Emma Birski / OnP

Opera

Rigoletto

Giuseppe Verdi

Opéra Bastille

from 23 October to 24 November 2021

2h45 with 1 interval

Rigoletto

Opéra Bastille - from 23 October to 24 November 2021

Synopsis

A disconsolate father staring at the lifeless body of his child. Such is the heart-wrenching image that confronts us in the final bars of Rigoletto. Taking that tragedy as a starting point, Claus Guth crafts a production in which the jester sees his life unfurling once more – a humiliating farce sweetened only by the presence of his daughter. In the sanctuary of a poetically modern scenography and haunted by the indelible memory of Gilda, Rigoletto again hears her being drawn towards the Duke of Mantua’s mendacious declarations of love: “Caro nome…” An air of innocence that counts among the finest that Verdi ever composed for a soprano.

Duration : 2h45 with 1 interval

Language : Italian

Surtitle : French / English

  • Opening

  • First part 60 min

  • Intermission 30 min

  • 75 min

  • End

Show acts and characters

CHARACTERS

The Duke of Mantua: A cynical libertine and womaniser
Rigoletto: The Duke of Mantua’s jester
Gilda: Rigoletto’s daughter
Sparafucile: Hired killer
Maddalena: Sparafucile’s sister
Giovanna: Rigoletto’s servant
The Count of Monterone: Courtier whose daughter has been seduced by the Duke of Mantua
Marullo: Courtier at the Court of Mantua
Matteo Borsa: Courtier at the Court of Mantua
Le comte de Ceprano: Courtier at the Court of Mantua
La comtesse de Ceprano: Count Ceprano’s wife, wooed by the Duke

Act I

The Duke of Mantua is throwing a fancy dress party. He tells Matteo Borsa, a courtier, about an unknown young girl he has set his sights on after having observed her at church. Meanwhile he enjoys the company of the beautiful ladies at the party. Tonight, he is particularly attracted by the Countess Ceprano. Rigoletto,the duke’s jester, scorns the husband who fiercely tries to prevent the duke from seducing his wife. Marullo bursts in with the news that Rigoletto, the outcast, has a young and good looking lover. After the duke has failed to separate Count Ceprano from his wife, Rigoletto encourages his master to abduct the Countess. When he bluntly suggestsexiling or even beheading the count, Ceprano appeals to the other courtiers who rally behind him; they all plot to take revenge on Rigoletto that same night by abducting the girl he is hiding away at his home. The festivities are interrupted by the sudden arrival of Count Monterone denouncing the duke as the seducer of his daughter. Taking the place of the duke, Rigoletto confronts him and mocks him cruelly. Monterone calls down a curse on the duke and his jester. Rigoletto recognises that he has struck himself by ridiculing an outraged father. Rigoletto returns home. An unsettling character approaches him, introducing himself as the professional killer Sparafucile. Rigoletto refuses his services for now, but takes note of his proposition. At his house, Rigoletto meets his beloved daughter Gilda, whom he keeps concealed from the world leaving her in the custody of a woman named Giovanna. Despite Gilda’s pressing questions, Rigoletto does not fully reveal his own identity and profession to her. However, he tells her about her mother who died after her birth. Before leaving, Rigoletto exhorts Giovanna to guard the young girl well and prevent any contact with whomsoever. But thesupposed watchdog has been bribed by the duke who clandestinely sneaks into the house just as Rigoletto is leaving. Giovanna encourages Gilda to overcome the remorse she is feeling because she did not tell her father about the young man she has met at church and with whom she has fallen in love. She dreams of him as a poor student not knowing that he is in fact the Duke of Mantua. When he approaches, at first she is terrified. But then she gives in to his declaration of love made under a false name and appearance. Footsteps are heard outside, and Giovanna urges the duke to depart. Alone again, Gilda dreams of the young stranger. Marullo, Borsa, Ceprano and other courtiers appear in order to abduct the woman they believe to be the jester’s mistress. When Rigoletto suddenly returns in the darkness he runs into Marullo, who tricks him into believing they have come to abduct Countess Ceprano and suggests he join them. On the pretext that he needs to be masked, he blindfolds him and gets him to hold a ladder. When Rigoletto, alerted by Gilda’s cries, rips off his mask, it is too late: the conspirators have made off with the young girl. Monterone’s curse has struck.

Act II

Next morning: in his palace the duke is worried about Gilda’s fate; the previous night he returned to her home to find it empty. He is happy when he learns from the courtiers that they have abducted the young girl. She is brought to him, and he reveals his true identity to her. Rigoletto tries to entertain the courtiers as usual, at the same time desperately searching for his daughter. A page of the duchess inadvertently transforms his doubts into certainty: Gilda is with the duke. The jester attacks the courtiers and finally begs them to give him back his daughter. Gilda is returned to her father, and they are left alone. Full of shame, she confesses how the duke gained her confidence and with the involuntary help of the courtiers succeeded in making her his mistress. Rigoletto swears vengeance.


Act III

A month has passed, but Gilda is still in love with the duke. In order to make her understand the true nature of his character, Rigoletto has taken her to Sparafucile’s tavern. He urges his daughter to watch the duke making advances to Sparafucile’s sister, Maddalena, who has served as a decoy to lure him into the trap. Rigoletto asks Gilda to put on men’s clothes and travel to Verona, where he will join her the next day. He then hires Sparafucile who promises to murder his guest whom he does not recognise as the duke since he has come incognito. Rigoletto requires that the corpse be delivered to him and they agree to meet again after midnight. While a storm is breaking and the duke has fallen asleep, Maddalena, seduced by the handsome young man, seeks to persuade her brother to spare him. Sparafucile proposes to kill in his stead the first man who shall knock at their door. Gilda, dressed as a man, has come back and overhears this conversation. She decides to sacrifice her life for the duke. When Rigoletto comes back, he takes the corpse Sparafucile delivers to him for the duke’s. The jester prides himself on having taken deadly revenge on the mighty man when he suddenly hears his master’s voice. Discovering Gilda, he must learn that he has killed his own daughter: the curse has fully been executed.

Artists

Melodramma in three acts (1851)

After Victor Hugo, Le roi s'amuse

Creative team

Cast

Orchestre et Choeurs de l’Opéra national de Paris

Media

  • Draw-me Rigoletto

    Draw-me Rigoletto

    Watch the video

  • Visions of Claus Guth

    Visions of Claus Guth

    Read the article

  • Podcast Rigoletto

    Podcast Rigoletto

    Listen the podcast

  • Imaginary Rigoletto

    Imaginary Rigoletto

    Watch the video

  • Rigoletto

    Rigoletto

    Watch the video

  • Victor Hugo, a scriptwriter for operatic blockbusters?

    Victor Hugo, a scriptwriter for operatic blockbusters?

    Read the article

Draw-me Rigoletto

Watch the video

Understand the plot in 1 minute

1:42 min

Draw-me Rigoletto

By Matthieu Pajot

© Elena Bauer / OnP

Visions of Claus Guth

Read the article

A portrait of the stage director

08 min

Visions of Claus Guth

By Konrad Kuhn

For many years now, Claus Guth has been one of the world's most sought-after opera directors; his productions can be seen from Vienna to Barcelona, from Amsterdam to Zurich, from London and Milan to Lyon, from Glyndebourne to Aix-en-Provence (next summer) and Salzburg, from Madrid and Moscow to Toronto and New York – and, of course, in his native Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Bayreuth... as well as at the Paris Opera since 2016.

What makes Claus Guth so special? Because of his origins, he is sometimes referred to as a representative of what is known as "Regietheater", which is generally understood to mean a staging style that seeks to attract attention by arbitrarily rewriting works from the classical repertoire, is aesthetically unsightly and deliberately provocative. These characteristics do not apply to Claus Guth.

When he sets the action of La Bohème in space, it is anything but accidental. On the contrary, he is focussing on the score's very heart; there is hardly any other opera in which the metaphor of cold is so present, both in the text and the music. One need only think of the Barrière d'Enfer scene at the beginning of Act III. Or of Mimi's muff, warming her ever freezing hands just a little. Where is it colder than in space? And where else have we sensed such interplanetary expanses (and precisely not the cramped confines of an attic room) other than in the duets of Mimi and Rodolfo?

What is Puccini's opera about? Ultimately, a group of young people are helpless when faced by the death of one of their number. Their hopes, both in art and in love, are shattered. Claus Guth underlines this by sending the protagonists hurtling towards certain death in their malfunctioning spaceship. Oxygen reserves run out and they land on a planet far from Earth that becomes their final destination. Only memories remain. The text of the libretto, Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème, is itself like an 'idealised' memory of youth, written by an older generation of men. The memory of a time when everything seemed possible. Memories that take on physical form. And suddenly, a comforting image of Paris emerges in the high-tech ship: the Café Momus, the toy seller, the fuss made by Musette to frighten off her rich protector... everything is there, but in memories. And on the barren surface of the alien planet that can only be trodden in a cosmonaut's suit, there appears solitary red balloon.

Take Rigoletto: When Bastille's huge stage is transformed into a gigantic cardboard box, what does it mean? Again, this is anything but arbitrary. Verdi makes it clear that the hunchbacked buffoon is under a curse from the start. The tragedy of the jester who seeks to dissociate his personal happiness as a father from his cynical role at court, by keeping his teenage daughter strictly locked up, and who for this very reason becomes Gilda's murderer in the end, unfolds with implacable logic. All the more implacable since, from the start, we see Rigoletto as a broken person. His life is destroyed. His existence is contained in a cardboard box in which there is nothing but the fool's cap and the blood-stained dress of the daughter whose death he himself caused. Objects that make him relive the tragedy over and over again. By doubling up the character (alongside the baritone, an actor plays the aged Rigoletto on stage), he becomes a powerless spectator of the key scenes that led to the catastrophe. What has happened has happened, nothing can prevent that. Thus, the entire universe of this captivating drama is contained in a cardboard box and it is precisely this reduction that captivates us. Locations are indicated by a handful of scenic elements, the story imagined by Victor Hugo is reduced to its substance and the usual clichés are elegantly circumvented.

Of course, underlying such stagings is the desire to bring a new voice to widely known repertoire works. But always with the intention of reaching the heart of these works. Taking not the libretto but above all the music as a starting point. In this respect, Claus Guth is truly impulsive and relies entirely on his instinct: if a score does not speak to him directly, if the sounds do not set his imagination in motion, he refuses to stage the piece. After listening intuitively to the score, he studies it scene by scene to develop a precise interpretation - leaving the singers ample freedom to enhance their performance and often to surpass themselves within the scope of precise indications during rehearsals.

Born in Frankfurt am Main, the director first took an interest in film. At the age of 16, he was already making short films on super-8 film. At the University of Munich he studied philosophy, German literature and theatre before studying directing at the August Everding Theatre Academy in Munich. His has retained a strong interest in film which is reflected in his productions by the multiple use of video projections, which are never reduced to decorative accessories.

Over the course of more than 30 years, he has built up a multi-faceted corpus of productions. Wagner and Strauss are the main focuses. The Mozart-Da Ponte cycle staged for the Salzburg Festival has become legendary, and has been completed by La clemenza di Tito and Lucia Silla, as well as by the fragment Zaïde, for which Guth asked the Israeli composer Chaya Chernowin to write a complementary continuation. The same applies to Purcell's The Fairy Queen: in collaboration with the composer Hellmuth Oehring, the artist combines baroque arias and choruses with contemporary sounds.

A Monteverdi cycle was created at the Theater an der Wien. Alongside Verdi and Puccini, the French repertoire is present with works such as Pelléas et Mélisande, Paul Dukas' Ariane et Barbe-Bleue and - in Frankfurt in July 2021 - Dialogues des Carmélites. The German repertoire includes Beethoven's Fidelio, Schubert's rarely performed opera Fierrabras and Lehár's operetta The Merry Widow.

The director's reputation has been established above all through his productions of contemporary operas. The world premieres include - in addition to those already mentioned - works by Peter Ruzicka, Beat Furrer, Klaus Huber, Luciano Berio and Pascal Dusapin. Another piece was premiered at the Paris Opera: Berénice, after Racine, by Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, had its world premiere at the Palais Garnier in 2018. This production typifies another characteristic of Claus Guth's work: his interest in the psychological depth of characters and themes. A breathtaking psychotrip into an impossible love, Bérénice captivated the Parisian audience.

Tracing the entanglements of opera characters' childhood traumas, their repressed emotions down to the finest ramifications, scrutinising the psychological aspects behind the seemingly fairy-tale or mythical subject matter, is one of Claus Guth's strengths, as is his flair for uncovering these layers in the music. His dissecting gaze then often gives rise to poetic images.

Another focal point is Georg Friedrich Handel. Alongside operas such as Rodelinda and Orlando, it is the oratorios that particularly appeal to Claus Guth. A work like Messiah becomes a gripping family drama showing us human beings in borderline situations. The existential questions of guilt and redemption and of what happens after death become as urgent as they were for Handel. Saul and Jephta, premiered in Amsterdam and also performed in Paris, are two further oratorios based on biblical subjects. Unlike Messiah, these oratorios are action-packed. Nevertheless, the role of the chorus provides them with a dramatic quality different from that of an opera, offering scenic possibilities of their own. In Jephta, all that is needed are a few abstract set elements, such as the giant letters which can be perceived as writing but which also create spaces.

Every time he embarks upon a new project, Guth asks the following question: What is my specific interest in this work? What is it really about? Only when the answer to this question points in a specific direction does he turn his attention to its aesthetic application. What stands out, therefore, is not so much one particular aesthetic as an in-depth appreciation of each work's music, along with the director's love for the singers who are ultimately his main source of inspiration.

© Elisa Haberer / OnP

Podcast Rigoletto

Listen the podcast

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

07 min

Podcast Rigoletto

By Charlotte Landru-Chandès

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


Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi
Conducted by Nicola Luisotti, this new production of Rigoletto marks director Claus Guth’s first collaboration with the Paris Opera.

Imaginary Rigoletto

Watch the video

A repertoire work narrated in a visual poem born of popular culture

1:35 min

Imaginary Rigoletto

By Marc de Pierrefeu

Rigoletto

Watch the video

as seen by the Academy

5:01 min

Rigoletto

By Laurent Sarazin

The new production of Rigoletto directed by Claus Guth is an opportunity to discover the Academy of the Paris Opera, whose ambition is to foster a new generation of artists, and promote those young artists’ work within the Orchestra.

© Monika Ritterhaus / OnP

Victor Hugo, a scriptwriter for operatic blockbusters?

Read the article

A Fresh Look at Rigoletto

10 min

Victor Hugo, a scriptwriter for operatic blockbusters?

By Violaine Anger

Victor Hugo’s talent for elaborating suspenseful plots was quickly spotted by European Opera Houses. Like the cinema production companies of today, they were always on the lookout for likely subjects that, when transformed into a good opera, would draw the crowds.

Victor Hugo, a great source of inspiration for opera

In all his plays, Victor Hugo is peerless in the art of creating a profusion of subplots trapping his characters within a web of intrigue that tightens its grip on them the more they struggle against the tide of events: Ruy Blas, Marie Tudor, Cromwell, Doña Sol … virtually all his heroes are embroiled in machinations that gradually become clear to their victims only to convince them that escape is hopeless. Hugo has no rival for creating scenes of maximum dramatic intensity: two women who love the same man but must join forces in order to save him; three men all in love with the same woman, each plotting vengeance; a valet whose love for his queen will be the downfall of both… Each drama sets in motion events that will culminate in disaster: a father who kills his daughter believing that he is assassinating the lover who has dishonoured her; a queen who sends a faithless lover to the scaffold, then learns in extremis that she has been deceived… To this one must add the art of depicting outlandish characters: Torquemade, Gwynplain, Quasimodo… not to mention the cutting riposte and the grand speech in which the character examines his soul and faces his tragic destiny. Hugo had a talent like no one else for creating extreme situations in which passion is laid bare. All these qualities are eminently operatic.

The number of operas inspired by the works of Victor Hugo is considerable. There are more than fifty of them, not to mention the contemporary musicals based on his novels. However, of all these operas, only a few have attained lasting fame; and of the two operas by Verdi based on works by Hugo, one must remember that Rigoletto was far more widely successful than Le Roi s’amuse, the play that inspired it. Indeed, it takes more than just a good story to make a good opera, but then, the meeting between Hugo and Verdi was that of two giants.

Their stature is indeed comparable: give or take ten years or so, they were the same age and both traversed the century as artists and commentators. Both were characterised by their commitment to political progress, Hugo devoting his life to the cause of the French Republic and Verdi to that of a united Italian nation. Both succeeded, in different ways, in embodying the spirit of their country.

In comparing these two giants it is also important to remember that Hugo is absolutely not Verdi’s librettist, or script writer as we would call him today. Critics like to imagine with a certain regret what would have happened if Berlioz and Hugo had worked together. It is by no means certain that the result would have been convincing: Berlioz, admittedly struck by the rhyme and rhythm of the author of Les Orientales, was however extremely demanding in the matter of the texts he set and one wonders if their collaboration would have come to anything. Verdi worked with Piave, a professional librettist employed by La Fenice in Venice who was perfectly aware of the difference between a well-written line of verse and a well-sung line. This difference was beyond Victor Hugo: admittedly, he uses songs and off-stage sound effects in a remarkable way in his theatrical works, but he never manage to produce singable alexandrines as becomes clear when one reads La Esmeralda, the only opera libretto he ever wrote, which was based on his novel Notre Dame de Paris.

Verdi - dramatist

Transforming a play into an opera means cutting out two thirds of the original text: this is what Debussy did with Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande as did Poulenc with Dialogues des carmélites by Bernanos. It implies a considerable tightening up of the plot and the dilemma of deciding what to keep. It is in the context of this rewriting that one can form a detailed appreciation of the role of the music. In a few bars, the music can create an atmosphere that it would take dozens of lines of verse to establish. By inserting the text into a broader orchestral discourse and allowing the characters to confront each other in duos and trios etc. in which they speak at the same time, the music can bring home the impact of a phrase or situation whereas it might require several scenes to create a comparable effect in the theatre.

However, unlike many other opera composers of the day, it is clear that Verdi did not reduce Hugo’s contribution merely to that of a good plot. He was evidently aware that through its structure Hugo was expressing something much broader – his vision of the world. The important thing was not only to draw on the dramatic strengths of the text but also to preserve the spirit of the original through the music. This is a specifically musical undertaking that goes beyond the structuring of scenes, duos and trios etc. but which aims to evoke with a variety of means, what one could term the Hugolien spirit characteristic of each drama.    

Quinn Kelsey (Rigoletto). Opéra national de Paris, 2016
Quinn Kelsey (Rigoletto). Opéra national de Paris, 2016 © Monika Ritterhaus / OnP

Opera

In this respect, Ernani and Rigoletto are very different. The first allows for tight, concise plotting articulated around a few key moments: three men love the same woman and everything turns to disaster. Verdi cut out the humorous elements (the character of Da Silva, the ageing lover, becomes an implacable avenger; that of Charles V of Spain, who is ready to share the woman he loves, becomes King Carlos, tormented and prepared to be merciful. Rigoletto, on the other hand, introduces a mixture of humour and tragedy to opera in the figure of the accursed fool. These two works each embody a change in Verdi’s aesthetic choices: in Ernani, the musical challenge was to leave behind the grand historic frescos of Nabucco and I Lombardi alla prima crociata and to focus on the psychology of the characters; in Rigoletto, the aim was to create a musical chiaroscuro capable of bringing to life characters that were completely new to the operatic stage. It was not merely the plot but the universe depicted by Victor Hugo that inspired these two major aesthetic turning points.

Drama

We know that Hugo was wary of opera. But this is really a measure of the respect he had for it. In 1840, when Lucrezia Borgia was performed at the Italian Theatre, he brought an action against Donizetti for plagiarism, accusing him of stealing his ideas. The defence argued that an opera, which was musical, and a play, which was theatrical, had strictly nothing in common. The plot of Hugo’s drama had, perhaps, fertilized the seed of the opera, but otherwise it was original and in no way exposed its author to the accusation of plagiarism. In any case, operas and plays each had markedly different objectives: drama aimed to create the illusion of real life, a portrait of contemporary mores, an explosion of passions and ideas which grip the mind, of feelings that agitate the spirit within the framework of a plot. Opera, however, which by its very nature could not create an illusion of reality, aimed to charm its listeners with memorable arias, with melody, musical lines that caught the ear. An opera and a theatrical drama, even treating the same subject, were therefore two completely different genres having nothing in common. Such was the case for the defence in the celebrated court case.

Now, it is exactly this idea that Verdi contested and Hugo was well aware that opera could perfectly well provide material for forgers and plagiarists. Over and above the plot and its possibilities, it is the desire to establish another relationship with reality that unites Hugo and Verdi, and listening to the music shows what the swan of Busseto made of the work of the exile from Guernsey. Hugo elaborated his settings, characters and created a sense of time and place in order to enact a drama or, as he himself put it in the preface to Cromwell, an “optical point” through which the entire world could be reflected in all its diversity.    

Double de Rigoletto. Opéra national de Paris, 2016
Double de Rigoletto. Opéra national de Paris, 2016 © Monika Ritterhaus / OnP

Reality from an optical point

This is exactly what Verdi spent his entire life doing, particularly with Piave in Rigoletto – an opera whose originality has been endlessly underlined. Even more so than in Ernani, and laying aside questions of mixed genres and the juxtaposition of the grotesque, the pathetic and the sublime, of what is odious and what is pitiful, it is the very status of what we hear and see on stage, the “optical point” through which we observe the world that is transformed. Where Wagner dreamed of music-drama in which stage performance would be like an apparition, a bodily cristallisation; where Berlioz imagined that each dramatic moment must be experienced from the view point of the character concerned; where Hugo desired a drama which made explicit the complex fabric of contradictions in which the individual is destroyed, Verdi created opera which brought the psychological development of his characters and the portrayal of their inner sufferings to the ultimate degree of burning intensity. Performance was to render the sinuous web of their torments visible, audible, palpable.

The Sung Word

This ideal implies profound changes in the organisation of the plot and the action: in the wake of Hugo, who accorded great importance to brief, rapid exchanges, Verdi asked his librettists, particularly Piave, to concentrate and accelerate the action in which lingering over conventional arias would no longer be a possibility. Psychological development had to be palpable in a single word, in the timbre of the voice and above all in the juxtaposition of different kinds of word setting. It is perhaps here that the meeting point between Hugo and Verdi is at its most diffuse but also at its most profound. Hugo in his plays chose words that would hit home, words from every day life: the art of naming things and events in new, condensed metaphors. Verdi tracks down the parola scenica: those words that, when sung, express the physical and emotional presence of the character, in its entirety, in what he says and sings. It is thus that certain words, when sung, “ring” in our ears and remain in our memories alongside snatches of melody; that the word “maledizione” sung by Rigoletto reaches us in its multiplicity of emotional colours giving with each utterance new meaning to his character and to the word itself.


Violaine Anger has worked as a producer for France Musique and France Culture. After teaching at the Paris Conservatoire, she then joined the staff of the University of Evry Val d’Essone, the École Polytechnique and the École Professorale in Paris.


Rigoletto by Giuseppe Verdi
Conducted by Nicola Luisotti, this new production of Rigoletto marks director Claus Guth’s first collaboration with the Paris Opera.

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Opéra Bastille

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In both our venues, discounted tickets are sold at the box offices from 30 minutes before the show:

  • €35 tickets for under-28s, unemployed people (with documentary proof less than 3 months old) and senior citizens over 65 with non-taxable income (proof of tax exemption for the current year required)
  • €70 tickets for senior citizens over 65

Get samples of the operas and ballets at the Paris Opera gift shops: programmes, books, recordings, and also stationery, jewellery, shirts, homeware and honey from Paris Opera.

Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

Opéra Bastille

Place de la Bastille

75012 Paris

Public transport

Underground Bastille (lignes 1, 5 et 8), Gare de Lyon (RER)

Bus 29, 69, 76, 86, 87, 91, N01, N02, N11, N16

Calculate my route
Car park

Q-Park Opéra Bastille 34, rue de Lyon 75012 Paris

Book your parking spot

In both our venues, discounted tickets are sold at the box offices from 30 minutes before the show:

  • €35 tickets for under-28s, unemployed people (with documentary proof less than 3 months old) and senior citizens over 65 with non-taxable income (proof of tax exemption for the current year required)
  • €70 tickets for senior citizens over 65

Get samples of the operas and ballets at the Paris Opera gift shops: programmes, books, recordings, and also stationery, jewellery, shirts, homeware and honey from Paris Opera.

Opéra Bastille
  • Open 1h before performances and until performances end
  • Get in from within the theatre’s public areas
  • For more information: +33 1 40 01 17 82

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