Among Seville’s cigar makers, Carmen is the most attractive woman around. Arrested for the assault of a friend, she enthralls the brigadier Don José who lets her escape. For her, José abandons his childhood sweetheart, he gives up his rank, deserts the army… and to what ends will passion drive him when he loses Carmen's love to the glamorous bullfighter Escamillo? We can only imagine the reactions of the first Parisian audiences at the Opéra Comique, who are said to have been shocked to see the incarnation of such an independent heroine. But what would those audiences in 1875 have actually seen on stage? With the support of Palazzetto Bru Zane (Centre de Musique Romantique Française), Opéra de Rouen Normandie have (re)created Bizet’s Carmen with the original costumes, sets and staging of the 1875 premiere.
A decade before the French Revolution, in a country riven with bitter polemics, Gluck throws the history of opera into confusion by raising it to an unheard-of peak of tragic intensity. Experiencing his two Iphigenias in a single evening goes beyond the norms of operatic life: it is to enter the very heart of the curse on the family of King Atreus of Mycenae, to follow a logical destiny through a cycle of endless violence. How does the victim of Aulis become the murderess of Tauris? That is the burning question that Dmitri Tcherniakov must adress, plunging the spectator into the midst of a household haunted by the dead and setting in train an implacable process of dehumanization, with parallels to our world today. Conducting Le Concert d’Astrée, Emmanuelle Haïm drives this dual tragedy to the summit of its expressive power, leaving humanity to be translated through arias of the utmost poignancy.
In order to fulfil the oracle’s prediction, Iphigénie must kill any stranger landing on the shores of Tauride. Alas, it is Oreste, Iphigénie’s own brother, who appears, having murdered their mother Clytemnestra in order to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon: such is the accursed lineage of the Atrides, condemned for generations to inflict death after death… Will this chain of hereditary bloodletting be perpetuated by Iphigénie? In Krzysztof Warlikowski’s stunning first production for the Paris Opera, the characters in the twilight of their existence are still haunted by their past.