Don Pasquale - Opera - Season 18/19 Programming - Opéra national de Paris

  • Opera

    Don Pasquale

    Gaetano Donizetti

    Palais Garnier - from 22 March to 16 April 2019

    Vincent Pontet / OnP

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Don Pasquale

Palais Garnier - from 22 March to 16 April 2019

Opera

Don Pasquale

Gaetano Donizetti

Palais Garnier - from 22 March to 16 April 2019

2h30 with 1 interval

Language : Italian

  • Opening night : 22 March 2019

About

In few words:

Don Pasquale, an old greybeard, decides to take a wife in order to overturn his nephew Ernesto’s plans. Ernesto, however, with the help of Doctor Malatesta, undertakes to ensnare Don Pasquale in the meshes of his own trap, entrusting the role of bride-to-be to Norina, his own betrothed. Docile, then intractable, Norina excels in playing at false appearances. The conflict between the two generations smoulders and stokes the comedy whilst producing an undercurrent of wistful yearning. With sincerity and dramatic profundity, Damiano Michieletto opens a pathway to the heart of an apparently light-hearted work, renowned as the apotheosis of opera buffa.

Characters

Don Pasquale: A rich old bachelor who decides to marry at the last minute in order to deprive his nephew of his inheritance.
Ernesto: Don Pasquale’s nephew who is in love with Norina.
Norina: A penniless young woman who, under the pseudonym of Sofronia, pretends to be Don Pasquale’s wife.
Doctor Malatesta: A friend of the family and an ally of Ernesto and Norina, he is the mastermind of the plan to fool Don Pasquale.

  • Opening
  • First part 80 mn
  • Intermission 30 mn
  • Second part 45 mn
  • End

Media coverage

  • Damiano Michieletto offre à Don Pasquale une entrée au répertoire digne des ors du Palais Garnier.

    Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, 13/06/2018
  • Abattage scénique, richesse du timbre, puissance de la projection, le Français remportera même la bataille de barytons du fameux duo de l’acte III avec Don Pasquale.

    Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, 13/06/2018

Performances

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Advantages

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Book your tickets today with the Season Pass

Available in audiodescription

Advantages

Full

Whether you’re a member of Arop or not, the friends of the Opera can reserve seats for you on all performance dates, including those not yet open for sale and those announced as sold out.

Audio clips

Don Pasquale (saison 18/19)- Christian Senn (Dottor Malatesta), Michele Pertusi (Don Pasquale)

Don Pasquale (saison 18/19) - Pretty Yende

Don Pasquale (saison 18/19)- Javier Camarena (Ernesto)

Don Pasquale (saison 18/19)- Michele Pertusi (Don Pasquale)

Backstage

  • The two faces of Don Pasquale

    Video

    The two faces of Don Pasquale

  • Draw-me Don Pasquale

    Video

    Draw-me Don Pasquale

  • Podcast Don Pasquale

    Podcast

    Podcast Don Pasquale

  • A Moral Tale. Or is it?

    Article

    A Moral Tale. Or is it?

© Eléna Bauer / OnP

The two faces of Don Pasquale

06:37’

Video

The two faces of Don Pasquale

Interview with Michele Pertusi

By Anna Schauder

A specialist of the Italian repertoire, Michele Pertusi discusses the character of Don Pasquale, a touching and authoritarian old man, caught up in the web of his own entourage. At once comic and dramatic, Donizetti's work is returning to the stage of the Palais Garnier. Michele Mariotti conducts this Neapolitan opera buffa, directed by Damiano Michieletto with Michele Pertusi in the title role.    

Draw-me Don Pasquale

01:09’

Video

Draw-me Don Pasquale

Understand the plot in 1 minute

By Octave

Don Pasquale, an old greybeard, decides to take a wife in order to overturn his nephew Ernesto’s plans. Ernesto, however, with the help of Doctor Malatesta, undertakes to ensnare Don Pasquale in the meshes of his own trap, entrusting the role of bride-to-be to Norina, his own betrothed. Docile, then intractable, Norina excels in playing at false appearances. The conflict between the two generations smoulders and stokes the comedy whilst producing an undercurrent of wistful yearning. With sincerity and dramatic profundity, Damiano Michieletto opens a pathway to the heart of an apparently light-hearted work, renowned as the apotheosis of opera buffa.  

© Vincent Pontet / OnP

Podcast Don Pasquale

Podcast

Podcast Don Pasquale

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

07’

By Nathalie Moller, France Musique

"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, Nathalie Moller (opera) and Jean-Baptiste Urbain (dance), present the works and artists you are going to discover when you attend performances in our theatres. 

© Eléna Bauer / OnP

A Moral Tale. Or is it?

Article

A Moral Tale. Or is it?

Interview with Damiano Michieletto

04’

By Simon Hatab

In 1843, Donizetti returned to opera buffa with his delightful Don Pasquale, an opera displaying all the ingredients of the genre: disguises, false names, counterfeit marriages, a disinherited nephew restored to his birth right at the end of the drama, an old uncle who will stop at nothing to protect his estate… It has fallen to the lot of director Damiano Michieletto to bring out the lightness and the depth of this work.


After The Barber of Seville and Samson and Delila, Don Pasquale is your third production for the Paris Opera. What made you decide to put on Donizetti’s opera?

Damiano Michieletto: This is a short opera that represents a challenge for a director. In it, Donizetti offers us a whole gallery of portraits drawn with great precision. Just as the composer was renovating and reinventing dramatic form and the characters of opera buffa, the interesting thing for me was to bring to the work a fresh eye, to conceive a modern vision of it and to rescue the characters from the usual operatic clichés, but to do it whilst preserving the comic aspects; to avoid being tedious without being too sophisticated; in a word, to take the plot seriously without being too serious. I noticed that, often, in contemporary dramas, the elderly characters are depicted as grave, heavy creatures, as if they had lost their comic side. I think it is important to allow space for laughter and lightness.

Michele Pertusi (Don Pasquale) et Nadine Sierra (Norina), Palais Garnier 201
Michele Pertusi (Don Pasquale) et Nadine Sierra (Norina), Palais Garnier 201 © Vincent Pontet / OnP

How do you see the eponymous character of Don Pasquale?

D.M.: He’s a weak character, isolated, incapable of breaking the habits that isolate him even more from the rest of the world, an old man who behaves like a

child: although he has seen a lot of life, he is extremely immature: he has no experience in the matter of love or sentiment, he has no means of expressing his emotions. There’s something in the very music he sings that is puerile, as if he constantly wanted to convince himself that he was still alive. From this point of view, he makes me think of Falstaff: old but believing himself still to be young and attractive. He likes to seduce and, of course, his attempts at seduction are always doomed to failure. He ends up abandoned and penniless and, as in the case of Falstaff, his demise doesn’t fail to amuse us. However, although Norina, Ernesto, Malatesta and even Don Pasquale himself sing that “the moral is very just”, we have every right to find it rather bitter. There is a certain melancholy in Don Pasquale. A melancholy that culminates in Norina slapping her “husband”. There are, at this point, several minutes of music that is really different from the rest of the opera. This is where the old man is forced to face reality. He feels vulnerable. He remembers his youth. Just like Verdi’s hero, Don Pasquale is fascinating dramatically, a sort of theatrical animal, because he plays a role, he is capable of taking huge risks, of throwing himself into a game without knowing the outcome and, when he fails, he is ready to start again.

Your production uses video. Can you say a few words about it?

D.M.: The video is linked to the character of Malatesta, who is an ambiguous character to say the least. He is a false friend. The prefix Mala is a reference to illness. He is the virus that poisons Don Pasquale’s life, the power behind the throne in a way. He appears to offer Norina his services, explaining that he plans to teach Don Pasquale a lesson so that the old man will allow his nephew to marry the woman he loves but, in reality, we don't know what his real motives are. He conjures up a fictitious world, an alternative reality, with a view to hoodwinking Don Pasquale. He offers to introduce him to his own sister, Sofronia, whom he describes as angelic, innocent, candid, generous, modest, sweet, loving and brought up in a convent into the bargain, according to the clichés of comedy at the time. But of course, none of this is true: she is in fact Norina who, no sooner is she married to him than she transforms herself and makes his life hell. The video serves to show the gap between the fantasy and reality.

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