A DESIGN THAT HIGHLIGHTS POWER

THE IMPERIOUS AVENUE DE L'OPÉRA HIGHLIGHTS THE MONUMENT, AS STRAIGHT LINES HIGHLIGHTED SYMBOLS OF MONARCHY 

 

Neige à l'avenue de l'Opéra de Camille Pissaro, 1898 / zoom

Twitter.com

The Avenue de Paris leads the eye to the chateau de Versailles.

It was designed to connect the Opéra with the Tuileries palace and where official parades took place until World War I: 

  Web photo, no photographer named

The Tuileries burned and that tie has been forgotten.

Place de l'Opéra too adapts the monarchs' template: It is a public space toward which straight streets converge, homogeneous architecture surrounds it and the edifice itself replaces the statue of the king.

Claude Abron

The edifice is associated to Napoleon III

as Versailles is to Louis XIV.

Pamela Spurdon

*     *     *

Next,
Where new and old money cross paths

WHERE NEW AND OLD MONEY CROSS PATHS

EXCEPTIONALLY EXPENSIVE BECAUSE IT UNITED ALL THE ARTS, OPERA PROVIDED A PRETEXT FOR ELITES TO MEET ON NEUTRAL GROUND

 

Age of Innocence by Martin Scorsese, 1995 

A long sequence at the opera begins the story set in New York's high society of 1870.

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 that flank the entrance of the performance space 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

# # #

The promenading space is the Grand Foyer, where "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 was often the real reason 
for coming to the show. 

*     *     * 

Next,

"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 has two ceilings, the modern placed over the original:

• The original made the public feel itself among the gods on Mount Olympus (in 1874).

By Jules Lenepveu

• That we see now alludes to various operas, and has no tie with the rest of the decor (since 1964):

By Chagall, 1964

The Opéra's inauguration and the first Impressionist exhibit

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

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

• Impressionism is "unfinished" scribbling.

• 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

 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,
II.7.2.
Backers, sex and money