Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui.
Irresistible, the allure of a snatched weekend in Paris to catch a rare, adored opera, Chabrier’s Le roi malgré lui. This glorious cornucopia of intoxicating invention has ‘enjoyed’ a history of bad luck: the delirious imbecility of the plot — ‘a negative tour de force, to invent such a confusing story with so few characters’ — has occasioned two comprehensive overhauls (most recent the brave rewrite mounted by Opera North in the mid-1990s). Maybe to revert to the original, embrace the absurdities, and enjoy the music for all it’s worth, is after all the best solution; a counsel of victory rather than despair.
And, if anywhere, at the Opéra Comique, its natural habitat. The lovable theatre, lavish with ornament outside and within, makes the perfect visual complement to Le roi, save only for the quantum difference between the décor’s generalised period idiom and the score’s minute particularity.
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