon had also included a stop in Bayreuth, Germany, where Wagner built an opera house against all odds to stage his works.

Rachmaninoff had already clawed his way out of a creative slump - reportedly with the help of hypnotherapy - but his encounter with Wagner's work seems to have nudged the young composer, more often associated with the concert hall as both composer and pianist, to complete two one-act operas: "Francesca da Rimini" and "The Miserly Knight."

Premiered back to back in 1906, those operas have been reunited in Switzerland this season at the Zurich Opera House. They are preceded by "Aleko," the one-act opera Rachmaninoff wrote at age 19 for his graduation from the Moscow Conservatory. Adapted from Pushkin's poem "The Gypsies," the setting recalls Bizet's "Carmen," but musically "Aleko" wears its influences closer to home: Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky.

Zurich Opera House's general music director, Gianandrea Noseda, seems particularly well suited to presenting these operatic rarities. Noseda - who also helms the National Symphony Orchestra, newly peripatetic after the Kennedy Center's closure - has dedicated himself to Russian repertoire for decades and first established himself in his new role at Zurich with a Wagner "Ring" cycle. Next year, he will perform the "Ring" in concert with the Zurich Opera House orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the first time the whole work has been played there.

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