II.7. WHEN OBSERVATION AND THE USUAL STORY CLASH: WHAT OPÉRA TOURS WON'T SAY

MENU: 2.7. What Opéra tours won't say

"LOOK AT THE IMPORTANCE WE GIVE TO CULTURE!" IS THE OFFICIAL MESSAGE OF THE MID-19TH CENTURY'S MOST IMPORTANT BUILDING

(1861-1874)

Usually one needs specialized information to challenge accepted accounts. Here observation is enough.

Richard Nahem

The Palais (palace) Garnier, named after its architect Charles Garnier or simply called the "Opéra," as opposed to the modern "Opéra Bastille."

     Christopher Dickey

A visit that peers behind the curtain

 

• A palace for a new elite 

• Backers, sex and money

• Blackout? 

• From nymphs to Nazis: How the Opéra saved the City of Love

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 Next,
II.7.1.
A palace for a new elite

II.7.1. A PALACE FOR A NEW ELITE

2.7.1. A palace for a new elite

THE OPÉRA DOMINATES THE NEW IMPERIAL CAPITAL, A CITY

OF BANKS, INSURANCE COMPANIES, DEPARTMENT STORES...

The second tranche of the urban metamorphosis that followed the first working-class insurrection is built in the west to avoid rebels and pollution. 

View from the terrace of the Printemps department store

A monument not built for culture

• A design that highlights power

• Where new and old money cross paths

• "We too can mingle with the gods"

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 A design that highlights power

A DESIGN THAT HIGHLIGHTS POWER

STRAIGHT STREET AND ROYAL MODEL

The Opéra is associated with Napoleon III as Versailles is with Louis XIV.

Pamela Spurdon

The imperious avenue de l'Opéra highlights the edifice as straight lines highlighted symbols of monarchy and as the avenue de Paris highlights Versailles: 

                                                                                             Snow on the Avenue de l'Opéra by Camille Pissaro, 1898 / zoom

Twitter, now gone

It was meant to connect the Opéra with the Tuileries and Louvre palaces, though the Tuileries burning has led to forgetting that tie:

  Web photo, no photographer named

It remained the site of official parades until  World War I:

As well, place de l'Opéra adapts the monarchs' template:

• It is a public space toward which straight streets converge.

• Homogeneous architecture surrounds it.

• The edifice itself replaces the statue of the king.

Claude Abron

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Where new and old money cross paths

WHERE NEW AND OLD MONEY CROSS PATHS

OPERA WAS EXCEPTIONALLY EXPENSIVE BECAUSE IT UNITED ALL THE ARTS

So it provided an ideal pretext for opposed elites to meet on neutral ground. 

 

Age of innocence by Martin Scorsese, 1995 

The story set in New York's high society of 1870 begins with an opera setting. 

The Industrial Revolution's "nouveaux riches" wished to mix with the nobility...

• But its salons were closed to them: "He's a banker who shows off his fortune... he's tried to come to see me..."

 -- A marquise observing the banker's wife from her loge:
 Balzac, Lost Illusions, 1843

• Yet impoverished nobles might welcome such encounters as steps toward useful marriages. 

The new Opéra was designed to facilitate the mix:

• The sculptures on either side of the performance space entrance fade into a setting where costume is enhanced: 

The Staircase at the Opéra by Louis Béroud, 1877 / zoom 

• The staircase divides to lead toward balconies, from which to observe the arrival of allies and rivals, exchange glances and be seen oneself:

Ball at the Opéra by Henry Gervex

• Loges and promenading space favor socializing during the two hour-long intermissions:

"The loge of the First Gentlemen [...]; one sees and is seen from all sides."   

-- Lost Illusions

• In Paris, young men of fashion gossip wittily with a marquise. Her provincial guests are hopelessly outclassed. (Lost Illusions)

• In Moscow, the unsavory Kuragin begins seducing Natasha in a loge. (War and Peace)

• In Saint Petersburg, outcast Anna Karenina defies society by coming magnificently dressed and sitting in the front row. (Anna Karenina)

Anna Karenina by Clarence Brown with Greta Garbo, 1935

• At the Grand Foyer "Light and color create a world without doubt or anxiety, a lost Arcadia."

--  Introduction, Les peintures de l'Opéra de Paris by J. Foucart and L-A Prat, 1980

Opéra web site

It comfortably holds the public of 2000, 

for whom meeting there was often the real reason 
for coming to the show. 

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"We too can mingle with the gods"

"WE TOO CAN MINGLE WITH THE GODS"

ECONOMICALLY VICTORIOUS BUT SOCIALLY INSECURE, THE

NEWLY-RICH TAKE UP THE NOBLES' CODE

The Opéra decor is the last flowering of an art that linked nobles with the gods:

Grand Staircase ceiling by Isodore Pils, 1865

The theater's two ceilings, the modern placed over the original, show the change of society and taste:

• The original made the public feel itself among the gods on Mount Olympus (in 1871).

By Jules Lenepveu

• Today's alludes to various operas, and has no tie with the rest of the decor:

By Chagall, 1964

The Opéra's inauguration and the first Impressionist exhibit

took place in the same year (1874-5). Reactions then: 

• The Opéra decor is the highest expression of French art. 

• Impressionism is "unfinished" scribbling and by idealizing every-day people,  is "Communard"*

*Giving Renoir an official commission would threaten the young republic, says the President (Gambetta, in 1877).

-- My Father by Jean Renoir, 1962

  

   Dance at the Moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir, 1876 / zoom

But a generation later the middle class knows its victory definitive, and adopts a code of its own.

Deities and heroes of Antiquity vanish and young, handsome, happy, ordinary people idealize a different humanity, and announce our ads.

 So ends the respectable part of our visit. 

End of this section.

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Next section,
II.7.2.
Backers, sex and money

II.7.2. BACKERS, SEX AND MONEY

2.7.2. Backers sex & money

OUR GUIDE STRIDES THROUGH AN EMPTY PASSAGE

TOWARD A BOARDED-UP DOOR

To the right of the passage is the salon of the "abonnés" (subscribers). It was the heart of the monument. 

Cyprian Leym

Those abonnés were

the wealthiest men in Paris.

• The backers who finance performances

• Detour: ballet, an art of the French court

• Millionaires and ballerinas

• Degas's "Little dancer"

• A ceiling decorated by an orgy

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The backers who finance performances

THE BACKERS WHO FINANCE PERFORMANCES

THE ABONNÉS FINANCED THE SHOWS BY RESERVING THE MOST EXPENSIVE SEATS 

Those magnates might use them for their families or visitors from the provinces, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Fridays for a year.

By Honoré Daumier

But the main attraction was dinner on those nights in a private salon next to the now sealed-off door. They reached it through an entrance created for them alone, after leaving their carriages in the huge space next to the edifice. 

The arrow points to coverings over tables of what is now a restaurant. Odd as it may seem, this view,  from a window of the passage the last page shows, is the only way to perceive the area's size: more later.

There the leaders of industry, commerce and culture connected, and met the most venerable nobility in a context as intimate and exclusive as that of a salon.

The dinners took place while awaiting the end of the ballet that took place after the opera's second act.

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 Detour: ballet, an art of the French court

DETOUR: BALLET, AN ART OF THE FRENCH COURT

 

IT BEGAN AS PROCESSIONS THAT ROYALS LED

(FROM ABOUT 1560)

Louis XIII and Anne of Austria conducted them or observed the ritualized dances that followed:  

     The Ball by Abraham Bosse, 1634 / zoom 

Maurice Leloir in Richelieu by Théodore Cahu, 1901, a history of France for children

They were allegories about royals that young members of the court performed. In his youth Louis XIV, an excellent dancer, starred:

Maurice Leloir in Le Roy-Soleil by Theodore Cahu, 1931

Later he established the first school for ballet and ordered that a performance be inserted after the second act of every opera produced at court.

 The Man with the Iron Mask by R. Wallace with Leonard Dicaprio as Louis (1998) and Le roi danse by G. Corbiau (2000) 

Ritualized dance was part of court life until the end of the Old Regime:

The Princess of Navarre by Nicolin Cochin, 1745 / zoom

# # #

  

The Opéra continued the royal tradition, with a ballet after the second act of every opera. All Degas's dancers were "Opéra girls:" The city had no other ballet.

 Shown at the exhibit Degas at the Opéra at the musée d'Orsay (2019)

Their interludes are the link 
 between court dance and cabaret floor shows, 
which also began in Paris.

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Millionaires and ballerinas

MILLIONAIRES AND BALLERINAS

"KEEPING" A DANCER WAS A SOURCE OF IDENTITY, PRESTIGE AND CREDIT

 "Mr. Leuwen, the wealthy banker who keeps Mademoiselle des Brins, of the Opéra..."

-- Lucien Leuwen by Stendhal, 1834

# # #

The second act over, the subscribers would meet the dancers backstage or in a room specially designed for that purpose, whose idealized image contributed to Paris's reputation for high-end sex:

 Backstage at the Opéra by Jean Béraud, 1889 / City Museum (musée Carnavalet) 

The Foyer de la Danse, courtesy Opéra archives

"It is meant [...] as a setting for the graceful groups of ballerinas [...] one thinks of a kaleidoscope when they intermingle in thousands upon thousands of ways."

 -- Charles Garnier

Degas's point of view:

   Shown in the exhibit Degas à l'Opéra on the centenary of his death, in 2017

Those ballerinas, "the elite of Parisian pleasures:"

-- Splendor and Misery of Courtesans by Balzac (1838-47),

• "...her mother, as I have since learned, to my horror, was a dancer at the Opéra"

-- Said of the adventuress Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair by W.M. Thackeray 1848

      Degas monotype, origin unknown

• The expression C'est ma danseuse  ("It's my dancer") means a pastime that absorbs huge resources and gives nothing in return. It harks back to the dancers' exorbitant demands for presents.

.

From humble backgrounds, usually illiterate, they left no records, and we know of them only through men who despised them.

They despised them back. The black choker Degas's dancer wears recalled a dog collar and meant, "We know what you think of us. We don't like you either."  

-- Nadège Maruta, cancan choreographer and historian,

personal communication

• Dancers' and courtisans' revenge : "At every bite, Nana devoured an acre...

She passed [...] like a cloud of locusts [...] she burned the land where she placed her little foot. Farm by farm, prairie by prairie, she bit into the inheritance [...] without even noticing, as she would munch a packet of pralines [...] but one night, all that was left was a little wood. She swallowed it with a look of contempt, for it was not even worth opening her mouth."

-- Nana by Émile Zola, 1880.

# # #

The practice declined when the "Opéra girls" joined a strike of Opéra employees and obtained livable salaries: Subscribers' furious letters show that many then refused their "sponsorship." 

(In 1912)

It ended when the austère Protestant Jacques Rouché became director and ended the abonnés' privileges by financing performances himself.

(In the 1930's)

-- Pascal Payen-Appenzeller, historian of Paris,
personal communication

When Rouché's funds ran out the State took over.

(In 1939)

 

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Next,

Degas's "Little dancer"