Andre Gretry

Raoul Barbe Bleue Andre Gretry

We owe this very first recording of that score to the 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 opéra comique, whose musical and dramatic

implications are such remarkable that it even inspired Offenbach. Marvelous and medieval universe 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.