Roméo et Juliette

One glance is all it takes for Romeo and Juliet to fall in love. But their passion collides with the ancestral hatred dividing their families in a Verona on the brink of implosion. Although Charles Gounod had been attracted to Shakespeare’s play from a young age, it was only some twenty years later, after the success of Faust , that he set about transforming it into an opera. Premiered during the 1867 Exposition universelle, the opera was an immediate popular success. Four love duets, a passionate waltz, luminous music: the entire score quivers with desire. Who better than Thomas Jolly, one of the most inventive directors of his generation to celebrate this hymn to youth? A connoisseur of Shakespeare, he captures the emotions of adolescence while reintroducing a crucial element from the play: the plague epidemic which infuses the characters with an urgency to live and love.