In entrusting the production of the first opera in its new Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, the Paris Opera has chosen an intimate marriage between song and dance. With her outstanding talent for highlighting the underlying geometry of musical works, the choreographer will be working with a double cast of both singers and dancers, transforming the stage of the Palais Garnier into a space in which the lovers, having made a wager with a philosopher straight out of the Enlightenment, undergo an experience both alchemical and emotional. Their bodies resemble the pairs of elements evoked by Goethe in Elective Affinities: they seem inseparable until a foreign body disrupts their equilibrium and creates new liaisons.