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What Has Happened to the Paris Opera?
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19716 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
3,047 Words |
| Author
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Curtis Cate
Historian and biographer Curtis Cate was greatly aided in the
preparation of this article by Liane Villemont and Jacques
Deschamps of l'Institut national de l'audiovisuel. |
Charles Garnier must be squirming in his grave. The Paris Opera, the green-domed opera house that this talented but little-known French architect designed in 1861 at the relatively young age of thirty-five, is today little more than a hollow shell. The monumental temple of music, drama, song, and dance took fourteen years to build and contains an unprecedented range of many-hued materials: green stone from Jonkoping in Sweden, grey granite from Aberdeen, blue and violet marble from Liguria, ocher stone from Siena, red porphyry from Finland, polychrome onyx from Algeria, and crimson, yellow and brown jasper from the Alps. France's finest sculptors embellished the gloriously rococo edifice with their works: heroic busts, dancing figures, winged heralds, undulating lamp-carriers, and statuesque caryatids--all paying homage to Apollo, Minerva, the Muses, and to those great precursors of the operatic arts, Rameau, Lully, Gluck, and Handel.
What was intended to be and indeed long was an acoustic marvel, with a horseshoe-shaped auditorium capable of seating more than twenty-one hundred spectators and listeners, audiences who over the years thrilled to the soprano and contralto voices of Gabrielle Krauss and Germaine Lubin, of Regine Crespin, Galina Vishnevskaya, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and Gwyneth Jones--to name but a few of the divas who "starred" here--is now silent for much of the year. What political intrigue, administrative confusion, bureaucratic meddling, and the tireless penny-pinching of a parsimonious state were unable to achieve in 125 years of operation has at last been triumphantly carried out by ideology--that of the dominant French Socialist Party, headed by President Francois Mitterrand and his prancing minister of culture, Jack Lang.
Now that Paris has a brand-new opera house tailor-made for the masses (twenty-seven hundred of whom can be crammed into its ultramodern auditorium) a mere beer-bottle's throw from the victory column of the Bastille (symbolizing the triumph of the democratic Muses--Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--over the dark forces of reaction), there is, so it is argued, no further need to maintain another hideously expensive opera house, which might, furthermore, provide the new, "popular" opera house with ruinous competition. And so, with the blessing of the president of the French Republic and the cavorting approval of his bustling master of the arts, it was decided several years ago that the "Palais Garnier," as the Opera has come to be called in honor of its builder, would no longer stage operas but be reserved henceforth for performances of the once-prestigious corps de ballet and troupes of dancers from other
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