It is known that the crown of laurels is the distinction of the victorious poet. It is also a hunting trophy and a mortuary emblem, commemorating the memory of a fatal passion: the one that launched Apollo in the footsteps of the nymph Daphne, metamorphosed into a tree before allowing herself to be reached...


At the beginning of the 17th century, the myth of Daphne provided the German Monteverdi, Heinrich Schütz, with the material for a pastoral. Created in 1627, his Dafne marks an essential date in the history of German opera. Unfortunately, the score is destroyed and only the libretto by Martin Opitz has come down to us. Reading it gave Geoffroy Jourdain the desire to follow in the footsteps of Apollo. Because the race of the god defeated by Cupid, seeking in vain to reach the object of his desire is sometimes like the artistic quest. The founder and director of the Cris de Paris invited Wolfgang Mitterer to recreate from the words of Martin Opitz a work where the roles seem to arise from the choral mass before plunging back into it, where electronics blur the boundaries between song and pure vibration. material. Aurélien Bory has designed a circular, enveloping and dynamic space for this operatic metamorphosis: as secret as the rings of a tree, as vast and deep as the spheres of the ancient cosmos.