Rameau's Les Boréades comes to the Linbury Theatre from 4 to 14 March 2027 — The Royal Opera's first Rameau at Covent Garden.
Rameau wrote Les Boréades at seventy-nine and never heard it. It went into rehearsal at the Paris Opéra in 1763; something stopped it, nobody is certain what, and he died the following year with the score unperformed. It survived only because a collector, J. J. M. Decroix, gathered his manuscripts after his death and they ended up in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The first performance of any kind was a concert in Lille, two centuries later.
It is a tragédie lyrique in five acts about a queen forbidden to marry outside the line of the north wind, and the music is the strangest and most forward-looking Rameau wrote: harmonically restless, full of orchestral weather, and containing dance sequences no one was expecting from a man of that age in that decade.
R B Schlather directs it in the Linbury Theatre from Thursday 4 to Sunday 14 March 2027, and it is the first Rameau the Royal Opera has ever staged at Covent Garden. Eleven days is the whole run, in the smaller of the two rooms — which for a house that has gone two hundred and sixty years without performing this composer is either modest or sensible, depending on how the first night goes. Not one person at the first night will have heard it in this building before. Rameau was the greatest French composer before Berlioz.