BELLINI, GLUCK, MOZART, VERDI
- Four operas in three houses: I Capuleti ed i Montecchi and Don Carlo at the Bastille; The Magic Flute at Châtelet (concert version); Iphigénie en Tauride at Palais Garnier.
- World-class soloists: Joyce DiDonato, Anna Netrebko, Sandrine Piau, Matthias Goerne, Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
- Free time between performances and lectures.
FOR MUCH OF THE 19TH CENTURY, Paris was the opera capital of the world. Here, the singers were the greatest and productions the most spectacular on earth. This was the home of ‘grand opera’, the city to which Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi and Wagner all came, knowing that the summit of success depended on their conquering Paris. The French themselves were slow in catching up, their greatest musical genius, Berlioz, frustrated by a bureaucracy that seemed to favour foreign composers. But from the mid-1870s, when the Opera Garnier was opened, Paris boasted the grandest opera house in the world, French operas like Faust and Carmen fast became global favourites, and audiences everywhere learned to swoon to the elegantly perfumed sensuality of Massenet.
This tour provides a wonderful survey of current opera performance in Paris in the form of four operas in three different houses. Assiduous study and comparison of the schedules at last bore fruit when we identified a pattern of contrasting operas on successive evenings, ensuring that variety is more of a common thread than similarity.
The Bastille, the now not-quite-new but ever controversial flagship of Parisian opera, offers Bellini’s rarely performed I Capuleti ed I Montecchi and Verdi’s Don Carlo; at Châtelet, the largest theatre in Paris, is a concert performance of The Magic Flute; and at the opulent Palais Garnier Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, written during his Paris period and premièred here to great acclaim in 1779.
During this tour, we have a guided visit of the Opera Garnier. In addition, we visit other sites associated with the rich musical and operatic history of Paris, including the Salle Favart (now the Opera-Comique but once the theatre over which Rossini presided), and the concert hall and music museum at La Villette.