Phèdre

At the height of the reign of Louis XVI, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne composed, as a tribute to the Grand Siècle of Louis XIV, an opera modelled on Racine’s play Phèdre (1677). But while the model was Classical, the music reflected all the new trends of an era that foreshadowed Romanticism with its passionate outbursts. Lemoyne dedicated the opera to Gluck, but the German composer, seeing him as a rival, rejected the tribute.
Performed at the Paris Opéra for almost twenty years, Phèdre was published in 2020 as a CD-book by Bru Zane Label.