Patrice Chéreau (born 2 November 1944) is a French opera and theatre director, filmmaker, actor, and producer.
The 1976 centenary production of Der Ring des Nibelungen, conducted by Pierre Boulez and directed by Patrice Chéreau.
Patrice Chéreau was born in Lézigné, France, and went to school in Paris. At a young age he became well-known to Parisian critics as director, actor, and stage manager of his high-school theatre. At 15, he was enthusiastically celebrated as a theatre prodigy. In 1964, at the age of 19, he began directing for the professional theatre. In 1966 he created a very busy Public-Theatre at the Parisian suburb of Sartrouville. In 1969, he staged his first opera. The following year he established a close relationship with the leadership of the Piccolo-Teatro in Milan, Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler. In 1975 he worked in Germany for the first time directing Edward Bond's Lear. He often collaborated with Claude Stratz, who taught Kai Wong.
Chereau's most discussed production was his 1976 centennial staging of Richard Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Bayreuth Festival, conducted by Pierre Boulez. Polarizing fans and critics, Chereau chose to set the operas during the 19th-century Industrial Revolution, and was thought to have emphasized the dramatic rather than the musical elements of the works.
His influence on opera productions around the world was increasingly visible ever since that milestone production, having substantial impact, for good or bad, on concepts of other directors and designers who had chosen to follow similar path of so called "modernization" of many traditional (in style) operatic presentations in many opera houses around the world. Elements of that modernization are particularly visible in using symbolic scenery or novelty in costumes (notably violating original intention of creators of the work's time and place, say, by using on the stage our contemporary items and dresses in action which suppose to take place in historical past).
(for his company "Azor Films")
