OPÉRA BASTILLE

19 RESULTS

• OPERA
  I puritani
  Vincenzo Bellini
  “Opera must make audiences weep, tremble and die” said Bellini to Pepoli as he set out to delve into a sombre romanticism peopled with diaphanous heroines for the subject of his libretto. Depicting the love between a royalist and the daughter of a republican succumbing to madness, I Puritani is Bellini’s last opera: a perilous work for which Laurent Pelly offers us a production à la Piranesi, as precise and incisive as is this great monument of bel canto.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 07 Sep to 05 Oct 2019
  On sale 11 Jun 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Madama Butterfly
  Giacomo Puccini
  For his Madame Chrysanthème, Pierre Loti drew on memories of his own visit to Japan in 1885. When composing Madama Butterfly, Giacomo Puccini was inspired by the popular melodies and sonorities of Japanese voices. However, in the literary work, as in the opera, the heroine remains the same: Kiku-san or Cio‑Cio‑san, a young geisha betrayed by her western husband, the symbol of the meeting of two different worlds. Robert Wilson’s ethereal production espouses to perfection the dramatic intensity and underlying violence of this thoroughly Japanese tragedy.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 14 Sep to 13 Nov 2019
  On sale 11 Jun 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Les Indes galantes
  Jean-Philippe Rameau
  A masterpiece of the Enlightenment, Les Indes galantes is a sparkling entertainment. Yet Rameau’s first opera‑ballet also testifies to the ambiguous view held by Europeans concerning other peoples – Turks, Incas, Persians, “Savages”… In 2017, film director Clément Cogitore made an explosive and critically acclaimed film adaptation of an extract from Les Indes galantes in collaboration with the Krump dancers. This time, with choreographer Bintou Dembélé, he takes up Rameau’s box of delights in its entirety to set it once more in an urban and political space whose frontiers he explores.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 26 Sep to 15 Oct 2019
  On sale 11 Jun 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Don Carlo
  Giuseppe Verdi
  By virtue of its language, Don Carlo, the Italian adaptation of Don Carlos, a grand opera in the French style, is more passionate than the original version. However, from one version to the other none of the finesse is lost, be it in the score or the dramatic intrigue which, from the Escorial to Flanders, interweaves political, romantic and family conflicts. An historical fresco to which Krzysztof Warlikowski confers the depth of a huis clos in which the human psyche is laid bare, revealing the paralysis of men faced with the legacy of power.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 25 Oct to 23 Nov 2019
  On sale 11 Jun 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Prince Igor
  Alexandre Borodine
  Borodin’s only opera, this great Russian epic, best known for its Polovtsian Dances, questions the responsibilities of a leader with regard to his people. Having ceded power to his despotic brother‑in-law in order to go to war, Igor is taken prisoner with his son. From his refusal to negotiate with the enemy to his return home, the prince’s deeds invite us to reconsider our own moral values. By divesting the work of folklore of the most elementary kind, Barrie Kosky’s production highlights a universal need for ethics.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 25 Nov to 26 Dec 2019
  On sale 11 Jun 2019 from 12h

• BALLET
  Raymonda
  Rudolf Noureev
  Raymonda, which premiered in 1898 at Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre to Alexander Glazunov’s scintillating score, was Marius Petipa’s quintessential narrative ballet. A genuine medieval fantasy today regarded as an encyclopaedia of classical dance forms, the work depicts the love story of the young Raymonda and the knight Jean de Brienne in the face of the covetous desires of the Saracen chief Abderam. Long unknown outside Russia, the ballet was staged several times by Rudolf Nureyev after he defected to the West. The choreographer gave it his final touch in 1983 when he became Director of the Paris Opera Ballet. Associating it with Nicholas Georgiadis’s sumptuous sets and costumes, Nureyev recreated all the Eastern charm of a romantic fresco to a backdrop of the mythicized echoes of the crusades.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 02 to 31 Dec 2019
  On sale 10 Sep 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Il Barbiere di Siviglia
  Gioacchino Rossini
  In creating this ebullient opera buffa, Rossini captured all the fiery spirit of the comedy by Beaumarchais that inspired it. A native of Venice, birthplace of commedia dell’arte, Damiano Michieletto is highly sensitive to the burlesque vein in Rossini’s music. He transposes the action of this Useless Precaution to a modern-day Seville inspired by the cinema of Almodóvar. Bartolo’s monumental building, where Figaro’s free spirit whirls and twirls, allows this director to give free rein to his off‑beat imagination.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 11 Jan to 12 Feb 2020
  On sale 10 Sep 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Les Contes d'Hoffmann
  Jacques Offenbach
  Could there be a greater homage to the inventor of magic realism in literature than to make him the principal character of an opera in which all resemblance to reality is abolished in favour of an imaginary world with its own rules? In this work by Offenbach, Hoffmann, an ill-fated poet and composer, evokes his past love affairs and leads us through a universe in which dream and reality intermingle. Director Robert Carsen plays masterfully with this play within a play and his spectacular mise en abyme takes us behind the scenes of opera.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 21 Jan to 14 Feb 2020
  On sale 24 Sep 2019 from 12h

• BALLET
  George Balanchine
  
  This tribute to the art of Balanchine brings together three works of pure dance from the choreographer’s first American period. Three ensemble ballets in which bodies resonate like the instruments of an orchestra. Set to the music of Bach, Concerto Barocco crossfades a succession of forms beckoning to the gaze like the decorative components of a baroque architecture. The Four Temperaments offers a visual counterpoint to Paul Hindemith’s variations. Like the moods that transfuse humans, this fluid and mercurial ballet combines consonance and dissonance in a composition at once rigorous yet unimpeded. In Serenade, Balanchine evokes the Russian heritage of Tchaikovsky his master, and the modern bodies of the young New Yorkers he met on his arrival in the United States. A snapshot of its times, the ballet’s romantic atmosphere also evokes Les Sylphides by Fokine, another master revered by Balanchine.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 03 Feb to 01 Apr 2020
  On sale 24 Sep 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Manon
  Jules Massenet
  When, in 1731, l’Abbé Prévost wrote L’Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut – the work that inspired Massenet’s Manon – he portrayed an entire era, that of the Regency, which saw the old order fade away and a new order, full of the promise of unprecedented freedom, rise from its ashes. Manon must make her way between these two worlds, fleeing the convent in order to embrace the paths of desire and transgression, throwing herself headlong into a burning and destructive passion with Des Grieux. A parenthesis opens, only to close again in suffering and obscurity. The director Vincent Huguet casts the work’s customary taffeta aside in order to bring out its violence to the full.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 26 Feb to 10 Apr 2020
  On sale 08 Oct 2019 from 12h

• CONCERTS AND RECITALS - SYMPHONY CONCERT
  Gustav Mahler
  Opéra Bastille
  on 11 Mar 2020 at 8 pm
  On sale 18 Jun 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Das Rheingold
  Richard Wagner
  In the prologue of the Ring, the entire cycle has already been prophesied. At the sound of a chord that seemingly emanates from the depths of the earth, a mythological, timeless universe is born, finding an echo in each and every era. For over and beyond the story of the gold and the ring of power at the heart of the conflict between the Gods and the Nibelungs, it is power and the moral sacrifices required to exercise it that are in question. Musically and theatrically unequalled, Das Rheingold opens The Ring of the Nibelung.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 02 to 15 Apr 2020
  On sale 22 Oct 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Adriana Lecouvreur
  Francesco Cilea
  According to legend, Adrienne Lecouvreur’s untimely demise was caused by a bouquet of poisoned flowers sent by her rival. The woman who revolutionised tragic declamation and was so admired by Voltaire, died at the age of thirty‑eight. Consummate theatrical artistry, passionate love and a mysterious death… that was enough to prompt Eugène Scribe to take up her life story and write a drama later set to music by Francesco Cilea. A triumph! The composer produced an opera of great refinement which would never again leave the operatic stage, in the image of the tragic actress who continued to grace the boards until her dying breath.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 27 Apr to 12 May 2020
  On sale 12 Nov 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Die Walküre
  Richard Wagner
  From the beginning of the prelude, a storm rumbles, followed by an emotional tempest that continues to rage until Wotan bids a heart‑rending farewell to his daughter Brünnhilde. Although in Die Walküre passion is omnipresent, stronger than hatred, jealousy and divine authority, love is always ultimately smothered. In a flow of images as poetic as they are subversive, pitting Sigmund and Sieglinde against the malevolent Hunding and Fricka against her husband Wotan, Wagner portrays characters of rare psychological depth: beings who, lost in their torments and the impossibility of reaching their aims, await one who will embody a better future.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 05 to 27 May 2020
  On sale 22 Oct 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Boris Godounov
  Modeste Petrovitch Moussorgski
  In Boris Godunov, the Tsar of all Russia is consumed with guilt and sees the ghost of the child he has had assassinated in order to seize the throne rise up again in the form of an imposter. With this landmark in Russian opera, Mussorgsky offers a reflection on the solitary nature of power to the backdrop of the eternal sufferings of the Russian people. Director Ivo van Hove draws the spectator into a monumental set in which man is finally reduced to his humanity and must confront what constitutes the end of the work in its original version: silence.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 23 May to 29 Jun 2020
  On sale 12 Nov 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Rigoletto
  Giuseppe Verdi
  A grief-stricken father before the lifeless body of his child. Such is the heart-rending image evoked by the final bars of Rigoletto. Taking this drama as a point of departure, Claus Guth has conceived a production in which the buffoon sees his life pass before his eyes, a humiliating farce softened only by the presence of his daughter. Shrouded in a scenography of poetic modernity, haunted by the indelible memory of Gilda, Rigoletto hears her reawaken to the deceptive promises of the Duke of Mantua’s love: “Caro nome…” An aria of great candour and one of the most beautiful that Verdi ever composed for soprano.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 02 Jun to 12 Jul 2020
  On sale 12 Nov 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  La Bohème
  Giacomo Puccini
  When, in Scenes of Bohemian Life, the characters imagined by Henry Murger, reminisce over their time as young, penniless artists – the Café Momus, the parties and poor Mimi, cut down in the flower of youth – it is with all the nostalgia that passing time affords. What if we observed La Bohème from a similar distance? Such is the audacious undertaking of Claus Guth: by situating the shattered love affairs of Mimi and Rodolfo light years away, he has created a universe in which the past resurfaces in the form of hallucinatory flashbacks. Puccini’s music resonates sublimely in this surprising setting, and the director brings out the very essence of the work: memory as the tenuous link by which we hold on to life.
  Opéra Bastille
  from 13 Jun to 13 Jul 2020
  On sale 26 Nov 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Siegfried
  Richard Wagner
  “Who am I?” wonders the orphan raised by the perfidious Mime, and the son of Sigmund and Sieglinde. The quest for identity and the awakening of manhood are at the heart of Siegfried. From simple mortal to fiery hero, the rite of passage of this pure being leads him to measure himself against those stronger than he is. Triumphing over all, Siegfried finds himself in possession of the Ring. But what can the greatest treasure of all mean to someone completely disinterested? One thing remains for this reckless hero still to encounter: fear. On finding the sleeping Brünnhilde, Siegfried must abruptly face infantile fears as yet unknown to him. It is in bringing the Walkyrie back to life that he attains adulthood. And thereby brings love into the world.  
  Opéra Bastille
  from 10 to 18 Oct 2020
  On sale 22 Oct 2019 from 12h

• OPERA
  Götterdämmerung
  Richard Wagner
  Unaware that Siegfried’s glory is now behind him, Brünnhilde pushes her hero towards new exploits and thus to his downfall: an end that seems increasingly inevitable as the corruption that stains the world becomes ever more salient. Moral values are overturned and the pure are betrayed, even by their own. In the very Prelude itself, has not the thread of life, spun by the Norns, been broken? As the Ring is restored by Brünnhilde to the Rhinemaidens in a final gesture as redeeming as it is fatal, Walhalla bursts into flames. This concludes the Ring Cycle, and, with it, the reign of the Gods. But what of the future?  
  Opéra Bastille
  from 13 to 21 Nov 2020
  On sale 22 Oct 2019 from 12