Video-on-Demand: L'Écume des jours

Colin treats his friends to dishes prepared by his chef Nicolas, invents a piano cocktail to match drinks to melodies, and dreams of true love. When Chloé enters his life, happiness seems complete. But a sinister water lily is slowly growing in the young woman's lung.

Boris Vian wrote L'Écume des jours (Froth on the Daydream) in just a few weeks, at the age of 26. Behind the enigmatic and luminous title of this novel, published in post-war Paris, lies an ambiguous story. Imbued with surrealist poetry, where mice talk and lovers hide in a pink cloud, the fantastical tale gradually turns into a drama about the fleeting and elusive nature of happiness.The book, which became a cult classic in the 1960s, has been adapted many times for the theatre and cinema, and then for the opera stage by Soviet composer Edison Denisov. Fascinated by French culture and Western European music, Denisov found in the narrative freedom of L'Écume fertile ground for broadening his musical horizons beyond those prevailing the other side of the Iron Curtain. He intertwines jazz, large Russian-inspired liturgical choirs, references to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and even a tribute to the sound of Orthodox bells. For Opera de Lille’s new production, the first in France since its premiere in 1986, Lebanese-Polish Bassem Akiki conducts and French-Polish director Anna Smolar directs. They both seek out the poetry and humour in this modern classic about the complexity of illness, and what it means to be free to live and die according to one's own rules.

Recorded on 12.11.2025