Judith Van Wanroij, Victories! by Various, Du (2022/2022), Auditorium du Conservatoire, Tourcoing, France

Warrior but magnanimous, heroic but touching, such was the image that Napoleon wanted to bring to the stage through works glorifying him. Napoleon, like Louis XIV, understood the power of Art to educate and instruct. The opera was one of the wheels of this skilful policy. Napoleonic determination materialized thanks to an army of composers gathered within the Conservatory, opened in 1795. Napoleon's expansionist ambition did not stop at French talent alone: ​​his conquest of Italy enabled him to discover its artists. This decisive meeting opened wide the doors of the Paris Opera to composers such as Spontini and Cherubini who, in the tradition of Sacchini, Piccinni and Salieri, would invent the monumental romanticism on which Wagner and Verdi would later feed. It is the boiling of this lyrical laboratory that the program served by Judith van Wanroij and the Quatuor Cambini-Paris, and designed by the Palazzetto Bru Zane, wants to illustrate.