Since Jean-Luc Choplin became director in 2006, the historic opera house's repertoire of classic opera has increasingly taken a back seat to newer, bolder commissions in a bid to make the Chatelet stage a true crossroads for the arts. From a Bollywood-style remake of the 1923 opera-ballet Padmavati, to a stage mutation of the sci-fi horror film The Fly, the Chatelet has had opera purists hyperventilating as it seeks to tear down walls between genres.
But perhaps the Chatelet's most ambitious and controversial gambit yet was to transform veteran rockers Sting and Elvis Costello into opera stars... kind of. As Sting qualified it during a TIME interview with the two musicians, “Well, no one is going to offer Elvis and I parts in Tosca, right?" Costello added, “Except 'Spear-Bearer' maybe."
Indeed, the opera Welcome to the Voice, which premiered Nov. 20, doesn't demand feats of coloratura of the pair. Rather, they lend their rock timbres to improbable duets with such brilliant sopranos as Sylvia Schwartz to “hopefully make harmony," as Sting says.
The work is the fruit of a genuine romance between the opera's composer, longtime Costello keyboardist Steve Nieve, and the writer and psychoanalyst Muriel Teodori, who wrote the Franco-English libretto. First released as a Deutsche Grammophon recording in 2007, the opera recounts the story of Greek immigrant steelworker Dionysos (played by a bearded Sting), who falls in love with an opera diva, much to the consternation of his blue-collar buddies. His stalker-like obsession nearly gets him incarcerated by the police commissioner (a hulking, black-robed Costello), but with a little supernatural intervention by the ghosts of operas past, all ends well.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
