Marc Labonnette

A staging of Pierre Corneille's play "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme" by Denis Podalydès.

An impressive masked figure, Trompe‑la‑mort reveals his true character through his impalpable latent energy and a plot abounding in tragic twists of fate. An ambivalent character, both regal in bearing and warmly protective, cruel and yet loving, rapacious and indomitable even in the face of madness, this ’Machiavelli among miscreants’ destined to become chief of police, uses his conquests to advance relentlessly in the pursuit of his aims whilst keeping his hand closely hidden. Guy Cassiers, working for the first time with the Paris Opera, portrays a three-tiered society where some rise and others fall.

No one better described the half-starved, struggling artists than Murger in his Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: artists ready to burn a manuscript to try to keep warm yet,in an era of triumphant bourgeois materialism, dreaming of another existence. Taking up these scenes of Bohemian life, Puccini offers us a heart-breaking love story and some of the most beautiful music in the history of opera in the story of the poet Rodolfo and fragile Mimi. The staging of this new production has been entrusted to Claus Guth who sets the drama in a future devoid of hope in which love and art become the sole means of transcendence.

For his opera Garnier stage-directing debut, Simon Stone creates a sensational La Traviata, 2.0! Pretty Yende and Benjamin Bernheim triumph as Violetta and Alfredo in a production that remixes the beloved operatic masterpiece’s familiar love story for the digital age, adding social media notifications, all-nighters, texts, and parties to produce an interpretation starkly appropriate for our modern era. At the podium, Michele Mariotti conducts the Paris National Opera Orchestra.