To celebrate the Royal Opera of Versailles’ 250th anniversary, here is the return to the stage of Grétry’s famous Richard the Lionheart (1784), the most famous 18th century French opéra comique in Europe for a century… disappeared from the stages for decades!

Hervé Niquet and Marshall Pynkoski are working on this doubly historic task. This “anniversary” project voluntarily puts the action back into the reign of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, to whom the heroes of Grétry’s opera were easily identified at the time: he was also familiar with the Royal Opera since the performance of Céphale et Procris in 1773. The sets restore the style of the painted canvases and frames typical of the construction of the Royal Opera House, the costumes are those of pre-revolutionary France (and no longer of the Middle Ages evoked at the time of creation), the staging giving an impression of Sedaine’s rich text, which quickly became famous.

If Grétry was Marie-Antoinette’s most beloved composer, his “Richard” is at the same time the culmination of a career, the announcement of an artistic style that romanticism will seize, but also the powerful historical mark of a dying era. This is an opportunity to bring opera back to life in the great history of Versailles and France. And here is also the first complete production of the Royal Opera of Versailles since 1789!