LA MONNAIE / DE MUNT

‘Don Pasquale’ is the ideal opera for the holiday season. Let our dramaturge Marie Mergeay convince you to come see the show.

No right-minded person out alone on the street would wish to encounter the characters from From the house of the dead! And yet Janáček has the power to shine a light in the darkest corners of humanity with music that exudes intensity, vulnerability, power and humour. Conductor Michael Boder explains why Janáček’s last opera is so unusual.

The chorus leader of our social programme ‘A bridge between two worlds’ has devoted ten long years to sparking and escalating an enthusiasm for singing in inmates in several Belgian prisons. A conversation with a musical fire accelerant.

In his last great work, Janáček flatly ignored the basic rules of the theatre: From the House of the Dead is an opera without heroes. The piece is a montage of powerful dramatic scenes and narrations, in which each of the various protagonists in turn steps out of the anonymous male chorus to tell his tale. Sometimes that tale takes up a whole scene, sometimes the protagonist sings a single line. Separating the close on twenty (!) soloist roles poses a huge challenge for both the director and the spectator. It helps that in this labour camp, as in all dystopias, everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. These five prisoners are most in the spotlight and they provide the spectator with a holdfast in the narrative.

Reinder Pols, dramaturge at La Monnaie, gets into the details of From the house of the dead, Leoš Janáček's last opera, a work that hovers between operatic tradition and early 20th-century innovation.

La Monnaie opens the 2018-19 season with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s iconic opera ‘Die Zauberflöte’ in an original interpretation by Romeo Castellucci. The production boasts a five-star cast with, playing the part of the Queen of the Night, one of the leading European opera singers of the moment: Sabine Devieilhe, whose career we outline below.

Our dramaturge Antonio Cuenca Ruiz introduces Die Zauberflöte.

For our production of ‘Die Zauberflöte’ – one of Mozart’s most famous works and one of the most beloved of the entire operatic repertoire –, director Romeo Castellucci asked the architect Michael Hansmeyer to design the set of the first act. Hansmeyer in turn collaborated with Factum Arte to create the gigantic architectural shapes he generated by algorithms.

Creator of shows that, by their visual power, fascinate as much as they question, Romeo Castellucci is much in the public eye. At the beginning of the 2018-2019 season, he revisits for la Monnaie the famous opera ‘Die Zauberflöte’ by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The playwright Piersandra Di Matteo, one of his close collaborators, depicts the artist in the following portrait.

Having directed the successful Foxie! (The Cunning Little Vixen), the Belgian designer, artist and theatre director Christophe Coppens has taken on a second opera. Béla Bartók’s two most important works for the stage, Bluebeard’s Castle and The Miraculous Mandarin, take us into two totally different worlds. After a mysterious universe full of symbolism in Bluebeard’s Castle awaits the expressionism and even violence of The Miraculous Mandarin. Director Christophe Coppens talks to dramaturg Reinder Pols.

Director Olivier Py in an interview with Reinder Pols about the opera Lohengrin.