Lear - Aribert Reimann - Opéra national de Paris

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Lear

Palais Garnier - on 01 June 2016 at 7:30 pm

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Lear

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Opera Aribert Reimann

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Palais Garnier - on 01 June 2016 at 7:30 pm

3h00 with 1 interval

About

In few words:

"Where am I? Is it day? I don’t know what to say. Are these hands mine? How I long to know who I am!"
- Lear, Partie II, scène 6

Berlioz wrote nothing more than an overture to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Debussy went no further than the first two numbers of the incidental music he had agreed to write for André Antoine’s production of the play. Verdi, who procrastinated endlessly over this “vast and tortuous” tragedy that had haunted him since 1843, confessed towards the end of his life that the scene where Lear finds himself on the moor had terrified him. Hoping to do justice to the role “less out of theatrical ambition” than because he had long “believed that the various levels of the inner and outer drama could be adapted and effectively expressed in music”, the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau appealed to Benjamin Britten before turning to the German composer, Aribert Reimann.

At first hesitant, the latter finally set to work. After repeatedly reading the play, the work eventually took root and he stored away the music in “a sort of drawer somewhere in [his] head”.
A commission from the Munich Staatsoper in 1975 triggered the actual composition. “Rarely has anyone depicted so convincingly – except perhaps Alban Berg in Wozzeck – the fact that a man's solitude is due to his own incapacity to see those around him”, wrote the first performer of this major 20th century opera composed at his initiative. This new production by Calixto Bieito marks the first revival of the work at the Paris Opera since its French premiere in 1982.

Lear

Opera in two parts (1978)

After William Shakespeare, King Lear
In German

Music :

Aribert Reimann

Libretto :

Claus H. Henneberg

Conductor :

Fabio Luisi

Director :

Calixto Bieito

Set design :

Rebecca Ringst

Costume design :

Ingo Krügler

Video :

Sarah Derendinger

Lighting design :

Franck Evin

Dramaturgy :

Bettina Auer

Chorus master :

Alessandro Di Stefano
Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus

French and English surtitles
König Lear :

Bo Skovhus

König von Frankreich :

Gidon Saks

Herzog von Albany :

Andreas Scheibner

Herzog von Cornwall :

Michael Colvin

Graf von Kent :

Kor-Jan Dusseljee

Graf von Gloster :

Lauri Vasar

Edgar :

Andrew Watts

Edmund :

Andreas Conrad

Goneril :

Ricarda Merbeth

Regan :

Erika Sunnegardh

Cordelia :

Annette Dasch

Narr :

Ernst Alisch

Bedienter :

Nicolas Marie

Ritter :

Lucas Prisor

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