Photo © Elisa Haberer / OnP
Photo © Elisa Haberer / OnP
Lear
Palais Garnier - from 20 May to 12 June 2016
Book Subscribe Option booking This production is no longer available for subscription
Lear
New show
Opera Aribert Reimann
Book Subscribe Option booking This production is no longer available for subscription
Personal offers for this show
Palais Garnier - from 20 May to 12 June 2016
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 :
Director :
Set design :
Costume design :
Video :
Lighting design :
Dramaturgy :
Chorus master :
König Lear :
König von Frankreich :
Herzog von Albany :
Herzog von Cornwall :
Graf von Kent :
Graf von Gloster :
Edgar :
Edmund :
Goneril :
Regan :
Cordelia :
Narr :
Bedienter :
Ritter :
Performances
Available in audiodescription
Advantages
Full
Available in audiodescription
Advantages
Full
Gallery
Audio clips
Podcast | Lear - Aribert Reimann
— By In partnership with France Musique
About the work
Podcast Lear
Exit the King
The deepest thing within us
By Simon Hatab and Milena Mc Closkey
Shakespeare at the Opera
Broadcast on France Musique on 18 June.
Media and technical partners
Radio broadcaster
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