Opera in Paris - Bellini, Rameau, Handel & Wagner

Opera and Paris are intricately intertwined: opera has always been a vital part of the city’s cultural and social life, and Paris in turn has shaped opera to an extent few other places can match. Paris’s opera houses are central to the histories both of the city and of the art-form, and most important composers, whatever their countries of origin, came to Paris at some point in their careers to try and establish their reputation in the world’s capital of opera.

The Sicilian-born Vincenzo Bellini followed in the footsteps of his friend and mentor, Rossini, gravitating towards Paris at the height of his career. Set in the English Civil War and reportedly Queen Victoria’s favourite opera, I Puritani was commissioned by Paris’s Théâtre-Italien in 1834 and turned out to be Bellini’s final work before his untimely death the following year. We see Laurent Pelly’s highly praised production in the monumental Opéra Bastille, one of the Mitterand era’s grandest projets, built to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution. Lisette Oropesa plays the Puritan heroine, Elvira, a welcome return to Paris after her unforgettable 2024 performances in Pelly’s production of Giulio Cesare; Elvira’s Royalist lover, Lord Arturo Talbot, is played by fast-rising American tenor Lawrence Brownlee.

Below the proscenium arch of Paris’s Palais Garnier hangs a drape bearing the inscription ‘Anno 1669’ and an image of the sun. This is a permanent reminder to the city’s opera-goers that the Académie d’Opéra – later renamed the Académie Royale de Musique, but generally known simply as ‘the Opéra’ – was founded by the ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV, inaugurating an unbroken performance tradition unmatched anywhere in the world. Sixty-eight years after the Opéra’s foundation, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s lyric tragedy Castor et Pollux was premiered at the Académie Royale; now it returns to that theatre’s magnificent successor on the Avenue de l’Opéra for a rare revival, in a new production by Peter Sellars. Greek-born Teodor Currentzis, whose revelatory Mozart performances have won praise all round the world, conducts; French mezzo-soprano Stéphanie d’Oustrac, a favourite at Glyndebourne, takes the role of Phébé.

Richard Wagner’s relationship with Paris was fraught, to say the least, but he lived in the city for an extended period in his late twenties and returned there on several occasions later in his career for several frustrating attempts to triumph at the Opéra. Despite his lack of success, he made a permanent impact not just on France’s music but also its literature: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry and Proust were just a few of the writers to fall under his spell. We return to the Bastille for the first part of Wagner’s mighty Ring cycle, Das Rheingold, in a new production by iconoclastic Spanish director, Calixto Bieito. Leading French baritone Ludovic Tézier takes the part of Wotan; New Zealand Heldentenor Simon O’Neill plays his slippery sidekick, Loge.

If the disastrous Paris premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in 1861 was the most notorious musical fiasco of the nineteenth century, then its twentieth-century equivalent was the near-riotous reception accorded to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on its first performance in 1913. That extraordinary evening unfolded at the beautiful art-deco Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, which we visit on the final day of our tour for an early-evening performance of Congreve and Handel’s subversive late masterpiece, Semele. The production is conducted by French period-performance specialist Emmanuelle Haïm and directed by Oliver Mears, Director of Opera at Covent Garden; a starry cast is led by Pretty Yende in the title role, Alice Coote as Juno and Brindley Sherratt in the double role of Cadmus and Somnus.