The most popular opera of its time and acclaimed since its creation, Il Trovatore single-handedly illustrates the magic of opera. Returning to the stage of the Opéra Bastille in a production by Àlex Ollé, one of the six artistic directors of the Catalan collective La Fura dels Baus, this opera with its numerous twists and turns has all the ingredients of a cloak-and-dagger novel, including castles, soldiers, burnings at the stake, and outlaws...
Àlex Ollé has chosen to set Il Trovatore in the context of the First World War, thus justifying the extreme situations which the characters have to face: love, jealousy, hate and the desire for vengeance… Based around Antonio García Gutiérrez’s Spanish classic El Trovador ( 1836), the intense, complex libretto is transcended by the beauty of the singing and the director’s turbulent yet visionary vitality.

First performed at the Cairo Opera in 1871 to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, Aida draws us into the fantasy of a reconstructed Antiquity. At the heart of the plot, an impossible choice between love and patriotic duty: A captive Ethiopian princess and an Egyptian soldier betray their people, defy a powerful rival and unite until death. Marked by the contrast between a theatrical extravaganza and the transition towards a more intimate, personal drama, Verdi’s score manages to distinguish the inner angst of its protagonists from the imposing historical setting. The work brings together several themes dear to the composer: nostalgia for a lost homeland, deliverance through death, the contrast between a dispiriting present and an idealized elsewhere, the stifling reach of religious and political power, the regulating factors in a world intentionally littered with pitfalls.

For her Paris Opera debut, Dutch director Lotte de Beer has chosen to cast a critical eye on the European portrayal of colonised peoples, encouraging us to rethink our relationship with aesthetic productions of the past and present.

I want a treasure, which contains them all! I want youth! Frustrated by the futile quest for knowledge, the erudite old Faust sells his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth and the beautiful Marguerite… Reworking the legend which Goethe popularised, Gounod focuses on the love story and elevates the significance of Marguerite’s fall and ultimate salvation. His decision to lighten the philosophical scope of the narrative allowed him to balance scenes where the supernatural called for something visually spectacular with a parallel microcosm governed by inner actions and feelings. Gounod’s score is a tour de force of melodic invention whose vocal composition reveals the composer’s skill at conveying sincere and immediate emotion.

For his Paris Opera debut, German director Tobias Kratzer reflects on contemporary society’s obsession for eternal youth. With its sophisticated scenography, his production oscillates between hyperrealism and magic, the world of today and the eerie atmosphere of German romanticism.   

Based on the eponymous play by Victorien Sardou, Puccini’s opera brings together all the elements of a melodrama: love, politics, violence and religion. Set against the backdrop of the struggle for Italian independence, Tosca is a tragic tale of thwarted love between a passionate, jealous and impulsive singer and a romantic, idealistic painter who champions civil liberties. In a period unsettled by the Battle of Marengo, which pits Napoléon Bonaparte’s French republican army against the Imperial army of the Holy Roman Empire, the terrible and manipulative chief of police Scarpia bargains with the singer: In exchange for spending one night alone with him, he will free her lover Mario. In order to escape his grasp, she murders him. However he will exact his revenge from beyond the grave.

In a landscape reminiscent of Pasolini, the crushing shadow of a cross hovers above everyone, representing colluding political and religious oppression. Through the ubiquitous presence of religious references in both private and public spaces alike, director Pierre Audi’s interpretation skilfully sets out the dramatic lines of the narrative.

Benjamin Britten composed The Rape of Lucretia in 1946 after a radio-drama by André Obey. Britten and his librettist, two convinced pacifists involved way before WWII, address a European society bruised by war and hate. Running from the grand operatic machine, their inspiration drove them to a more intimate construction, the chamber opera. Britten wrote indeed for a small number of musicians and singers-actors in a musical and dramatic language where the narration exceeds the illusion on stage.
Britten chose the myth of the dedicated and suicidal wife and wrote a piece that interrogates desire in its relation with anxiety: mutual love, gulty will and frustration. Britten makes us think about the violence in human relations, about sexuality and its dark zones. With Lucretia as heroin and victim, Britten makes us face the tragic human condition.

Two obsessions can no more exist in the same mind than two bodies in the

same space", wrote Pushkin in "The Queen of Spades" in 1834. A

story in which the young Hermann, eager for social ascension, is obsessed by a

magic formula in the possession of an old countess. To obtain this formula that

would enable him to win at cards, he sacrifices his love for Lisa.

Tchaikovsky's opera of 1890 paints a bitter portrait of the generation of the

final years of Tsarist Russia. Saint Petersburg's streets, embankments and

balls surge out from a score that deliberately seeks to recreate eighteenth-century

musical forms, yet sacrifices nothing to the fervent lyricism so distinctive of

Tchaikovsky's music. This evocation of a far northern city, cut off from the

land and, hence, from reason, might also be seen as a portrait of the composer.

Lev Dodin underlines this notion of loss of reason by setting the characters in

an asylum where ghostly visions haunt lost souls as obsessively as the three

winning cards "three, seven, ace" that echo in Hermann's mind.

“The subject for the Satin Slipper comes from a Chinese legend about two celestial stars in love who, each year, having travelled far, manage to come within reach of each other without ever being able to come together from the disparate sides of the Milky Way.” So surmised Paul Claudel. The play, whose power of attraction has never wavered, occupies a special place in the theatrical repertoire of the 20^th century: written between 1919 and 1924 and first staged by Jean-Louis Barrault in an abridged version in 1943, it would have to await Antoine Vitez to be performed in its entirety. That production, performed in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes in 1987, lasted over ten hours and marked an entire generation of theatregoers, including Marc-André Dalbavie.

Alternatively titled The Worst Is Not Always Certain, The Satin Slipper is an immense parable which alternates between the sublime, the comic and the disturbing. It is set in a specific era—the Spanish Golden Age—during which humanity experiences its first bout of “globalization”. Confronting a passionate desire for individual happiness, external imperatives and an aspiration for the universal, the work leads the spectator into a ongoing state hovering between hypnosis and joy. This new opera is the third world-premiere production commissioned by the Paris Opera for its cycle on French literature.

For his residency as stage director at the Academy, Simon Valastro will build a staging workshop with scenes taken from Perrault and Grimm’s tales which stories inspired composers such as Rossini and Massenet (Cenerentola) and Humperdinck (Hänsel und Gretel). In these colourful musical landscape, Cenerentola, Hänsel and Gretel, unconscious but supported by their good fairies and preceptors, find their ways to recognition and happiness facing danger. How does music express what the texts could not? How to tell and put on the stage the strength of enchantment of these three musical tales?