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November 16, 2022
By Natasha Roule
Paris, December 2015. I had come in search of opera. I had hoped to unearth reams of scores copied for provincial music academies, ideally complete with performance annotations and musicians’ cues. Instead, I stumbled across La chute de Phaéton, comédie en musique—a slender, unassuming livret by a playwright I had never heard of named Marc-Antoine Legrand. As I leafed through its pages, I couldn’t stop grinning. A spunky cast of hammy singers, foppish patrons, coy lovers, and no-nonsense officials sprang to life, mimicking the elegant verse of Lully’s tragédie en musique Phaéton (1683) with a humor that matched the dry wit of Oscar Wilde and the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges. Lully’s opera told the story of the rise and demise of an arrogant demigod, cautioning spectators on the dangerous consequences of misplaced ambition and pride. Instead of a proud demigod, it is the opera company of Lyon—crippled by a history of poor financial decisions and personalities who do not care to truly set things right—that is the star of Legrand’s work.