Rémy Brès-Feuillet

Published between 1844 and 1846 in the French periodical Le Journal des débats as a serialised novel, The Count of Monte Christo is one of the greatest adventure novels in world literature. Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet tell the story of the seafarer from Marseille, Edmond Dantès, who is betrayed in a conspiracy and loses all his possessions, his freedom and his love, before devoting his life to a merciless vendetta. This novel, the portrait of a complex and ambivalent hero who borders at times on cruelty, combines the entire palette of human emotions with the heady fragrance of the Mediterranean.

The basic themes of the novel are mapped out already in the music theatre of the Baroque era. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operas have the protagonists haunted by inner catastrophes and torments; they must survive almost superhuman trials and passions and time and again have to conquer their own nature. This self-conquest is a leitmotif in Dumas’s novel, just as in the operas and oratorios of Handel, Scarlatti and Vivaldi. The countertenor Rémy Brès-Feuillet, who himself conquered Bayreuth in 2023 in the title role of Handel’s Flavio, tells the story of Edmond Dantè as a musical trial by ordeal, relating it directly to the extraordinary plights of Baroque operatic heroes.

With arias by George Frideric Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti and Antonio Vivaldi