Platée

About

Collegium Vocale 1704
State Opera Orchestra
National Theatre Opera Ballet

After 15 years, a Baroque opera is returning to the National Theatre repertoire, and after a full quarter-century the National Theatre will stage a work by Jean-Philippe Rameau, the guru of 18th-century French opera: the globally renowned comédie lyrique Platée, which, however, has never before been performed in the entire history of the National Theatre and the State Opera, and its predecessor, the Neues deutsches Theater.

In 1745, Louis XV selected the comedy about an ugly nymph, enticed to believe that Jupiter, the king of the gods, has fallen in love with her, as one of the three operas for the celebrations of his son’s wedding to the Infanta María Teresa of Spain. Given that the bride is said to have been no beauty, we can speculate as to whether the choice of Rameau’s opera was the monarch’s spiteful prank – if that indeed was the case, it was fitting (and improper) for other reasons too. Platée not only pokes fun at a foolish, graceless sprite, it also ridicules the “holy” social institute of matrimony: the pathologically jealous wives and the timid yet resourceful husbands, who, albeit being Olympian gods, face diverse partnership troubles …

Our production has been undertaken by the SKUTR stage directors’ tandem, who drew inspiration from the fact that the world premiere of Rameau’s Platée took place within a wedding, as well as the opera’s allegoric Prologue, in which Comedy engenders from wine ...

So come and see what a “Baroque” wedding has to offer.