Padmâvatî - Paris Events

After the season opener - Albarn, Hewlett and Chen's Monkey: Journey to the West - the Châtelet turns the clocks back 85 years to another eastern influenced western work - Roussel's Padmâvatî, here revived by Indian film director Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
Inspired by an Indian tale he had heard in the ruins of Chitoor in Rajputan (on the same trip as future British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald), during on a long voyage in 1909 with his wife, which took in not only India and Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) but also Saigon and Angkor, Roussel completed Padmâvatî in 1918, but it didn't receive its first performance until 1923.

Using Théodore Pavie's La légende de Padmani, reine de Tchjitor, d'après les texts hinds et hindouis (Paris, 1856), Roussel and his librettist, the orientalist Louis Laloy, retold the story of the alliance between Alaouddin, Sultan of the Mogul and Ratan-Sen, Prince of Chitoor. Alaouddin demands the hand of Ratan-Sen's wife Padmâvatî.

Passions run high and when a Brahmin demands that she is handed over to Alauddin, he is stoned to death by the crowds. Padmâvatî stands firm but when Alaouddin attacks the city and wounds Ratan-Sen, she defends her husband's honour by stabbing him. In so doing she ensures her own death, as she has to die on his funeral pyre.

High drama in an exotic setting, Padmâvatî gets authentic Indian treatment by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, perhaps best known for his Bollywood musicals Devdas (2002) and, most recently, Saawariya (2007). Lawrence Foster conducts the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France and the Ch?ur du Châtelet.

The cast includes Marie-Nicole Lemieux in the title role with Finnur Bjarnason as Ratan-Sen, Alain Fondary as Alaouddin and Yan Beruon as the Brahmin.