When the King is searching for an offender: Chabrier’s “L’Étoile”

With Emmanuel Chabrier’s opéra bouffe “L’Étoile”, Opera Zuid is staging a masterpiece which is both carefree and seldom performed, using the Urtext edition by Hugh Macdonald from the series “L’Opéra français”. Spiced up by a tale of love and mistaken identity, the opera is convincing thanks to any number of refined and catchy melodies à la Jacques Offenbach. Every year, King Ouf I offers his people an execution, but this time there is no suitable candidate. A solution appears in the person of the young Lazuli, with whose fate the King’s life is closely associated. Premiered in 1877 in the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, “L’Étoile” was Chabrier’s first publicly performed stage work, with which the lawyer from the French Ministry of the Interior made his name as a composer. The premiere of the new production takes place on 17 May 2026 in Eindhoven, directed by Matthew Eberhardt and conducted by Nicolas Kruger. (Picture: Emmanuel Chabrier, painted by Édouard Manet)