Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de Musique Romantique Française

The operatic works co-produced in 2009- 2010 by the Palazzetto Bru Zane – Centre de musique romantique française provide a panorama of the genre in nineteenth-century France, and thus present a different aspect of Romanticism. The programme entitled Altre stelle concentrates on the early Romantics, the forerunners of Berlioz and his contemporaries: Gluck, Méhul and Cherubini. The excerpts chosen for this programme are taken from masterpieces that left their mark on that period, including Gluck’s Armide (1777) and Cherubini’s Médée (1797). Béatrice et Bénédict by Berlioz (1862) is a playful work in which the composer carefully avoids the grandiloquence and tormented pathos that characterise his other operas. A few years later, in 1867, Ambroise Thomas composed Mignon, which was to be one of the most popular works of the nineteenth century. Messager’s Fortunio (1907) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) took Romanticism into the twentieth century. The tone and style of Fortunio call to mind the compositions of Offenbach and Massenet. In Pelléas Debussy “re-invented” French prosody, as Lully and Gluck had done in their time, thereby giving French opera a new lease of life.