Opéra National de Paris

A vengeful beauty foils the plans of the bloodthirsty Hun warrior to conquer Rome.

Screen adapatation of Mozart's greatest opera. Don Giovanni, the infamous womanizer, makes one conquest after another until the ghost of Donna Anna's father, the Commendatore, (whom Giovanni killed) makes his appearance. He offers Giovanni one last chance to repent for his multitudinious improprieties. He will not change his ways So, he is sucked down into hell by evil spirits. High drama, hysterical comedy, magnificent music!

Jafar Panahi sets out to find a Kurdish young woman with a golden voice that has been forbidden to sing by her family.

Two bored extras from the ‘Tristan and Isolde’ opera roam the underground of the Garnier Palace.

An opera ballet that doesn't exist. A ghost-like piece, played in Opera Bastille and danced at Opera Garnier. An almost mystical link between both scenes. A musician is testing sounds in Bastille's pit. The choir are taking their place in the rehearsal studio. Both sides are fine tuning the work in progress of an opera ballet: Sarah Winchester, her grief, her madness, her home and her ghosts.

Every morning at dawn, in the Lammermuir hills in Southern Scotland, the beautiful Lucia meets Edgardo of Ravenswood, a mysterious young man with whom she is in love. However, just as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the lovers are the progeny of two feuding families and do not have the right to love each other. Lucia, a magnificent flower shattered by the violence of a society of men, is embodied by South Africa’s Pretty Yende, a rising star of the opera stage, in this production by Andrei Serban, conducted by Riccardo Frizza.

Motivated by the love that bound him to Mathilda Wesendonck, Richard Wagner’s composition of Tristan und Isolde goes far beyond any simple operatic gesture. Peter Sellars’ production pours oil onto this troubled sea of emotions in an almost dematerialised setting bared of all earthly contingencies whilst Bill Viola presents the lovers’ initiatory quest for nirvana in videos detached from the stage, suspended like altarpieces.

A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.

Divested of its traditional attributes – glass slipper and pumpkin carriage – and dominated by a tyrannical stepfather instead of a cruel stepmother, Rossini’s la Cenerentola plays with these most conventional of fairy‑tale characters. Nonetheless Cinderella lives in a closed world devoid of tenderness and under the yoke of the tormentor whom she protects. Deep beneath her goodness smoulders a fire that her encounter with the prince will set free… Guillaume Gallienne subtly highlights the halftones of this dramma giocoso, somewhere between opera buffa and opera seria, and ranging from sombre melancholy to the burlesque.

Sergei Prokofiev's setting of the fairy tale "Cinderella" premiered at Moscow's Bolshoi Theater in 1945. In 1986, Rudolf Nureyev, then ballet director of the Paris Opera, choreographed the ballet anew and transposed the story into a private cinema, with sets reminiscent of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis." ARTE shows the Paris Opera performance from December 31, 2018.

Ballet en deux actes et treize tableaux du chorég. This is a live recording of a performance at Paris Garnier in 2007. Petit's earlier production for the Ballet de Marseille used more realistic stage sets, but the current Paris version has minimal stage sets. Also, the costumes were redesigned. Roland Petit created a ballet based on "In Search of Lost Time" for the Ballet de Marseille in the 1970s. Petit's intention was not to make a faithful adaptation of the novel, but to capture its flavour and convey, through a number of selected scenes, the narrator's incessant fluctuations between happiness and torment. The highlights are the series of poetical pas de deux.

Recording of a performance by Ballet de l'Opéra national de Paris of the ballet on Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker.

Once the show is over at Bastille Opera's 6th basement, Professor Turrel and his team open their shop. The service offers the opportunity for couples to say goodbye beautifully: recycling sets, performers and musicians. But tonight, we follow Thibaut's story: a man who couldn't say goodbye to his love.

The composer's opera buffa transcends the spirit of Beaumarchais’ comedy and combines the absurd with a touch of satirical realism in a score where rhythm and virtuosity place the comic effects in an ongoing dramatic narration. As a result, the characters – Rosina in particular – gain a new degree of realism and break with the usual archetypes. Damiano Michieletto’s giddying production embraces this perpetual motion and carries in its wake the happy couple formed by Lawrence Brownlee and Pretty Yende.

The Florentine sculptor and silversmith Benvenuto Cellini rapidly attained a degree of renown that went beyond the confines of Italy. Invariably embroiled in conspiracies, intrigues and quarrels, Cellini is commissioned by the Pope to cast a large sculpture of Perseus. He is loved by Teresa, but she is promised to Fieramosca, an academic artist who has not been favoured with a papal commission. Terry Gilliam’s exuberant production draws the protagonists into a delirious and joyful yet claustrophobic and megalomaniac world: a flaring up of contagious madness.

Werther loves Charlotte, but she promised her mother on her deathbed that she would marry Albert. After the marriage Charlotte suggests that Werther should travel - but not forget her. In addition to the singing and orchestral accompaniment, the entire cast acts very convincingly. And, there's no backstage mugging, entrances and spoken nonsense to spoil the experience of the drama.

Set in 16th-century France and Spain, Don Carlos tells of the political and amorous rivalry between King Philip II and his son, Don Carlos, over Elisabeth de Valois. Krzysztof Warlikowski strips down a tragedy haunted by ghosts, and places the intimate at the heart of an imaginary fresco truer than history itself. Along with Philippe Jordan, he reveals to the public the very first version of this great five-act opera: the version modified by Verdi himself for the work’s first performance in 1867.

No one better described the half-starved, struggling artists than Murger in his Scènes de la Vie de Bohème: artists ready to burn a manuscript to try to keep warm yet,in an era of triumphant bourgeois materialism, dreaming of another existence. Taking up these scenes of Bohemian life, Puccini offers us a heart-breaking love story and some of the most beautiful music in the history of opera in the story of the poet Rodolfo and fragile Mimi. The staging of this new production has been entrusted to Claus Guth who sets the drama in a future devoid of hope in which love and art become the sole means of transcendence.

In Nephtali, animator Glen Keane uses both film and drawing in order to depict the journey of a ballerina that is drawn towards a higher power.

Jean-Gabriel Périot sketches the portrait of a group of women for whom music is a means of resistance and of escaping isolation.