Gustave Charpentier – Louise
📍 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence
📺 Streaming on ARTE.TV
🗓 Available from 12 July 2025
🎙 In French, with subtitles available
Cast
- Louise: Elsa Dreisig
- Julien: Adam Smith
- Le Père: Nicolas Courjal
- La Mère: Sophie Koch
- With Annick Massis, Marianne Croux, Carol Garcia, and others
🎼 Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon
🎶 Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée
🎤 Chœurs de l’Opéra de Lyon, Maîtrise des Bouches-du-Rhône
👨🎓 Conductor: Giacomo Sagripanti
🎬 Stage director: Christof Loy
🏛 Recorded at Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Aix-en-Provence – 11 July 2025
Please note: ARTE.TV may not be available in all regions. Availability depends on local broadcasting rights.
Premiered in 1900 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris, Louise by Gustave Charpentier (1860–1956) stands at the crossroads of Romanticism and modern French opera. Now, in a new staging for the 2025 Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, director Christof Loy revisits this rarely performed work with soprano Elsa Dreisig in the title role. The performance is now available to stream on ARTE.TV.
Subtitled by Charpentier as a “musical novel in four acts and five scenes,” Louise tells the story of a working-class young woman who defies her restrictive family to pursue love and freedom in Paris. While critics in 1900 found the opera scandalous for its depiction of female desire and independence, Loy’s contemporary take highlights the psychological and emotional control exercised by Louise’s father—a possessive figure portrayed with chilling realism by Nicolas Courjal.
Rather than romanticising emancipation, this production draws viewers into Louise’s subconscious, revealing a society that offers few true paths to liberation. Adam Smith appears as Julien, the young poet who represents freedom—and its disillusionments.
With Giacomo Sagripanti conducting the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon, the Orchestre des Jeunes de la Méditerranée, and the festival’s choral forces, the musical forces bring Charpentier’s lush, evocative score vividly to life. The performance was recorded live at the Théâtre de l’Archevêché in Aix-en-Provence, not to be confused with the Opéra-Comique where the opera originally premiered.
A co-production with the Opéra National de Lyon, the Opéra-Comique, and Palazzetto Bru Zane, this Louise presents a complex, urgent vision of a work that still resonates with contemporary themes of autonomy and social constraint.
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