A love story that is not actually a love story, spleen and ennui, grand balls, passionate impulses, a duel in the mist and intoxicating melodies... All the ingredients of a real Tchaikovsky masterpiece. Read the synopsis of Yevgeny Onegin here, along with the opera's musical highlights provided and discussed by conductor Alain Altinoglu.
In addition to composing some of the most popular works in the whole history of music, Tchaikovsky was an assiduous correspondent. His letters on Yevgeny Onegin reveal a perfectionist artist who was searching for lyrical innovation and marked by his own tumultuous emotional life...
One cellist, six suites, one dancer in each of them, intermittently joined by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker herself. Simultaneously, with a slow and steady pace, the sun is setting. “The absolute antithesis of Tomorrowland” was what the choreographer called her latest: a stubborn celebration of unfashionable faith in an “experience without additives.”
An opera about unbreakable chamber pots and fragile family relationships, about straggly Scottish isles and shifty smiles, about how the greatest ambitions can end in the smallest room in the house.... Read the synopsis of On purge bébé !.
Ian Bostridge has been singing Schubert’s Winterreise for three decades. He explains why he agreed to approach a work he knows so intimately through the dark mirror of Hans Zender’s ‘composed interpretation’.
On purge bébé ! will be opera number 8.5 for Philippe Boesmans at La Monnaie. It crowns an artistic collaboration of just under forty years. A brief overview.
Der Rosenkavalier's most moving central theme sees its main character, the Marschallin, gradually giving up her relationship with her lover Octavian whom she relinquishes into the arms of a much younger (and in her eyes much more beautiful) woman. The opera raises a number of questions about how we relate as a society to age and femininity, and to its romantic and sexual issues…
A comedy, certainly, but also the moving portrait of a farewell, a nostalgic look back at time past, faded beauty, lost loves. Read the synopsis of Der Rosenkavalier here, and listen to some musical highlights in advance.
For our production of Der Rosenkavalier, and in preparation for the ball that we will host at La Monnaie on this occasion, we invite you to learn a little more about the waltz, from its origins to its variations in the cinema.
However lovely, elegant and, dare we say, rosy Richard Strauss’s most popular opera may be, as an opera house, you can soon find yourself in a thorny situation. Our colleagues reveal the biggest challenges for this production… and how they are trying to overcome them.
Elsa Dreisig
Currently preparing for our concert Salome's Dance, where she will sing excerpts from operas by Richard Strauss and Jules Massenet, soprano Elsa Dreisig talks us about her passion for the character Salome and the emotions a musician experiences before and during a concert...
Culture as the cement of Europe
In the current geopolitical climate, we can imagine that our 2022-23 season programme may surprise or even raise questions given that it includes three Russian operas. In this statement, we will explain why we have decided to continue with the planned programming. Or rather: what, due to the corona pandemic, all ended up in one and the same season.