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Overview: Possibly mythology’s most unfathomable character: Medea, the sorceress, betrayed by her husband Jason, takes revenge by offering the latter’s lover a poisoned dress and then killing her own children. Such a destiny, so often portrayed in the arts, could not but be embodied at the Opera. In 1693, Marc-Antoine Charpentier premiered his only “tragédie lyrique”, based on a libretto by Thomas Corneille, at the Académie royale de Musique – forerunner of the Paris Opera – in the presence of Louis XIV. Three centuries after its creation, this baroque score of great orchestral wealth returns for the first time to the stage of the Paris Opera, under the baton of William Christie. Renowned for his exceptionally articulate interpretations, director David McVicar transposes the action to the Second World War, thus reinforcing the heroine’s tragic character.

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Overview: In Wajdi Mouawad's "brilliantly involving" new Paris Opera production of Debussy's only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, French soprano Sabine Devieilhe is "as near to perfection as one might wish for: a voice of exquisite beauty and sung as if the role [of Mélisande] had been written especially for her" (Opera Today) and Huw Montague Rendall, as Pelléas, projects a "faultless French phrasing, endowing [Pelléas] with the perfect blend of freshness and candor" (Bachtrack). Based on the classic symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck that the composer found to contain "far more humanity" than realism, Pelléas et Mélisande sets a tragic love triangle against some of Debussy's most soaringly dramatic music, all its Wagnerian flourishes brought out by Antonello Manacorda and the Paris Opera Orchestra.

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