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Selection from 4 shows
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Selection from 6 shows

Opera

La Bohème

by Giacomo Puccini

Opéra Bastille

from 12 September to 14 October 2025

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Opera

Ariodante

by Georg Friedrich Handel

Palais Garnier

from 16 September to 12 October 2025

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Opera

Il Barbiere di Siviglia

Gioacchino Rossini

Opéra Bastille
from 10 June to 13 July 2025
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Concerts and Recitals

ADO invites the EMESP Tom Jobim

Musicians of the Maria Callas Orchestra and the EMESP Tom Jobim

Grand Amphithéâtre de la Sorbonne
on 11 July 2025 at 7:30 pm
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Ballet

Hofesh Shechter

Red Carpet

Palais Garnier
from 10 June to 14 July 2025
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Life at the Opera

  • Draw-me La Bohème
    Video

    Draw-me La Bohème

  • Les Grands Entretiens, with José Martinez and David Dawson
    Video

    Les Grands Entretiens, with José Martinez and David Dawson

  • Draw-me Ariodante
    Video

    Draw-me Ariodante

  • Les Grands Entretiens with Alexander Neef and Pablo Heras-Casado
    Video

    Les Grands Entretiens with Alexander Neef and Pablo Heras-Casado

  • Draw-me Giselle
    Video

    Draw-me Giselle

  • Podcast Ariodante
    Video

    Podcast Ariodante

  • Les Grands Entretiens
    Video

    Les Grands Entretiens

  • Romantic Tutus in Giselle
    Article

    Romantic Tutus in Giselle

  • Giselle and her Avatars
    Article

    Giselle and her Avatars

© Matthieu Pajot / OnP

Draw-me La Bohème

Watch the video

Understand the plot in 1 minute

1:36 min

Draw-me La Bohème

By Matthieu Pajot

Les Grands Entretiens, with José Martinez and David Dawson

Watch the video

José Martinez, David Dawson

18:52 min

Les Grands Entretiens, with José Martinez and David Dawson

By Isabelle Stibbe

When an artist meets the Paris Opera's General Manager or its Director of Dance, what do they discuss? In this new series entitled Les Grands Entretiens, the Paris Opera lifts the veil on the artistic line-up of new productions for the 25/26 season. The choice of guest artists, the key themes, the directors' creative intentions and the choreographic styles: these exclusive twenty-minute exchanges offer you the first keys to the works that will soon be on the bill.

In this interview, Director of Dance José Martinez discusses the choreographic style and themes of Anima Animus with choreographer David Dawson. The ballet is making its repertoire debut at the Paris Opera.  

© Matthieu Pajot

Draw-me Ariodante

Watch the video

Understand the plot in 1 minute

1:37 min

Draw-me Ariodante

By Matthieu Pajot

Les Grands Entretiens with Alexander Neef and Pablo Heras-Casado

Watch the video

Alexander Neef, Pablo Heras-Casado

20:45 min

Les Grands Entretiens with Alexander Neef and Pablo Heras-Casado

By Isabelle Stibbe

When an artist meets the Paris Opera's General Manager or its Director of Dance, what do they discuss? In this new series entitled Les Grands Entretiens, the Paris Opera lifts the veil on the artistic line-up of new productions for the 25/26 season. The choice of guest artists, the key themes, the directors' creative intentions and the choreographic styles: these exclusive twenty-minute exchanges offer you the first keys to the works that will soon be on the bill. 

What does the Ring represent for an opera house? On the occasion of the new productions of Die Walküre and Siegfried, Paris Opera General Manager Alexander Neef discusses the unique aspects of this colossal undertaking with conductor Pablo Heras-Casado.   

Draw-me Giselle

Watch the video

Understand the plot in 1 minute

1:15 min

Draw-me Giselle

By Octave

The ultimate romantic ballet, Giselle marked the apogee of a new aesthetic that saw diaphanous tutus, white gauze, tulle and tarlatan take over the stage. The Willis bring the illusion of immateriality to this ghostly transfiguration of a tragedy. First performed at the Académie royale de Musique on June 28, 1841, the ballet travelled to Russia, then temporarily disappeared from the repertoire before finally returning to France in 1910. Today’s version by Patrice Bart and Eugene Polyakov – which closely follows Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot’s original choreography – continues to reaffirm the ballet’s early success. Bright, earthly scenes and spectral, nocturnal visions: dance becomes the language of the soul and the ballerina’s ethereal presence seems to defy gravity.

© plainpicture/Narratives/ Brent Darby

Podcast Ariodante

Listen the podcast

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" - by France Musique

Podcast Ariodante

By Jean-Baptiste Urbain

"Dance! Sing! 7 minutes at the Paris Opera" offers original incursions into the season thanks to broadcasts produced by France Musique and the Paris Opera.

For each opera or ballet production, Charlotte Landru-Chandès (opera) and Jean-Baptiste Urbain (dance), present the works and artists you are going to discover when you attend performances in our theatres.

Les Grands Entretiens

Watch the video

Alexander Neef, Shirin Neshat

18:19 min

Les Grands Entretiens

By Isabelle Stibbe

When an artist meets the Paris Opera's General Manager or its Director of Dance, what do they discuss? In this new series entitled Les Grands Entretiens, the Paris Opera lifts the veil on the artistic line-up of new productions for the 25/26 season. The choice of guest artists, the key themes, the directors' creative intentions and the choreographic styles: these exclusive twenty-minute exchanges offer you the first keys to the works that will soon be on the bill. 

In this interview, Paris Opera General Manager Alexander Neef talks to director Shirin Neshat about the new production of Verdi's Aida, a work whose modernity has a powerful resonance today.  

© Christophe Pelé / OnP

Romantic Tutus in Giselle

Read the article

A production remembered

06 min

Romantic Tutus in Giselle

By Anne-Marie Legrand

The story is well-known: Giselle discovers that the man she loves is in reality a prince betrothed to another woman. Devastated by grief, the young peasant girl succumbs to madness and dies. She joins the Wilis, young brides to be who have died before their nuptials and who condemn men to dance themselves to death. If this ballet, first performed in 1841, has lost nothing of its fascination over the centuries, it is particularly thanks to those bewitching winged creatures, the Wilis, dressed in tulle and on points. Anne-Marie Legrand, in charge of the Soft Dressmaking Workshop at the Palais Garnier, confides the secrets of the making of the emblematic tutus from the “white act” of Giselle.

The Soft Dressmaking Workshop (in French Atelier Flou, “flou” meaning blurred or indistinct) is dedicated to the conception of the female costumes, unlike the Tailoring Workshop, which makes the male costumes. Why these names? I couldn’t give you the exact reason. To my mind, when you look at a male costume made by the Tailoring Workshop, you notice that it has a more structured look, with fabric cut on a flat surface. For the female costumes, however, a large part of the work is done on the tailor's dummy because a pattern is not enough to work from. The fabrics are all-important and each one requires a particular approach. We have to be very reactive in our work, moulding and sculpting the fabric, particularly for the drapes. I think that’s where the term “flou” comes from, because we sculpt diaphanous fabric for women whose curves can be infinitely varied and subtle.

As head of the Soft Dressmaking Workshop, I prepare the models of the costumes. The decorators arrive at the workshops with designs that I make up in three dimensions. The designs are more or less flexible, depending on the decorators. I have to reconcile the vision of the artistic team with what we can do and especially with the constraints and particularities of dance costumes, which is our speciality. We make suggestions to the decorator and eventually the design is finalised. Then, I create a pattern which I pass on to my two workshop assistants who do the cutting out. Then they pass on the job to the nine dressmakers. We also use temporary staff when the workload is really heavy. At the moment, we’re working on a revival of the ballet Giselle as well as on two new productions so there are twenty-seven of us in the workshop!   

Hannah O’Neill dans le rôle de Myrtha (Giselle, 2016)
Hannah O’Neill dans le rôle de Myrtha (Giselle, 2016) © Svetlana Loboff / OnP

The costumes for Giselle are redone regularly for several reasons. Firstly, because it’s a ballet that occupies an important place in the company’s repertoire and which is often performed, in particular on foreign tours. The costumes get a lot of wear and are stocked in containers: the dancers barely have time to take them off before they are packed away, sometimes still slightly damp. Silk yellows very quickly so we have no choice but to renew the costumes.

Once the skirts and bodices have been cut out, the dressmakers get them ready for fitting. There are always two fitting sessions. At the first, the costume is not finished. Between the first and second fitting it takes five days' work to carry out the considerable job of pleating the organdy silk used for the Wilis. After the second fitting, we make the final adjustments to the bodice before we assemble it with the skirt. It is painstaking work, all done by hand, in order to fit it perfectly to the dancer's body.

There are various sorts of skirts and tutus. The type used in Giselle is what we call a “romantic tutu”. At the end of the 18th century, with grand ballets like La Sylphide, the long skirt with several underskirts became the emblematic costume of the ballerinas. It is also known as the “Degas tutu” in reference to the painter Edgar Degas, who often took dancers as a subject for his paintings. But at the dawn of the 20th century, the tutu was shortened, became rigid and began to be worn above the hips: the pancake tutu or English tutu was now the order of the day. This is the tutu used in Swan Lake, for example, and therefore the emblematic ballerina’s costume in the collective unconscious today.

Making the bodice and the tutu requires a considerable amount of work. One single tutu in Giselle takes 23 metres of tulle, cut into seven layers placed one on top of another. We use different types of tulle with different characteristics for each layer: first comes a stiffer tulle to structure the skirt then come layers of increasingly fine, supple tulle. The layers are gathered, pinned and stitched by hand, one by one, onto a yoke. Then we do what we call “points de bagage” : large, loose stitches that keep the layers together during performance. To make a complete costume, it takes at least sixty hours.

In the second act of Giselle, the dancers all wear romantic tutus and points, which is why it is called the “white act”. It’s the most enchanting and it’s when the plot moves into the realms of the supernatural. We are in the kingdom of the Wilis, ghosts of young women who died before their weddings. I think the tutus make an essential contribution to this unearthly atmosphere. Their whiteness seems to reflect the light of the moon, - it’s extremely beautiful. And the “unreal dance” with which they ensnare men would really lose something of its hypnotic power without the effects created by the fabric. The diaphanous quality of the tutu gives the Wilis' movements an ethereal and floating quality. In spite of the twenty metres of fabric, on stage it appears infinitely light. The romantic tutu has become an integral part of the ballet Giselle.


interviewed by Milena Mc Closkey

© Caroline Laguerre

Giselle and her Avatars

Read the article

Once a romantic, always a romantic

05 min

Giselle and her Avatars

By Valère Etienne / BmO

In the entire history of ballet, I know of nothing more perfect, more beautiful or greater than Giselle”, wrote Serge Lifar with alacrity. It is true that the popularity of Giselle has never wavered, and neither has its place among the most important creations in the history of ballet, and indeed dance in general. For whilst remaining the incarnation of a certain era, Giselle is timeless; the epitome of romantic ballet, modern re-readings of it have often sought only to render it yet more romantic.


If Giselle is rightly considered one of the summits of romantic dance, it is not only because this ballet, created around 1840 by Théophile Gautier and Jules-Henry Vernoy de Saint-Georges, is a product of its time; it is also because the many performances of it that have been given right up to our own time have revisited, accentuated and streamlined some of the elements that constitute its romanticism.

The story of Giselle was entirely inspired by German romanticism: the idea for it came to Gautier in response to a passage from the manifesto Über Deutschland (On Germany) by Heinrich Heine on the subject of Vile, creatures from German and Slavonic folklore, the ghosts of young fiancées dead before their nuptials and haunting the woods to carry off imprudent wanderers with them into the afterlife. The ballet’s plot, situated in a medieval, bucolic Germany, begins in the first act with a scene featuring folk dances whose strong “local colour” is reminiscent of certain works by Victor Hugo or Musset; and the second act, in which the Vile appear is dominated by a dreamlike, fantasmagorial atmosphere, heightened in the first production of the ballet by the decors of Charles Ciceri, “a great specialist of lighting effects, sunrises, moonlight and evocations from beyond the grave”, wrote Serge Lifar.

After a resoundingly successful period, in France and elsewhere, that continued up until the 1860s, Giselle seems to have gone out of fashion and disappeared from the bill. But the ballet was later to enjoy a renaissance in Russia, at the Mariinski Theatre in Saint Petersburg where, in 1884, 1887 and 1899, the French ballet master, Marius Petipa, presented new version of Giselle. In the course of these performances, the original libretto and the choreography were modified, notably, those elements judged to be purely decorative and not necessary to the drama were cut out.

It was in this new mould that, in 1910 and 1924, Giselle was re-exported back to France by the Russians, with memorable new productions. Deliberately modernised, the ballet radicalised certain elements that had been present initially and, as a result, it could be considered as even more romantic than the original. In Act II, for example, all the elements of daily reality, whose appearance contrasted with the ghostly presence of the Vile, were cut: the halt of the hunters at the beginning of the tableau, the confrontation between the peasants and the Vile that follows, and the arrival of Princess Bathilde at Albrecht’s side at the end (the curtain now falls on a despairing and solitary Prince). Thus the Act now belongs entirely to the Vile, nothing more disturbs the dreamlike and sepulchral atmosphere created by their presence on stage. In Act I, the “Madness Scene”, in which Giselle discovers that her love for Albrecht is impossible, was also modified: less danced, more mimed, it offered a vision of madness that was both more realistic and more dramatic.

As Lifar said, these changes contributed to a more “poetic” conception of ballet, in keeping, in his opinion, with what Gautier had wanted (Gautier had had to make a few concessions to his co-librettist Vernoy de Saint-Georges, a confirmed author of ballets orientated more towards entertainment and bourgeois drama) and closer to the spirit of German romanticism that had inspired him in the first place.

The interpreters of the role of Giselle also changed, and with them, the way the role was conceived. After Carlotta Grisi, the first Giselle, a blue-eyed blond whose appeal as a young peasant lay in her freshness and vivacity, the role was reinvented by the great Russian ballerinas who then appropriated it: Anna Pavlova, Olga Spessivtseva, mysterious brunettes who embodied a more tragic, ethereal Giselle, perfect when they mimed her madness or took on the aspect of ghosts clad in the winding sheets of the Vile.

Yesterday and today, Giselle embodies the apotheosis of Romantic ballet; but it is clear that, from one period to another, one is not speaking of entirely the same romanticism. The ballet that was performed in 1841 was of a prosaic, bucolic romanticism, still close to light entertainment, relying to a large extent on effects of local colour. In the 20th century, it became more poetic, more absolute, with a romanticism dominated by themes of dreaming and death that, as a result, is timeless.

News

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    02 juillet 2025

    New

    Release of the film Coddess Variations on Paris Opera Play and on tour

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    28 avril 2025

    Discover La Magie Opéra, a brand-new immersive VR experience at the Palais Garnier from 7 May to 31 August: explore the theatre and experience the emblematic arias of the Opera

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    28 juin 2025

    Il Barbiere di Siviglia: cast change

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    11 juin 2025

    Rigoletto: cast change

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    03 juin 2025

    Tribute to Stéphanie Romberg

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    21 mai 2025

    Paris Opera Ballet tour in San Francisco and New York in October 2025

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    19 mai 2025

    Manon: cast change

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    05 mai 2025

    The Paris Opera will launch a new youth chorus programme starting in September 2026

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    04 mai 2025

    Tribute to Pierre Audi

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    29 avril 2025

    The Junior Ballet's public rehearsal is cancelled and will be replaced by a public rehearsal of the ballet "Sylvia"

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