Rameau's Les Boréades, unheard in his lifetime, receives the Royal Opera's first staging of his music at the Linbury Theatre.
Rameau’s last opera, Les Boréades, receives its first Royal Opera staging when R B Schlather’s production opens at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden on Thursday 4 March 2027.
Rameau wrote the opera at 79 and never heard it. It went into rehearsal at the Paris Opéra in 1763, but something stopped it, and nobody is certain what. He died the following year with the score unperformed.
The score survived because a collector, J. J. M. Decroix, gathered Rameau’s manuscripts after his death, and they ended up in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The first performance was a concert in Lille, two centuries later.
The work is a tragédie lyrique in five acts about a queen forbidden to marry outside the line of the north wind. Its music is harmonically restless and full of orchestral weather.
Schlather’s production plays the Linbury Theatre until Sunday 14 March. It is the first Rameau the Royal Opera has staged at Covent Garden, so nobody in the audience will have heard the work in this building before.