We see Salome in a new production by American director Lydia Steier, making her debut at the Opéra Bastille the title role is taken by French/South African soprano Elza van den Heever, while Finnish superstar Karita Mattila plays Herodias for the first time. By the time Salome was premiered Wilde was in Reading Gaol, but its fame quickly spread to Germany, where it immediately inspired Richard Strauss to create his most sensational opera.

Uniquely among Oscar Wilde’s works, Salome was written in French the author’s fascination with the titular character – a shadowy, unnamed figure in the New Testament source – was shared by French writers and artists including Flaubert, Moreau, Huysmans, Laforgue and Mallarmé, whose portrayals all left their imprint on Wilde’s scandalous play. The fin-de-siècle theme continues with our first two operas: both were based on plays written in the decade following Rudoloph and Mary’s deaths, and premiered in theatres only a mile or so from the Palais Garnier – an indication of the extraordinary intensity of Paris’s theatrical as well as musical life.

The Palais Garnier provides an appropriately fin-de-siècle setting for MacMillan’s inspired recreation of this catastrophic incident. It tells the story of the 1889 suicide pact between the Archduke Rudolph, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, and his teenaged lover Mary Vetsera. His virtuosic music provides the exhilarating score for Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling, premiered at Covent Garden in 1978 and regarded by ballet companies worldwide as one of the most formidable challenges in the repertoire.

The Hungarian-born Franz Liszt moved to Paris at the age of eleven and maintained a lifelong connection with the city. It boasts not one but two of the world’s greatest opera houses: the sumptuous Opéra Garnier, completed in 1875, and the monumental Opéra Bastille, opened in 1989 for the bicentenary of the French Revolution.įor much of the Opéra’s 350-year existence, achieving success in Paris has been a crucial career goal, attracting musicians here from across the world.

Music and Paris are intricately intertwined: opera and ballet are central to the city’s social and cultural life, and Paris in turn has shaped both art-forms to an extent few other places can rival.

Ballet at opera garnier paris