It’s true that hierarchies in general can be a problem. I always aim to eliminate them so as to allow a community to emerge and make this collective body possible. However, the Paris Opera, albeit an august institution, has the extraordinary capacity to carry the artist along and allow her/him freedom of expression. I have felt really good here and I’ve been able to work with some outstanding professionals in all the domains which go together to make a production. By the way, I also really admire the way in which the Opera Ballet has opened up to contemporary dance.

I love this music. My first experience of opera choreography was Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas in 2005. Baroque music is intimately linked to dance, its forms are inspired by dance forms, which, by the way, offers another kind of challenge to a choreographer. With Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet, I found material of a very different kind, yet charged with potential for dance. This is a work unlike any other: neither an opera nor a ballet but a “dramatic symphony” with a very abstract, refined narrative. In it, Berlioz developed a way of thinking that was more suggestive than narratorial, an approach that can simply be extended by dance. If only because of this suggestive quality, the music is profoundly romantic.

Nobody is ever one single thing, but rather a multitude of different facets! Each work, each project draws on a different facet. I am also a great realist! Whatever the case, Berlioz’s romanticism is a powerful, intoxicating current that is particularly conducive to that collective organism I was talking about. One is literally swept along. But from an emotional point of view, Romeo and Juliet is also harrowing; you have to go with the flow whilst being careful not to get carried away, which is dangerous. I haven’t, strictly speaking, fought against this vulnerability or repressed the emotion. Berlioz’s music really stimulates our emotional side, obliging us to open up, to welcome this emotional flood and find an appropriate corporeal language. But at the same time, I’ve had to maintain a certain distance, so as not to lose my hold over the artistic aspect.

The genesis of Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet was the product of complex circumstances and, although this eminently modern work marked the development of dramatic music in the Romantic period in a decisive way, it is likely that its composition was partly inspired by Berlioz’s former operatic failures.

In September 1838, the premier production at the Royal Academy of Music of Berlioz’s first opera, Benvenuto Cellini, was a fiasco: the work was slated by both audiences and the musicians themselves. This set-back left Berlioz profoundly wounded. Scarcely a few months later, however, his luck turned: on an evening in December in the hall of the Paris Conservatoire, Berlioz conducted his Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy; Paganini, present in the audience, was instantly fired with enthusiasm for his music (“Beethoven is dead; only Berlioz could bring him back to life”, he wrote the very next day) and became his patron, sponsoring him handsomely to the tune of twenty thousand francs. Thanks to this stroke of providence, Berlioz, for a time at least, was free to concentrate on composition, and accountable to no one. “It is necessary […] that I write a master work, on a new and vast plan, a grandiose work, passionate, full of fantasy, worthy of being dedicated to the illustrious artist to whom I owe so much. […] How ardently I have lived all this time!” His labours on this new work, Romeo and Juliet, were to occupy him for most of 1839.

His sources of inspiration were many. The Shakespearean myth, on the one hand, had profoundly marked him: in 1827 during the Restoration, he saw it performed by an English company in Paris, with the actress Harriet Smithson in the role of Juliet. He fell violently in love with her and married her a few years later. At the same period, he had been galvanised on hearing Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 with its unprecedented use of chorus and soloists in a symphonic work. Thence sprang his Romeo and Juliet, a “symphonie dramatique” for orchestra, chorus and soloists, in which the chorus’ function is to comment on the action whilst the emotions are expressed through instrumental music; the two principal roles are not sung, the solo voices corresponding to secondary characters who emerge but little from the orchestral texture. This use of music as an expressive language complete in itself, as well as the striking structural originality of the work, which illustrates the story of Shakespeare’s two lovers with a series of episodes rather than in a continuous drama, delighted romantic artists and was to have a formative influence on the development of programme music in the 19^th.