Andre Modeste Gretry: Guillaume Tell

Grétry’s Guillaume Tell, the legend of the Swiss national hero, was revived in June 2013 at Liège’s Opéra Royal de Wallonie to celebrate the bicentenary of the composer’s death in 1813.

This short, charming, opera-comique in three acts, opens with elements of Swiss colour, ranz de vaches and popular melodies, which give way, in the last two acts, to tense dramatic writing, pervaded by Sturm und Drang qualities producing a continuous musical discourse that seems to anticipate Beethoven and his Fidelio.