Bovary - Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie - De Munt (2025) - Bovary - Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie - De Munt (2025)

Description

World Premiere.

"A new opera by Michael De Cock and Harold Noben, based on the novel Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

We know this woman and her story: to overcome the emptiness of her existence, Emma Bovary sets out in search of attention and lovers. A first passionate affair, although illusory, marks the beginning of a chronicle punctuated by repressed desires, brief moments of feverish happiness and lies intended to hide the truth... until it bursts into the open.

With the publication of Madame Bovary in 1856, Flaubert initiated a veritable literary revolution. This story, featuring the adulterous wife of a doctor who ends up taking his own life, caused such a shockwave in France that its author was even put on trial. Even today, Emma Bovary fascinates, and her predicted fall arouses empathy. Perhaps in each and every one of us sometimes resonates a "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"?

Driven by their shared passion for this cult 19th-century novel, Harold Noben and Michael De Cock begin their first collaboration by working on a contemporary interpretation: Bovary. The director of the KVS delivers here a quasi-dramatic monologue, a lyrical extension of the adaptation for the theater that he had already signed in collaboration with Carme Portaceli. Harold Noben, one of the great emerging talents of composition in Belgium, had already demonstrated his literary sensitivity at La Monnaie with À l'extrême bord du monde (2020), an opera recounting the last days of Stefan Zweig. This time again, he offers an eclectic and accessible score which, echoing Flaubert, apparently speaks of nothing, but actually contains everything."

More information is available on the official website of the opera house.