LEAR / PROGRAMME / Palais Garnier / Novembre 2019

Description

Berlioz wrote only an overture to Shakespeare's King Lear, while Debussy did not go beyond the first two numbers of the score he undertook to write to accompany André Antoine's staging. As for Verdi, whom this tragedy "so vast, so tortuous" haunted as early as 1843, he never stopped procrastinating, confessing in the evening of his life that the scene in which Lear finds himself on the moor had terrified him. The great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who wanted to take on the role because he had long had the "impression that the various levels of inner and outer drama could very well be combined with music and expressed by it," approached Benjamin Britten, before turning to the German composer Aribert Reimann.
At first hesitant, he eventually declined the proposal. However, through repeated readings, the piece took root in him, the music being stored in "a sort of open drawer somewhere in [his] head," until the commission from the Munich Staatsoper triggered the actual composition phase in 1975. "Rarely has it been so convincingly portrayed - perhaps in Alban Berg's Wozzeck - the loneliness of man as a consequence of his inability to see those around him," wrote the creator of the role of Lear and instigator of this major work of the 20th century. Never revived at the Paris Opera since its French premiere in 1982, it is presented in a new staging by Calixto Bieito with Bo Skovhus in the moving role of Lear.