A few years ago, William Christie paused during an interview about his latest opera production (Monteverdi’s “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” then having a triumphant run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), to declare he was hard at work on a new project, Les Jardins des Voix. Singers in the last stages of university training were being auditioned all over the world to participate in a “Baroque boot camp” under his direction.

Why, I asked, would someone so overworked, with so many operas still to revive and record, take on yet another project? “Because there’s a new generation of artists coming up, my dear,” he answered, “and I must work with them.” The unspoken appendix to that statement was “If I don’t train them, who will?”

That first Jardin des Voix, in 2002, was a resounding success. This Wednesday, the second class of garden graduates makes its American debut at Alice Tully Hall, performing excerpts from works by Handel, Mozart, Monteverdi, Purcell, and the French masters Mr. Christie has championed: Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Louis-Nicolas Clerambault, and Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Mr. Christie, the Buffalo-born-and-American-trained harpsichordist, conductor, and coach, is the contemporary master of Europe’s first wave of classical music. In the early 1970s, Mr. Christie forsook a promising academic career to perform in Europe. Making Paris his home base, he created a future by rediscovering abandoned 17th and 18th century scores in music collections, libraries, even the basement of the Opera. “It was forgotten music,” Mr. Christie has said. ” Any living tradition connected to it had died out long before we were born.”

Figuring out what makes this formal, declarative, often frustratingly subtle music move hearts and minds and sing became Mr. Christie’s life’s work. To the astonishment of audiences, critics, other conductors, and the entire French public, this American built a modern tradition of Baroque performance unassailable in its virtuosity, beauty, and profundity.

Be warned: never call it “authentic.” Mr. Christie once said he finds “authenticity” a “loathsome word.” Almost alone among leaders of early music ensembles, Mr. Christie has none of the museum mentality about him; he insists he’s a contemporary artist performing works a century or two older than the more familiar, mainstream classical repertory. Yet much of what we know of these unforgettable operas, cantatas, and pieces d’occasion derive from the conglomeration of voices, instruments, and tempi coaxed from Mr. Christie’s research, practice, and, most of all, his imagination.

The conductor founded his own ensemble, Les Arts Florissants, in 1979, its title taken from a divine little Charpentier opera in which the arts flourish in place of war. The company’s 1984 recording of Charpentier’s terrifying opera “Medee” made its name. Today, their discography includes more than 70 recordings of works by dozens of composers. “There are as many masterpieces in those first two centuries of opera than there are in the later ones,” he told me, a statement that before Mr. Christie’s undertook his efforts would have been met by hoots of derision.

Remaining apart from the musical mainstream, refusing to conduct Baroque works for modern-instrument orchestras, he has nonetheless profoundly influenced how others play Baroque. The recent Met “Rodelinda” production certainly succeeded due to its excellent cast and conductor – but remember that Renee Fleming, David Daniels, and conductor Harry Bicket have all worked with Mr. Christie.

Ms. Fleming performed in a smashing Handel “Alcina” that played Paris and Chicago (but nobody managed to bring to New York). Mr. Daniels did so in a searing “Theodora” (which Mr. Bicket worked on and later led). Even James Levine’s Mozart conducting has in recent seasons taken on some of the sensitivity to fluctuating tempi, wise articulation of ornamentation (something he never used to allow, even though Verdi did), and wider emotional compass Mr. Christie has taught our ears to yearn for.

Mr. Christie is often compared to other Baroque conductors of his day. Some are artists of real distinction and importance. Some are not, however successfully they’ve brand named themselves. Mr. Christie’s true peers are earlier maestros, those whose authority and passion embodied the tradition of unassailably great conducting: Hans von Bulow, Toscanini, Mahler, Furtwangler, the late Carlos Kleiber.

You trusted the sounds these men summoned; today, we trust Mr. Christie because we believe he is delivering an entire world of sound to us, one whose protocols and ideas may at first seem hopelessly alien but, through the understanding and emotional integrity he invests them with, suddenly tell us much about music and life we have never heard in the same way before.

Mr. Christie isn’t resting on his reputation. He recently revived “David et Jonathas,” commissioned from Charpentier by the Jesuits and performed as they heard it: in church, with a choir of men and boys. And there’s Les Jardins des Voix: the sequel, a showcase for a fresh crop of singers who probably would never have turned on to this music had Mr. Christie stayed in America. What remains to be done? Perhaps another garden needs to be cultivated – one for conductors.

Now 60, Christie is in the dubious position of watching former novices become competitors (Marc Minkowski with Les Musiciens du Louvre, Emmanuelle Haim with Le Concert d’Astree). None has approached his eminence, which could present a problem for the future. Perhaps the only person capable of shepherding a group of great Baroque maestri who’ll keep these splendid, venerable works sounding through another century is the man who breathed new life into them in the first place.

Le Jardin des Voix will perform with Les Arts Florissants Orchestra at Alice Tully Hall on March 16 & 17 at 8 p.m. (Lincoln Center, 212-721-6500).