A collaboration of the Norwegian Music Festival Barokkfest and the Centre de musique baroque de Versailles. Premiered just a few months before the French Revolution and fallen into oblivion since, Raoul Barbe-bleue is an unclassifiable opera comique whose musical and dramatic implications are so remarkable

that it even inspired Offenbach.

Marvellous and medieval universes meet in this drama based on Perrault’s tale that announces, both through its writing and its inherent horror, the upcoming

musical romanticism. Indeed, far from being an archetype of the genre, Raoul Barbe-bleue depicts a cruel gentry from a quite political point of view, that it

even dares to mock by mingling tragical register and comic effects, from travesty to the figure of the scapegoat valet.

The mysterious atmosphere that emerges from the drama (and that recalls eventually Weber’s Singspiel) stems mostly from a musical writing that widely

supports the suspense and that cannot be compared to the naive and simple early works of the composer. Indeed, Gretry’s musical refinement and elegance

serve the dramatic strength of his work and evokes Mozart’s Requiem introit.

Recorded in the beautiful theatre in Trondheim (Norway) with a brilliant cast under Martin Wahlberg’s direction, Raoul Barbe-bleue reveals a considerable

richness that will certainly strike both the neophyte and the specialist.