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We know this woman, we know her story: to fill the void of her existence, Emma Bovary seeks attention and lovers. A first, all-consuming but illusory love affair is the start of a chronicle marked by repressed desires, fleeting moments of feverish happiness and lies meant to cover up reality – until they no longer can.
With Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert revolutionized literature in 1856. The story of the adulterous doctor’s wife taking her own life sent such a shock wave through France that it resulted in a court case. To this day, Emma Bovary continues to fascinate and we sympathize with her inevitable downfall. Perhaps there lurks in each of us the feeling ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’
Driven by their shared love of this nineteenth-century cult novel, Harold Noben and Michael De Cock will now work together for the first time on a contemporary opera version: Bovary. The director of the KVS wrote the libretto as a dramatic quasi-monologue, following up for the opera his theatre adaptation with co-director Carme Portaceli. Harold Noben, one of Belgium’s leading up-and-coming composers, already displayed his literary sensitivity at La Monnaie in À l’extrême bord du monde (2020), an opera about the last days of Stefan Zweig. Again, he delivers a richly varied and accessible score that, following Flaubert, is about nothing yet contains everything.