The choice to return with Œdipe, by Romanian composer George Enescu (1881-1955), makes perfect sense since the work received its world premiere in Paris in 1936. It is always exhilarating to herald the beginning of the operatic season with a new production of a rarely performed work, but when it is the first to be performed at the Opéra National de Paris after a two-year shut-down of theaters and opera houses, the excitement levels are off the scales.

Photo © Elisa Haberer/Opéra National de Paris

In this context, the author discusses the moral and physical risks of “exhibitionist” trends in fashion.Laius threatens to kill his baby, Oedipus, while his wife Jocasta lies prostrate at his feet. Although in France this fashion marked the post-monarchic dissolution of etiquette and ancien regime hierarchies, its appeal to classical antiquity was in Russia used to mask its contemporary subversive provenance. This article highlights the dual provenance of Russian antique fashion, which simultaneously imitated classical antiquity and post-revolutionary France (Directoire style). Later memoirs (Ian’kova, Pyliaev, Vigel’) and fiction (the works of Gogol’, Tolstoi, and Merezhkovskii) provide material on the fashion’s afterlife in Russian letters. The antique revival clothing fashionable in Russia from the late 18th to the first quarter of the 19th centuries is depicted in essays and memoirs reporting on its introduction into France, its somewhat idiosyncratic adoption in Russia, and the traces of its cultural impact.

Rare oedipe paris opera together