Heroine

To open the season, this evening, consecrated to the transgression of things forbidden, combines  three rare works in a single artistic endeavour. Sancta Susanna streaked through the skies of opera like a meteor one evening in March 1922. Driven by a burning desire, a nun strips naked and embraces the statue of Christ. This thirty-minute work, never performed, caused a scandal when it premiered at the Frankfurt Opera and provoked the fury of the Church.

The sultry deeds of Sancta Susanna are matched by Judith's thirst for knowledge: Bluebeard's Castle is a disquieting “huis clos”, a confrontation between Bluebeard and his wife who obliges her lover to open the doors of his castle one by one, to the point of no return... To accompany this plunge into the unknown, Bartók composed a spellbinding nocturnal score, imbued with fantasised Hungarian folklore.

Honegger's Danse des morts, another little-known if not unknown work, completes the evening. In this choral work composed to a poem by Claudel, the dead become a joyful and subversive community. The composer plays with the frontiers between scholarly and popular music, incorporating unexpected songs such as Sur le pont d'Avignon into his inferno.

Once upon a time...
Where did it happen?
Outside or inside?
It's an old story,
but what does it mean,
ladies and gentlemen?
You hear a familiar song.
You look at me and I look at you.
The curtain rises...
Or is it just
just our eyelids?
Blubeard's Castle

Winner of the European Opera Director Prize, Anthony Almeida presents a woman at three different stages of her life. Each piece depicts one of the social rituals - baptism, marriage and death - that punctuate her existence. This modern-day heroine becomes the common thread in this fiery triptych.