Marie-ange todorovitch biography of william shakespeare

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How can you heighten the drama of Shakespeare’s most famous play? By giving it the French grand opera treatment. Gounod’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet follows Shakespeare’s centuries-old tale and brings this familiar tragedy to an epic crescendo. Romeo Montague has fallen for Juliet Capulet, a member of a rival family in the City of Verona. They secretly marry, but family tensions come to a dramatic peak. A plan is hatched to keep them together; however, it plays out in all the wrong ways resulting in devastating tragedy. With an expansive score, gorgeous sets, and period costumes, you’ll see Shakespeare’s tale as you’ve never experienced it before.

Content Advisory: Roméo et Juliette closely follows the action of the Shakespeare play and contains some mature themes that may be disturbing to audiences, including homicide and suicide.

COMPOSERCharles Gounod

LIBRETTISTSJules Barbier and Michel Carré

CONDUCTORChristopher Allen

PRODUCTIONby Matthew Ozawa

Understand every word:Performed in French with English translations projected above the stage.

Opéra National du Rhin

Patrick Fournillier, Vincent Boussard, Stéphane Degout, Ana Camelia Stefanescu, Marie-Ange Todorovitch, Nicolas Cavallier, Christophe Berry, Vincent Pavesi, Mark Van Arsdale, Jean-Gabriel Saint-Martin, Dimitri Pkhaladze

Strasbourg, France - 26 June 2011

To be or not to be... an opera... that is the question.

That’s a bit of a predictable way to start a review of Ambroise Thomas’ opera version of Hamlet, but it’s still a relevant question that has divided opera-goers for years. Your view on that is likely to depend on whether you are an English-speaker and familiar with the Shakespeare drama or otherwise, and if you are more attuned to the traditions of French grand opera. The problem with Shakespeare in French – even though his work is venerated there almost as much as in the UK – is that it’s not really Shakespeare. In French it has none of the poetry of his Elizabethan period verse, and it translated into a rather prosaic, ordinary, commonplace (I know these all mean the same thing, I’m just listing them for effect) French that is almost indistinguishable from how modern French is spoken.

Adapting Shakespeare to opera is not without its problems either, but there are plenty of examples from Berlioz to Wagner, but most notably Rossini and Verdi, to indicate that there’s no reason why a lyrical presentation of the Bard’s dramas can’t work, and in some cases… dare I say it… even improve on the original. Well, maybe not improve, but there are certainly examples, such as Iago’s Credo in Verdi’s Otello, where the original elements are expanded upon to superb effect, but it’s hard to see how even the Gesamtkunstwerk nature of opera can add much that isn’t already contained within the original Shakespearean drama.

Particularly Hamlet, which in my view, and many others, is the gre