Opéra Royal - Donizetti: The Daughter of the Regiment

Cultural

Virtuoso soloists Gwendoline Blondeel and Patrick Kabongo, accompanied by the Chœur de l'Armée française, will transport the audience at the Opéra Royal to the beating heart of the French homeland!

In 1840, crowned with exceptional success, Donizetti gave his first opera in French in Paris: La Fille du régiment. King Louis-Philippe had just reopened the gates of Versailles and decided to create a museum dedicated to ‘all the glories of France’. Napoleon is more honoured there than Louis XIV, and France is preparing to welcome the return of the Emperor's ashes with fervour. In other words, patriotism was in full swing, and La Fille du régiment was perfectly in tune. Donizetti had a field day singing the unlikely love story between the vivandière Marie, who had become the regiment's adopted daughter, and the brave Tonio, who had saved the young woman and joined Napoleon's army: patriotic arias and choruses, an assault of bel canto and Tonio's famous aria, the ‘Everest of Lyric Art’ with its nine counter-utes!

The thousandth performance was given in Paris in 1914. During the December 1840 performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Lily Pons, after a stunning ‘Salut à la France’, sang La Marseillaise, which became a symbol of freedom in the midst of war.