At the Bordeaux Opera, with her "Fidelio", Valentina Carrasco offers a lyrical escape to the time of the Occupation

Produced in partnership with the Gironde prison service for integration and probation, this new production of Beethoven's Fidelio , like many others, aims to give the German composer's only opera the universal scope of a hymn to freedom, which it is. Director Valentina Carrasco , using a Google Earth-style magnifying effect, has recruited real Gironde prisoners (at the end of their sentences) to play their own roles on stage. A lyrical escape for four performances at the Bordeaux National Opera, until May 23.

But by embodying it in reality, isn't that, ultimately, restricting the perspective? Especially since the stage limits the dramaturgy to the period of the German Occupation and the Liberation, particularly in Bordeaux, a strategic port region and one of the hotbeds of the Resistance.

Period photos projected in the background punctuate the Beethovenian manifesto inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Images of deserted buildings and avenues with Nazi banners flying, portraits of Resistance fighters (the Aubracs, Jean Moulin, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Simonne Mathieu and Simone Segouin), torturers (Maurice Papon, the "butcher" of Lyon, Klaus Barbie), heroes (General de Gaulle alongside the Free French Forces). From floor to ceiling, not a single button is missing from the German uniforms, as well as from the Vichy police, who cooperate with the invaders.

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