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Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse

Comic opera ballet in three acts. Libretto by Charles-Simon Favart.

First performed at the Académie Royale de Musique, 12 February 1743.

François-Nicolas Geslot Don Quichotte

Marc Labonnette Sancho Panza

Chantal Santon-Jeffery Altisidore, the Japanese woman

NN Montesinos, Merlin, the Duke, the Japanese man

Choir and orchestra Le Concert Spirituel

Conductor Hervé Niquet

Staging Corinne and Gilles Benizio, alias Shirley et Dino

Decors Daniel Bevan

Costumes

Anaïs Heureaux and Charlotte Winter

Lighting Jacques Rouveyrollis

Choreography Philippe Lafeuille

In 1743, two years before Rameau created Platée, Boismortier had an extraordinarily modern and crazy "ballet comique" performed at the Académie Royale de Musique: Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse ("Don Quixote at the Duchess’s"). Over the course of a totally delirious plot, the hero meets monsters, enchanters, princesses, Japanese people... who are the pretext for so many daring and original dances and choruses. Musical beauty is combined with parodic and irreverent comedy. Although little known today, Boismortier was a prolific composer under Louis XV, producing in all the fashionable genres. His first great success was Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse, a Ballet Comique that he invented with Favart, a librettist of genius who transformed the subject of Don Quichotte into a brilliant and colourful farce of "theatre within the theatre". Boismortier's writing sparkles in every sentence, in this fantasy where the Duchess makes Don Quixote believe that he is meeting Dulcinea and a gallery of characters including Merlin the Enchanter or the Infanta of the Congo, while he is unknowingly on the stage of the castle's private theatre...

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