Il Viaggio a Reims

The premiere of this production – 19 June 2025 – marked the 200th anniversary of the first performance of Rossini’s comic opera. The plot “Il viaggio a Reims” is so simple and witty that in its directness and harmlessness there is something touching, nostalgic and disarming. Of course, until the last scene, which is entirely dedicated to the occasion of composing this opera and its political propaganda – the coronation celebration and glorification of a reactionary king, Charles X of France. Only five years after the coronation, history swept Charles X away and threw him in Slovenian Gorica, where he suddenly died and remained buried. Our production was set in the square in front of the local train station building, transformed first into a wellness hotel, and then – ironically – the most famous European palaces.

More interesting than the development of the plot itself is the circumstance or situation into which the characters are “thrown”, as if into some kind of social “experiment”. Representatives of the European aristocracy and military elite from the early nineteenth century found themselves, on their way to Reims, in a spa-hotel, where an accidental shortage of horses permanently prevents them from arriving on time for the coronation. The finale of the first part of the opera, in which all of them lament the lack of horses, launches us over 100 years into the future, right up to the grotesque of Ionesco's type and charge. The celebration of the so-called "European unity" and royalist romanticism, which the libretto ultimately suggests, is not idealized in our production. Well, if there is any “unity” after all, then it is the one that brings together the European aristocracy, not the peoples. In one of the interpretative turns and twists, the servants start to sing the Marseillaise, and in the finale of the performance, the aristocracy and military, obsessed with the celebration of the king, do not even notice the horses that have finally arrived. The servants and assistants board the carriage and set off for Paris. Or – on Paris!

Costumes and heavy makeup transformed the characters into ghosts from the past, trapped in their own historical time, until the finale, when faces of our contemporaries, the singers, begin to peek out.