As part of her residency at the Paris Opera Academy, Maëlle Dequiedt is organizing a workshop that brings together several operatic scenes from librettos inspired by Shakespeare. The English playwright gave the world an array of theatre characters which rapidly became legends in their own right. A fascination with them prompted numerous composers in the 19th and 20th centuries to bring those tormented souls to life on the opera stage. For the workshop Maëlle Dequiedt has selected from the works of Bellini, Verdi and Britten three scenes which count among the most beautiful and original in the opera repertoire. For Bellini, the characters of Romeo and Juliet offered lyric profiles embracing the bel canto of early romanticism, particularly in the final scene in which Romeo is reunited with Juliet in the Capulets’ crypt. With Otello, Verdi made Desdemona’s willow scene one of the most moving of his repertoire. In the 20th century, Britten himself wrote the text for A Midsummer Night’s Dream condensing as far as possible the original play to evoke the magic of a summer night during which four young lovers go astray in the forest... Three composers and three opera scenes from different aesthetic worlds brought together in the same theatrical project: a challenge taken up by Maëlle Dequiedt, the young director in residence at the Academy.