La Chûte de Phaëton

Jean-Baptiste Lully/Marc-Antoine Le Grand

 

In 1688, the Académie de Musique de Lyon, the first opera company in Lyon, France and only the second outside Paris, opened amid great excitement with Lully’s masterful tragédie lyrique, Phaëton. By 1694, amid fierce competition from popular  musical theater such as Italian comedy, plagued by financial woes, and hindered by regional and national politics, warfare, famine, and a subsequent plague, the company had failed spectacularly and was forced to declare bankruptcy. The fall of the Académie led the Lyonnais playwright Marc-Antoine Le Grand to write the opera parody La Chûte de Phaëton, a commedie en musique, ridiculing the fall of the Opéra using music from Lully’s Phaëton set to new text. Our performance, set in the streets and alleys of Lyon and in its failing opera house, will be the first performance of this work in the modern era and carries special relevance and humor in an era when opera is struggling to find its place in contemporary American culture.

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Performed in French with English supertitles.