Wednesday, July 31, 2013

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


"LOOK AT THE IMPORTANCE WE GIVE TO CULTURE!" IS THE OFFICIAL MESSAGE FOR THIS 19TH-CENTURY JEWEL

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

Christopher Dickey
In brief 
  • A palace for a new elite 
  • Backers, sex and money
  • Blackout? 

    End: " 'Is Paris burning?' From nymphs to Nazis: How the Opéra saved the City of Love








    *      *      *

     Next,
    V 1.
    A palace for a new elite


    Friday, June 28, 2013

    V.1. A PALACE FOR A NEW ELITE

    5.1.1. A palace for a new elite

    THE OPÉRA DOMINATES THE NEW IMPERIAL CAPITAL, A CITY
    OF BANKS, SHIPPING AND INSURANCE COMPANIES, DEPARTMENT STORES...

    The second tranche of the urban metamorphosis is built in the west to avoid rebels and pollution

    View from the terrace of the Printemps department store

    In brief

    • A design that highlights power
    • Where new and old money cross paths
    • "We too can mingle with the gods"

    *     *     *

    Next,




    Thursday, June 27, 2013

    A DESIGN THAT HIGHLIGHTS POWER


    STRAIGHT STREET AND ROYAL MODEL

    The imperious avenue de l'Opéra...


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


    •  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

    • Remained the site of official parades until  World War I:



    Place de l'Opéra adapts the monarchs' template:

    • It is a public space toward which straight streets converge.
    • Homogeneous architecture surrounds it.

    Claude Abron

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

    Pamela Spurdon


    *     *     *




    Monday, June 24, 2013

    WHERE NEW AND OLD MONEY CROSS PATHS


    OPERA UNITED ALL THE ARTS AND EXCEPTIONALLY EXPENSIVE, GAVE OPPOSED ELITES A PRETEXT TO MEET ON NEUTRAL GROUND 
     
    Age of Innocence by Martin Scorsese, 1995 
    The story set in New York's high society of 1870 starts with a 10-minute sequence in the opera house. 

    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, The Paintings of the Opéra de Paris by J. Foucart and L-A Prat, 1980 (in French)

    Opéra web site

    It comfortably holds the public of 2000, 
    for whom meeting there was often the real reason 
    for coming to the show. 

    *     *     * 

    Next,





    Tuesday, June 18, 2013

    "WE TOO CAN MINGLE WITH THE GODS"


    ECONOMICALLY VICTORIOUS BUT SOCIALLY INSECURE, THE

    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 godon 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, it 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.

    *      *      * 

    Next section,
    VI, 2.
    Backers, sex and money




    Tuesday, May 28, 2013

    V.2. BACKERS, SEX AND MONEY

    5.2. Backers sex and money

    OUR GUIDE STRIDES THROUGH AN EMPTY PASSAGE
    TOWARD WHAT LOOKS LIKE A BOARDED-UP DOOR 

    Cyprian Leym
    In brief

    • The backers who finance performances
    • Ballet, an art of the French court  
    • Millionaires and ballerinas
    • Degas's "Little dancer"
    • A ceiling decorated by an orgy

    *     *     *

    Next,




    Saturday, May 25, 2013

    THE BACKERS WHO FINANCE PERFORMANCES


    THE CITY'S WEALTHIEST MEN FINANCED THE SHOWS BY
    RESERVING THE MOST EXPENSIVE SEATS 

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

    *The "abonnés," whom we will call "subscribers"

    By Honoré Daumier

     ...but the main attraction was dinner on those nights in a private salon next to the now sealed-off doorThe tycoons reached it through an entrance created for them alone, after leaving their carriages in the huge space surrounding it  we are coming to it.

    Roofs cover tables of the modern restaurant.


    That salon  please read on — was at the heart of the edifice and at the heart of its purpose.

    It was the place where leaders of industry, commerce and culture connected among themselves, 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.

    *     *     *




    Friday, May 24, 2013

    BALLET, AN ART OF THE FRENCH COURT

     
    IT BEGAN AS PROCESSIONS ROYALS LED
    (FROM ABOUT 1560)

    Louis XIII and Anne of Austria conducted them...

         The Ball by Abraham Bosse, 1634 / zoom 

    ...or observed the ritualized dances that followed...

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


    ... allegories about the king that young nobles performed. 

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

    Louis XIV, an excellent dancer, 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 The King Dances 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 every opera's second act:



    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

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

     *     *     *





    Thursday, May 23, 2013

    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:

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

    • The idealized image contributed to Paris's reputation for high-end sex:

    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 at the exhibit "Degas at the Opéra," musée d'Orsay


    # # #

    Those ballerinas, "the elite of Parisian pleasures:"

    • "...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

    By Degas

    • The expression "It's my dancer" (C'est ma danseuse)...

    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 girls then refused their "sponsorship." 
    (In 1912)

    It ended when an 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)
     
    *     *     *