Little brother of the Paris Opera, but full of jewels of the French repertoire alternating sung scenes and spoken dialogues, the Opéra Comique will equip itself, under the leadership of its new boss Louis Langrée, with an academy to transmit a 300-year-old art . “I realized that a lot of people didn’t know what the comic opera genre is… it doesn’t mean funny”, the 61-year-old director told AFP.
“In the golden triangle of the Right Bank [à Paris, ndlr], there is the theater where one sings, the Paris Opera, the theater where one speaks, the Comédie-Française, and the theater where one speaks and one sings, the Opéra Comique”, he recalls.
The main works of this genre created at the Opéra Comique? The famous Carmen, Daughter of the Regiment, The Damnation of Faust or The Tales of Hoffmann. If the comic opera genre was indeed born in Paris, Louis Langrée believes that “those who have best preserved the sung and spoken until now are the Anglo-Saxons with the musicals (musical comedies)”. “West Side Story, it’s a comic opera, there is not this break between the spoken and the sung, the song is the supplement of emotion”, he adds.
He plans to launch an academy in September 2023 to train professional singers in this genre, but also pianists and conductors. Appointed by President Emmanuel Macron in November 2021, Louis Langrée, himself an internationally renowned French maestro, programmed in the first season of his mandate one of the oldest works of its kind (1771), Zemir and Azoraccording to The beauty and the Beast.
Out of fashion, comic opera? “These are not modern works but they have passed the filter of time, they tell of humanity in a dimension outside of everyday life”, underlines Louis Lagrée, who intends to commission a composer to create music based on a text by Maurice Maeterlinck, as Debussy did with Pelléas and Mélisande at the Opéra-Comique. Highlighting a forgotten repertoire was a mission already begun by his predecessor, Olivier Mantei (now general director of the Philharmonie de Paris), as was the development of sponsorship: from 689,000 euros in 2018, this rose to 1.77 million in 2021 and jumped to 2.9 million in 2022.
Relying on the team that worked with his predecessor, Louis Langrée brings a singular expertise in fundraising and for good reason: he is also, since 2013, the musical director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. “In the United States, patronage is a way of being part of the city, of society. I learned there that for them, it’s not just about loving an institution but feeling responsible for its future”he said.
“Today, patronage is no longer just coming to see an opera and drinking a glass of champagne during the intermission”, adds the director who was able to raise 26 million dollars from 25 wealthy families for his orchestra after the pandemic and will develop an international circle of “friends of the Opéra-Comique”. Among the projects at the Opera that have attracted the most patrons since its launch by the Mantei team: the Maîtrise Populaire, which trains young people aged 8 to 25, often from underprivileged regions, in the performing arts (a budget of one million euros per year, 70% financed by sponsorship). In 2018, the percentage of children from working-class neighborhoods integrating the Maîtrise was 23%, it has now risen to 60%. “Thanks to the rigor of the music, there is 100% success in the baccalaureate” among these young people, he assures.
A highlight awaits the Maîtrise in 2023 when the children will sing the national anthems during the Rugby World Cup. Develop societal projects, attract audiences away from opera, but also offer initiatives rooted in the 21st century: NFTs, these unforgeable certificates of authenticity, created around Carmenwill soon be launched by the new director.