Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier (Le Chevalier à la Rose) at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Monday June 2 2025

Conductor: Henrik Nánási. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes: Małgorzata Szczęśniak. Choreography: Claude Bardouil. Lighting: Felice Ross. Video: Kamil Polak. Feldmarschallin von Werdenberg: Véronique Gens. Octavian: Niamh O'Sullivan. Sophie: Regula Mühlemann. Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau: Peter Rose. Faninal: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Annina: Eléonore Pancrazi. Valzacchi: Krešimir Špicer. Sänger: Francesco Demuro. Leitmetzerin: Laurène Paternò. Polizeikommissar, Notar: Florent Karrer. Haushofmeister: François Piolino. Wirt: Yoann Le Lan. Orchestre National de France. Unikanti Choir, Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine children’s choir.

Photos: Vincent Pontet

I suppose it had to happen one day…

If I’ve done my sums right, this Rosenkavalier at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées was my sixteenth Krzysztof Warlikowski production, not counting the times I’ve gone back to see some of them more than once. Since I was first hooked by his Makropoulos at the Bastille, through thick and thin - inevitably, some of his productions are less ‘thick’ than others - I’ve been a fan. I missed his first for the Paris Opera - Iphigénie en Tauride, in 2006 - but made up for that by seeing it later. I’ve explained time after time to people who complain that his ‘tics’ are predictable that, if you like Bruckner symphonies, novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett or Carry-On films, you want more of the same, not something completely different. I’m living proof that the assertion I once read online, that ‘nobody makes a special trip to see an opera just for the director,’ is false: I’ve scheduled trips to see Warlikowski’s work beyond Paris and Brussels. I’ve invited friends to see it too, and made fans of them as well. They aren’t usually interested in opera, but if Warlikowski’s directing, they want to go.

But this time, for the first time, I wasn't convinced. And as the press had raised my expectations high, implying this show was Warlikowski at his best, and shocked at the booing that greeted it, I was sorely disappointed.

Not that he hadn’t done his homework, as usual. Warlikowski is an intelligent, thoughtful director. He takes the job seriously and - I believe, though others don’t - respects the works he’s staging. Like Romeo Castellucci’s, his productions are underpinned by a mille-feuille of interrelated references. You may not get them all, but you're sure every detail, every design choice and gesture, has been thought through and is significant. Like multiple layers of paint on canvas or wood, these substrates may not be obvious but they’re there, adding depth and complexity to your experience. His work is like a puzzle that keeps you wondering, keeps you guessing, forces you to think. Puzzles can be addictive.

This new Rosenkavalier is - like Robert Carsen’s Capriccio at the Palais Garnier - site-specific. The single set is inspired by the Théâtre des Champs Elysées (and its Studio) itself, in the house’s ‘signature’ pinkish burgundy, with a sinuous, sleek balcony on the rear wall. It is at once a stage, a backstage area, and an auditorium, sometimes equipped with rows of seats, sometimes with three dressing tables with gleaming mirrors and, yes, a washbasin. Mobile walls of square glass bricks, set in a red grid, refer directly to a revolutionary modernist building in Paris called the Maison de Verre (1928). They glide across to form smaller spaces as the plot requires.

In this evocative space, the production interweaves the key notion of performative representation - the public staging of modern life on digital ‘glass house’ platforms - with the gender ambiguities and other issues inherent in Hofmannsthal’s libretto, and the history - including Josephine Baker’s Revue Nègre (1925) - of the house. It also bears in mind that the origins of the story were French, and plays with a kind of Vienna-Paris artistic dichotomy, pre- and post-WWI (cf. all these references to the 20s).

But I can’t go into every detail; this article, already long, would go on forever. Here, instead, are just a few pointers that I hope will give an idea of how it looked and felt. 

The Marschallin is portrayed as a ‘digitally famous’ personality, somewhere between a mature (and slender) Kim Kardashian and Anna Wintour. Her life is lived mostly in public, surrounded by a kind of cour des miracles of camp, extravagantly-dressed, gender-fluid fashion victims. Annina and Valzacchi wield cameras and microphones, the pet-seller pulls a tiny mechanical dog on a string, the orphans look and giggle like Japanese cosplay teenagers, and the hammy scene acted out by the Italian singer - a boxer in red trunks - and the Marschallin stretched out like a silent-film star on the bed, is captured with a smartphone by by Hippolyte, stretched out on the floor.

The Marschallin’s in charge, deliberately staging Octavian’s ‘handover’. At the end of act one, she checks on Sophie, who’s at her dressing-table getting ready for the presentation in act two, which the Marschallin observes, with her (female) sidekick Mohamed, from the balcony. Whether they’re actually watching the live action, or Robert Wiene’s 1926 silent film of Der Rosenkavalier, shot in Vienna and projected here, is left unclear.

The third act, at the inn, opens with the vivid green curtain that brought the second to a close, and is watched by all of the entourage we met in the first, from their seats under the balcony. Leopold, an afro-haired break dancer, helps Octavian into a slinky black dress and bouffant black wig that recall Warlikowski’s ‘Amy Winehouse’ portrayal of Medea. The apparitions are near-naked black dancers with white faces. Or might they be white dancers with painted bodies? As the masquerade ends, before the trio, all take their bows at the front of the stage.

The three acts are doubly framed. A video, at the start, as the horns strike up, shows two beautiful women in bed: the older Gens with dark hair, the younger O'Sullivan blonde. At the end, during the new couple’s final duet, we see another video: the Marschallin pours herself a drink after she joins her husband at home. Sophie, meanwhile, removes Octavian’s curly red wig and lets down her hair: blonde again. 

A dense production, full of ideas… so why didn’t it work for me this time?

In Eurotrashy Europe, we’re used to what the French call décalages: mismatches between text, plot and what we see on stage. Provided the concepts behind it all are convincing enough, the mental gymnastics involved can be interesting and entertaining. So my WTF threshold is high, but this time, I found the constant discrepancies exasperating.

Is it possible to update Der Rosenkavalier to the present day, or is it better to stop at WWI? The director does nothing to explain Octavian’s sword on the bedroom floor - not even borrowing a fencing helmet from his staging of Don Carlos. His deliberately ungendered approach (to Octavian in particular: we never really know if he or she is, well, a he or a she) might be fine, only it clashes all the time with Hofmannsthal’s gendered text. And it’s very hard to believe that his Marschallin would dismiss her household of mincing fashionistas to get ready to go to church. Who is this present-day ‘Marschallin’ anyway? Of course, Instagram influencers are supposed to wield influence, and Anna Wintour is fashion royalty, but where does Marie-Thérèse get all her power? And what, in this day and age, is all this rigmarole about Ochs needing a young nobleman to present a silver rose?

Worst of all, and most disconcerting to me, much of the acting, which usually rings true in Warlikowski’s productions, is hammy and camp: old-fashioned, caricatural camp, I mean, recalling Benny Hill shows, and Mr. Humphries in Are You Being Served? Even the way people smoke, taking great gulps at their cigarettes in too-quick succession, looks fake. (The constant smoking, in particular, exasperated my neighbour as, like the break-dancing to Strauss’s waltzes, we’ve seen too much of it recently.) Perhaps just as, in my view, Laurent Pelly would be better-off sticking to comedy, Warlikowski should steer clear of it in future.

Musically, the evening was a mixed bag. Among the supporting roles, Yoann Le Lan’s innkeeper stood out, though the poor chap choked on his topmost note. Some may recall François Piolino as the cross-gendered fairy Manto in José Montalvo’s vividly memorable production of Rameau’s Les Paladins, more than two decades ago. Even if vocally he’s no longer at his best, it was nice to find him again here, after making an honourable career of these smaller parts, as both majordomos.

Eléonore Pancrazi was an unusually ripe- and round-voiced Annina, and Krešimir Špicer a resounding, almost roaring, Valzacchi. Jean-Sébastien Bou plainly enjoyed playing Faninal, but, though he’s a singer I generally like, he was in his worst barking mode the evening I was there, blasting out his good notes like a foghorn. ‘Shouting,’ a friend of mine who likes him less has always called it.

Francesco Demuro, flexing his muscles for the smartphone cameras as a kind of Rocky-cum-Rudolf Valentino, made a three-course meal of his Italian aria, hamming it up outrageously, but hitting all the notes. Peter Rose is a veteran Ochs. His voice now shows signs of fatigue, sometimes lacking body. The subterranean last note of his parting ‘Keine Nacht dir zu lang’ was barely audible. But his experience showed in the fluency he brought to the character’s ‘patter’, a parlando so natural it verged on Sprechstimme.

I certainly got a thrill from the presentation scene, but after that it seemed as if Regula Mühlemann (Sophie) - a little bit mature and sturdy, incidentally, for her prim little girl’s yellow velvet coat and frilly socks - had shot her vocal bolt. As a result, the final trio wasn’t quite the sublime escalation we look forward to (supposing we’ve stayed to the end). Odd casting, I thought.

But Niamh O'Sullivan, whom I’d only previously seen in Händel (Second Harlot in Solomon in Madrid) was a convincingly vehement Octavian. Back then I’d found her voice ‘interestingly deep and dark,’ and that darkness and complexity combined in an appropriately virile timbre. This contrasted nicely with the supple elegance of Véronique Gens as the Marschallin, so some of the evening’s best bits came when the two were together. Gens’s voice, instantly recognisable, is quite catnippy to me. I love its easy grace, and dark-gold, satiny core. So I’m glad she got the chance to fulfil her wish to sing the part by replacing Marlis Petersen, initially announced. As you might expect, she brought to it a natural, unaffected nobility, rare these days, that reminded me of Dame Felicity Lott’s incarnation, more years ago than I care to count.

Strauss doesn’t really run in the veins of the Orchestre National de France. To my mind (but I'm not a musicologist) he calls, at least in his most spectacularly complex passages, for a special degree of rhythmic and chromatic fluency and clarity; a good conductor will help the players mark the rhythmic pulse underlying all those flourishes, to keep the score legible. Henrik Nánási’s conducting seemed, on the contrary, pretty bland and featureless to me. There were no great brass outbursts - in the act two presentation, for example, the trumpets played like a tenor afraid of cracking at the top, copping out just when you expected them to dazzle. Fast tuttis were somehow slithery and formless.

The orchestra was best, I'd say, at the softer string passages and (as usual) in woodwind solos. So to me, as the famous trio was, in the end, wanting, the finest moment of the evening was a sublime ‘Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding.’

And finally, a classic scene from a different production:

Note: an edited version of this post may be published on Parterre.com.