Patrice Chéreau

Major partners of the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary

Major partners of
the Paris Opera’s 350th anniversary

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Abbé Perrin (Director of...

Portrait

Directors, ballet masters, stage directors, choreographers, architects, ... Octave discovers the personalities that have marked the history of the Opera which continues to attract the great names of music and dance.

The director, film-maker and actor Patrice Chéreau (1944-2013) left a profound mark on the artistic landscape over the last few decades. The eleven opera productions he staged breathed new life into opera direction. The greatest revolution that Patrice Chéreau brought to opera was his capacity to inject theatre into the genre by directing the singers like genuine actors. In 1974, Rolf Liebermann approached him to produce Les Contes d’Hoffmann at the Palais Garnier. Chéreau began by restoring the fantastic dimension to Jacques Offenbach’s work. He replaced the (sung) recitatives with spoken dialogues and inverted the order of the acts to give greater dramatic coherence. Together with Pierre Boulez, he was also the architect of the centenary production of the Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Festival (1976-1980). In 1979, at the Paris Opera, he set to work on a full version of Alban Berg’s Lulu—an opera left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death. Set against an Art Nouveau backdrop of black marble and flanked by a monumental staircase, Chéreau pushed the physical requirements of the performers to new heights. In 2005, the Paris Opera staged Così fan tutte (a production initially performed at the Aix Festival the same year). Then, in 2017, it presented From the House of the Dead, which had premiered ten years earlier at the Wiener Festwochen.