Season tickets [GRAND ABONNEMENT] - Grand Théâtre de Genève

Here is another monument to the fascinating and questionable genre of French grand opera: Fromental Halévy's La Juive (1835). La Juive was Halévy's first great success, with its colossal spectacle and final execution scene, the stuff of operatic legend. Beneath its sumptuous stage finery, La Juive speaks of religious intolerance, imperialism and the tragedy of medieval Jewish life in Europe threatened by Catholic fanaticism and forced to migrate constantly. The goldsmith Éléazar and his daughter, the beautiful Rachel, take in a young man who introduces himself as Samuel, but the truth and the price of love will only too soon become clear to the protagonists. American director David Alden will treat the harsh and disturbing plot of La Juive with his trademark sense of irony and black comedy. At his side to rekindle this complicated, exciting and dangerous operatic artefact, Marc Minkowski reigns as the undisputed maestro of French grand opera.

Something is rotten in the state of the Grail knights. Their king Amfortas has lost the Holy Spear to the fiend Klingsor. Amfortas is crushed with shame and his wound festers horribly without killing him. In the midst of this ailing world, young Parsifal appears and the Grail knights make him their champion. Trials and temptations ensue for the pure-hearted Parsifal who finally retrieves the Holy Spear, the cause and the cure of Amfortas’ wound. Amfortas may now die and Parsifal take his place as king. German director Michael Thalheimer sees Parsifal as the “wound” of bidding farewell to the world. The world must bid farewell to the Grail knighthood and the knights to their past and their worldly works. Jonathan Nott already has a legendary performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle at the Lucerne Festival under his belt. With the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and some of the best Wagner singers of the day, they embark on the great spiritual journey that is Parsifal.

This new opera, based on the film of the same name by Swiss director Xavier Koller, tells the story of a Kurdish family that abandons kind and country to try to get into paradise, i.e., Switzerland. Like a mirage, this paradise fades away with each step forward and ends up disappearing completely in a snowstorm. More than 30 years ago, a family’s future was sealed by the mountains. Today, people meet their destiny at sea. But for those of us who do not have to make this kind of journey, the story is little more than a parable. Who better to stage this new opera than Hungarian film and theatre director Kornél Mundruczó, already seen in Geneva with The Makropoulos Case (2020) and Sleepless (2022)? The music of this journey into despair, the first of our productions to be cancelled by the 2020 COVID lockdown, is the work of German composer Christian Jost, whose distinctive orchestral writing has the epic proportions of film music and is full of powerful rhythms and great emotions.

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of his second opera: "Even if Katerina Lvovna is a murderer, she is not a scumbag. Her conscience torments her. (...) I can empathise with her...". In addition to murder, the opera features (audibly!) brutal sex, sadistic harassment and sexual assault. Buoyed by the steamy love affair between Katerina and Sergey, the opera also includes fragments of operetta, music hall, cabaret and jazz with the orchestra leading the party - one senses Shostakovich's vast experience as a silent film accompanist. Calixto Bieito, for one, is in a film noir mood, setting the opera in a rotten industrial labyrinth, where one can only work in hazmat suits, and which recalls the polluted and dilapidated metropolises of Russia and China... or Detroit. According to Bieito: "It's not Romeo and Juliet, it's the apocalyptic thriller of love in a post-capitalist system." The Argentine Alejo Pérez conducts the OSR and we introduce the dazzling Lithuanian soprano Aušrinė Stundytė in the title role.