Fim and stage director and actor Patrice Chéreau (1944-2013) had an enduring impact on the artistic landscape of the last few decades. To mark the revival of Leoš Janáček’s From the House of the Dead at the Opéra Bastille, the Paris Opera and the Bibliothèque nationale de France are jointly presenting the first exhibition exclusively devoted to his career in opera.

Through the eleven productions he directed, Patrice Chéreau brought new life to opera production, applying his talents as a director of actors to further his ever more "embodied" conception of vocal roles. The exhibition invites us to discover his formal and conceptual choices for each production. It also reveals the wealth of the visual world that influenced Patrice Chéreau and his stage designer Richard Peduzzi. It allows us to explore the specificity of the creative process that Chéreau applied to opera. How do you direct singers like actors? How do you work in coordination with conductors? What relationship can you build between a score's musical line and the action on stage?

What emerges is a portrait of a director at work, engaged in a close dialogue with all his collaborators whilst constantly seeking to give opera the force of “elevated theatre, incandescently forged, like Siegfried’s sword, by the music”.