To celebrate his 60th birthday this year, Pascal Dusapin gave us a triumphant opera Penthesilea, premiered in March 2015 at the Théâtre de la Monnaie, under the baton of Franck Ollu, with staging by Pierre Audi. This fall the co-commissioner, Opéra national du Rhin will present the French premiere in Strasbourg on September 26, 2015.

Penthesilea, the proud queen of the Amazons!

Dusapin based his opera on the play by Heinrich von Kleist (1808) who took the story from greek mythology. After accidentally killing her sister Hippolyta while hunting, Penthesilea joined Trojan War  with the hope that she would die in battle. In Kleist’s version, a complex and deadly game of love and hate, attraction and repulsion, Penthesilea kills Achilles in a moment of tragic madness, when she tears him apart with her teeth.



Pascal Dusapin’s Penthesilea is his seventh opera. The message of the work seems to be taken from a quote from Christa Wolf that he includes in his score: ‘Thus begins the modern era and it is not beautiful.’

“ …a formidable, hard-to-classify figure who has drawn on both the convulsive avant-gardism of Iannis Xenakis and the brooding late Romanticism of Sibelius.
 
“Dusapin approaches the material with admirable restraint; the tone of the opera, which unfolds in an unbroken ninety minutes, is grave and meditative, with chant like lines rising over extended drones and impressionistic washes of timbre. It begins with a lonely modal melody for harp, which is gradually blotted out by a spreading smear of sound in the lower strings and brass. An array of antique instruments—a cimbalom, a type of hammered dulcimer; a sistrum, or sacred Egyptian rattle; various drums and gongs—provide an archaic sonic patina. Although Dusapin occasionally unleashes a Dionysian frenzy in the full orchestra, for the most part the musical action proceeds at a ritual distance. It is a masterly work...”
Alex Ross, The New Yorker, April 27, 2015

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