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Exhibition: "Molière en musiques" (‘Molière and Music’)
Curator: Laurence Decobert, Head of Iconography and Documentation Department, Performing Arts Department, BnF
Scenography and graphic design : Atelier Deltaèdre, Claire Holvoet Vermautet Noémie Grégoire.
Music and dance occupy an essential place in Molière's work. Twelve comedies and a tragedy – more than a third of his output – were interspersed with interludes of songs and ballet, forming a whole new genre of drama, the comédie-ballet.
This kind of interdependence was not unusual in the 17th century, since music and dance were often closely associated with the theatre. However, the new genre of comédie-ballet invented by Molière, which he created along with the composers Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier and the choreographer Pierre Beauchamps, gave this alliance of the arts a very special dimension of total theatre, which was to contribute to the birth of French opera in the 1670s.
On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the playwright's birth, the exhibition explores not only the conditions that gave rise to the comédie-ballet, but also the way in which theatrical creators have, right up to the present day, appropriated, transformed and even surpassed this defining aspect of his theatre.
Over the years, the role played by music has been perceived in various ways by stage directors. Depending on the period, some sought out the original pieces, while on the contrary, others called on contemporary composers to write new music. The choreographies, which have been irretrievably lost, were recreated in accordance with the criteria and tastes of each era.
This mixing of the arts in Molière's theatre has also prompted the creation of musical and choreographic works adapted from the comédie-ballets and has sometimes even found its way into comedies originally intended to be 'music-free'.
