Language: French
Subtitles: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish

Phaëton is a tragédie en musique in a prologue and five acts by Jean-Baptiste Lully. Philippe Quinault wrote the French libretto after a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses. It can be read as an allegorical depiction of the punishment awaiting those mortals who dare to raise themselves as high as the "sun" (i.e. the Sun King).

Phaëton was the first lyric tragedy of Lully and Quinault to receive its world premiere at the Palace of Versailles, where it was given without stage machinery on or about 6 January 1683. The Paris Opera also performed it at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal, where it was very successful with the general public. The performances ceased for thirty days of mourning following the death of the queen on 30 July 1683, but resumed thereafter. It was sometimes referred to as "the people's opera", just as Lully's Isis came to be called "the musician's opera" (because of its score), and his Atys, as "the king's opera".

Phaëton, the prideful and reckless son of the Sun and the ocean nymph Clymene, is driven to abandon his lover Theona by his ambition for the hand of Libya, daughter of the king of Egypt. On the day of the wedding, Libya's enraged lover Epaphus, himself the son of Jupiter, disputes Phaëton's claim to divine lineage. Desiring to prove himself, Phaëton convinces his father to allow him to drive the sun-chariot for one day. In the course of his flight he loses control of the horses, threatening the earth beneath with fiery destruction; Epaphus entreats his father to put an end to the danger, and Jupiter strikes the chariot down with a thunderbolt. Phaëton falls to his death.

That Lully's Phaeton was an allusion to the fall of Fouquet, minister guilty of wanting to rise too close to the Sun King, it is possible, but for his staging, Benjamin Lazar chose quite other reading keys. This terrible story of devouring ambition could unfold in any setting without losing any of its strength, as we can see from the sober and monumental sets by Mathieu Lorry-Dupuy and the costumes by Alain Blanchot deliberately mixing times and places.

Director: Benjamin Lazar (Staging), Vincent Dumestre (Music Conductor)
Cast: Phaeton: Mathias Vidal, Libya: Éva Zaïcik, Théone: Victoire Bunel, Saturn / Epaphus / Jupiter: Lisandro Abadie, Triton / the Sun / the Earth Goddess: Cyril Auvity, Climène: Léa Trommenschlager, Proteus / the Tributary King: Viktor Shapovalov, Astrée / Hour of the Day: Elizaveta Sveshnikova, Merops: Aleksandr Egorov, Hour of the Day: Alfiya Khamidullina, music Aeterna, Le Poème Harmonique