Once upon a time...

The period that extended from the First Empire to the Belle Époque, that saw the triumph of the rhapsody and the fantasia, was also the era of scientific expeditions and leisure travel in distant lands. The discovery of new cultures revived memories of the fantastic tales that had made a celebrity of Perrault a century earlier. Though they are wittily reinterpreted each time, the narrative mainsprings of the fairytale remain fundamentally unchanged. Whence the idea of reconstructing today a universal ‘tale’, drawing its successive episodes from these stories of olden days. And all this is played out against a background of French Romantic music, alternating between famous composers (Offenbach, Massenet), those currently undergoing major rediscovery (Viardot, Schmitt) and others still little-known at present (Silver, Isouard): a new story in the making that will delight young and old alike.