What a happy idea Stéphane Lissner had for his first season in reprising the last (and necessarily melancholy) production by Hugues Gall a little more than 10 years ago, when he left the Paris Opera:there is an implicit homage, and the sign of a desire for continuity in excellence.For the excellence is there, in the prodigious staging by Robert Carsen, perhaps one of his most successful:in this setting, which is an elegant mise en abyme of the Opéra Garnier, the...

Tragedia dell' ascolto was the classification of his opera by Luigi Nono. He was born 1924 in Venice and he had a strong relation to his home town. His composition style was formed by the sound and the special hearing environment of the laguna city with its echoing waters, greenless brick architecture of stairs, arcades and narrow streets. Even if he was a music revolutionary and the creator of contemporary Italian music, he was still very close to the traditional composing education...

The title is misleading as it is not mentioned to be a historical drama. The libretto of this opera is taken from surrealistic texts by Antonin Artaud dating from 1933, and are enriched by lyrics by Octavio Paz. It is actually a musical drama without a narrative, even it is linked to the historical fact of the conquest of America, but the composer's intention is more to accuse our civilisation, social organisation, capitalism, war and after all the central relation between man and...