And above all, that intoxicating thing: freedom!

What is there for a ‘director’ to do in the reconstruction of a historical staging, where the smallest details might seem to be immutably regulated by the large number of surviving archive documents that are available (albeit little-known today)? From a personal point of view, he can draw on information that he hardly has the opportunity to assemble when, once a career is underway, productions follow each other thick and fast and budgetary constraints condition one’s thinking. How good it is to give free rein to one’s imagination concerning such and such a work, when the original scenographic message has been perfectly grasped thanks to visual and literary sources that are as precise to read as they are poetic to look at! So many cuts are inflicted arbitrarily on the music today because we no longer understand the raison d’être of the passage in question. An indication of a movement or a mime sequence noted in a livret de mise en scène gives new meaning to these few bars nowadays accused of being ‘anti-dramatic’ when in fact they are quite the opposite.