When the Grand Théâtre de Genève chose Alain Perroux as their new General Director, starting from the 2026–27 season, they were going back to one of their own: Perroux was born in Geneva, was raised in the surrounding countryside, studied at the city’s university and conservatoire, and spent nine years as a dramaturg at the Grand Théâtre itself.
When I spoke with Perroux’s predecessor, Aviel Cahn, at the start of his tenure in 2019, he painted a persuasive picture of “the four Genevas” – a city of humanitarianism, of science, of religion and of bling (his examples being the UNHCR, CERN, John Calvin and Rolex). Since Perroux is a Genevan through and through, I ask whether he finds that description persuasive.
“Aviel’s not wrong: it’s true that there are these different segments of population in Geneva, which partly define the city’s identity. But this description omits a whole part of the population that you don’t get to know if you’re coming to it from outside. There’s a popular Geneva. There’s an alternative Geneva. I tell my French or foreign friends: if you just spend two days in Geneva, you only see the clichéd parts of a city with many other facets.
“In the 90s, I had the good fortune to experience the great age of the squats: there was an artists’ village, Artamis, on a former industrial site, which had a theatre, a café, artists’ workshops. There were many alternative theatres.”
Perroux is well aware of the need to keep onside the traditional Grand Théâtre patrons from the city’s wealthy. But throughout our interview, he keeps coming back to a guiding principle: the house must be inclusive. “It’s true that there is a well-to-do audience – an audience that comes from Protestant Geneva, often linked to banking. But there are also real opera lovers who are not from that class. There’s an audience from the universities. And Aviel was successful in reaching a younger, more alternative populace. My strong wish is to include, not to exclude.
“It’s not about exchanging one audience for another, it’s about broadening the appeal,” Perroux says. “That’s why I like to talk about audiences in the plural: it’s really about addressing a population in all its diversity. That’s why I believe in creating a programme full of contrasts – for me, being eclectic is a virtue, not a vice.”
Perroux’s Geneva appointment was confirmed in 2023, and the transition, he tells me, has been handled very smoothly. Therefore, the 2026–27 season is all his own work, with his embrace of eclecticism clearly on display. Of the nine main stage operas performed, only three feature in Bachtrack’s statistics for the hundred most frequently performed, with only Le nozze di Figaro in the top ten. No Verdi, no Donizetti, no Wagner, and only lesser known pieces by Puccini and Rossini. The season opens with a proper rarity: La Tempête by Swiss composer Frank Martin. Is Perroux putting down a marker that he will prioritise feeding his audiences on new repertoire?
“Definitely. You’ve put your finger on something I’m passionate about, to the point where it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to take on a general manager’s role in opera. I discovered my passion for opera when I was 10 or 11. My parents didn’t go to the opera, so I have no idea where it came from, but anyway, I found that I was touched and moved by classical music, and that I very much loved theatre. Opera is the crossing point between these two, and this was the start of an all-consuming passion. Even then, I was always trying to share this passion with my adolescent friends, because it was a way of validating it, of showing them that what I loved had a value.
“Eventually, I realised that all my professional activities have had this as a common thread: the strong need to share my enthusiasms with other people,” Perroux continues. “It was the same when I was a music critic and when I was a dramaturg: it’s about transmitting knowledge, and keys to understanding the works, it’s about making a link between audiences and shows. When you’re a general manager, that’s the best place to do it, because you get to decide which works are played, in what balance, in what more general context, and you can also have a say in communications and media.”
Perroux says that his greatest pleasure lies in bringing little known repertoire to audiences – “forgotten treasures”, as he puts it. “I’ve done this a lot in Strasbourg and it gives me so much pleasure to see it in action. When we gave the French premiere of Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane last January, the audience was brimming over with enthusiasm and with how extraordinary this music was. It was even more so with Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys: we gave seven performances with houses that were, on average, nearly 99% full.” Stéphane Lelièvre’s reviews for Bachtrack are confirmation: “music of exceptional richness and density” and “two stunning successes in reviving rare works”.
The one major hiccup in the succession plan came in late 2024, when it became clear that the renovation works for the Grand Théâtre would not be completed before the end of the season, causing various changes of venue and associated programming risks. But Perroux is unfazed by taking risks, as shown by his first season opener. “Obviously, Frank Martin’s La Tempéte is more risky, but a general manager’s first production is a much awaited event – it would be a shame to open with La bohème, which doesn’t say much about you. Whereas this very beautiful work, based on Shakespeare’s sublime play: opening with that really tells you something. It’s an opera nothing short of sumptuous, full of different colours and completely in the service of Shakespearean theatre and its poetry. And by the way, it makes sense at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices [the Grand Théâtre’s temporary home for 2026–27], which is surrounded by water.”
I’ve lost count, I tell Perroux, of the number of opera reviews that Bachtrack has published of the general form “loved the music, hated the staging”. As he is a dramaturg of many years standing, I am eager to know his views on opera production – and whether those views are different from the standpoint of a dramaturg or stage director from that of the general director who hires them.
“My experience as a dramaturg remains very important to me today. Links with stage directors are things that get built over years of discussions and questioning, a dialogue that runs through the whole production through to rehearsals and the finished product. It’s important to be open to different aesthetics: I have very good relationships with Laurent Pelly, Christof Loy, Barrie Kosky or Krzysztof Warlikowski, or even Castellucci, people with whom I’ve worked in Aix-en-Provence,” where Perroux was dramaturg between 2009 and 2020.
“It’s also important to give opportunities to less well known people, so I’m always interested to see what’s happening with the younger generation in the worlds of theatre, cinema, dance and so on. I’m very open to different ideas from stage directors, but I’m also quite demanding with them. I always make a point of the transparency of what they’re offering: one can suggest a lot of things, there’s an infinite number of possible readings of operas old and new, but what’s important is that an audience member can find a way into this reading, that things should have a meaning without the need to read a director’s note or the background in the programme. The directors I’ve worked with have always had a reasonably strong link with the music and its poetic and emotional dimension.”
How does he assess the health of opera? Perroux is an optimist by nature, he says, but he also genuinely considers the standard clichés to be nonsense. “The first cliché whose neck I would cheerfully wring is the one of an art form out of line with today’s world and is therefore on death row. It’s false! Absolutely false! Opera is a genre that’s lasted over four centuries and has been through societies in crisis, regime changes, wars, revolutions. I’d love to know why people think it should die at this particular moment...”
Perroux points out that although opera houses were greatly affected by the Covid pandemic, at the houses he is connected with audiences have returned in ever greater numbers – the Opéra national du Rhin filled an average of 92% of seats in their 2025–26 season, “including the obscure pieces that I delight in doing so often. People are thirsty for experiences today, so I believe that opera has many wonderful days to come.”
A thought experiment: projecting ourselves forward five years, what does he hope that people will be saying about his tenure so far? “What I hope they’ll say is this: my goodness, it’s extraordinary and incredible at the opera. I had no idea that the history of opera contained many masterpieces.”
See upcoming performances at Grand Théâtre de Genève.
This article was sponsored by Grand Théâtre de Genève
