Menuet

Music theatre
A man spends his days in a company’s ice cellar. To kill time he collects newspaper cuttings on all sorts of gruesome events. In the meantime, his hyperactive wife loses herself in organising the household and making children’s clothes that she sells through her brother-in-law. The housemaid who assists her is the main focus of the man’s desires. In Menuet, this classic triangular relationship unfolds into a grand tragedy on a domestic scale.

Composer Daan Janssens and director Fabrice Murgia are tackling the existential issues in Louis Paul Boon’s novel. The simple facts are presented three times in succession, each time through the eyes of one of the characters. This gives this banal situation a tragic depth. Menuet portrays lonely people hovering between the normal and the abnormal, balancing between speaking and silence, weltering between shame and sexual desire.

“The novel Menuet by Louis Paul Boon is a musical work of art not only by its title. The form as well breathes music and dance. The translation by Daan Janssens and Fabrice Murgia to music theater follows that breath faithfully and subtly."
– Stephan Moens in De Morgen

“Composer Daan Janssens and director Fabrice Murgia transform Boons Menuet into an surreal opera trip.”
– Annemarie Peeters in De Standaard

Programme & credits

CREDITS

text
Louis Paul Boon

director
Fabrice Murgia

composition
Daan Janssens (°1983)

soloists
Cecile Granger, soprano
Raimond Nolte, baritone
Ekaterina Levental, soprano

performance
SPECTRA conducted by Filip Rathé

production
LOD muziektheater

coproduction
Théâtre National - Wallonie Bruxelles, deSingel, SPECTRA, Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, Le Maillon - Théâtre de Strasbourg Scène européenne, Artara, La Monnaie / De Munt, Centre Henri Pousseur

Calendar

Wednesday 06 November 2019, 20:00
Brugge, Concertgebouw
 Friday 08 November 2019, 20:00
Aalst, CC De Werf

Media