Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse - Versailles Opera house (2024) - Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse - Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles (2024)

Description

Revival of the production created in 2015.

"In 1743, two years before Rameau imagined his Platée, Boismortier had the Royal Academy of Music play an extraordinarily modern and wacky "ballet-comique": Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, the hero encounters monsters, enchanters, princesses, the Japanese... which are the pretext for so many offbeat and daring dances and choirs. Musical beauty borders on parodic and irreverent comedy. A work of choice for Hervé Niquet, Corinne and Gilles Benizio!
Although little known today, Boismortier was a prolific composer during the reign of Louis XV, producing in all popular genres. His first great success was this Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, a comic ballet he invented with Favart, a genius librettist who transformed the subject of Don Quichotte into a brilliant and colorful farce of "theatre within the theatre". Boismortier's writing sparkles with each sentence, in this pochade where the Duchess makes Don Quichotte believe that he is meeting Dulcinea again and a gallery of characters including Merlin the Enchanter or the Infanta of the Congo, when he is without knowing it on the stage of the private theater of the castle…
Hervé Niquet unearthed the music for this nugget in 1988, but to the delight of the public it was brought to the stage with the complicity of Corinne and Gilles Benizio (Shirley and Dino), reconstituting the infernal trio of King Arthur and Platée. Attention, baroque delirium guaranteed!

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