Jean-Louis Grinda

In the cold of winter, an exuberant poet lives in poverty with his three bohemian flatmates. His heart is warmed when he falls in love with his fragile neighbour, but then her illness takes a turn for the worse. In Opéra de Monte Carlo's production of Puccini’s beloved opera, set in Paris to the interwar period, the artists’ misery looks more like a chosen lifestyle than a suffered fate. Jean-Louis Grinda’s sumptuous staging reflects on Puccini’s romantic glorification of the precariousness of the human condition.

"Dare to come, you who defy Venus!" cries Thaïs, the priestess of Venus, to ascetic monk Athanaël, determined to save her soul by converting her to Christianity. This challenge precipitates the action of Thaïs, Massenet's operatic masterpiece, staged here by Jean-Louis Grinda at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo with Jean-Yves Ossonce conducting!