The creative journey to bring a new opera to the stage is fascinating with so many moving parts. The new opera, Yourcenar, une île de passions, premieres this summer.
But remarkably the impetus for this new work can be traced to the passion and enthusiasm of librettist Hélène Dorion, who shares with her friend and co-librettist Marie-Claire Blais, an unbounded admiration for Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the Académie Française in 1980.
Hélène Dorion is a poet, novelist, essayist and a long-time lyricophile. In 2016, at the invitation of Opéra de Montréal, Hélène agreed to become ‘librettiste d’un soir’. The challenge was to choose a well-known opera aria and give it new life by replacing the original lyrics with a new text of her own. In her own poetic way, she described what the music brought to her words: “It was as if you had placed a piece of wood on a stream and the water just carried it away.” After such a moving experience, she says she
