Georges Bizet takes over the Théâtre du Châtelet!

Aficionados of bel canto or curious about new experiences, mark your calendars! The Théâtre du Châtelet is inaugurating this season Opéra pour tous! The goal of this operation: make the lyric genre accessible and spread it as much as possible, with affordable prices, simple librettos, and subtitles in French. And to kick off the project, a tribute is paid from May 24 to June 3 to the 150 years of the death of an icon of this art: the great Georges Bizet, with the masterpieces L’Arlésienne and Le Docteur Miracle performed together in one and the same play. Focus on this event performance!

150 years after his death, we all still have in mind the tune of Carmen when we mention his name. And yet, Georges Bizet was also a child of bohemia: an uncomfortable material life, a difficult family life, a rather posthumous glory… but behind his too short passage on Earth (he dies at 36 years old), the rebellious bird of composition left as legacy around 120 musical compositions and nearly thirty operas (unfinished included). Among his greatest pieces: L’Arlésienne, inspired by the eponymous novella by Alphonse Daudet, or also his operetta Le Docteur Miracle.

Big success adored by Sviatoslav Richter and others like Sergei Rachmaninov, L’Arlésienne is stage music for a three-act drama by Alphonse Daudet. Bizet composes for the play melodramas and intermezzos inspired by traditional and Provençal music of the time.
The pitch? Jan, a country boy, is madly in love with a young girl from the city of Arles. One day a man comes to speak to Jan's father and claims he was the lover of this Arlésienne, with letters as proof. The next day, the father tells his son the whole story. Consumed by grief, he renounces the marriage but cannot forget the young woman.

In 1856, Jacques Offenbach wants to return to pure and hard theater, to promote the Bouffes-Parisiens. So he organizes a one-act operetta competition. Georges Bizet, then still very young, composes Le Docteur Miracle, whose tune of the "omelette quartet" was encored on the evening of the first performance. Result: he wins, at only 18 years old, the first prize of the operetta competition!
The pitch of this work between laughter and great music: the epic adventure of Docteur Miracle, who tricks the Podestat of Padua to win over his daughter Laurette, and (as often) love and song that triumph in the end!

L’Arlésienne / Le Docteur Miracle by Georges Bizet, from May 24 to June 3, 2025 at the Théâtre du Châtelet, 1 place du Châtelet, Paris 1.