One of the few places without an endless queue in Paris was Charles Garnier’s masterpiece, the Opéra. I’d last visited some forty plus years ago. Garnier was chosen from a vast list of applicants, virtually without experience as an architect.
That great writer, the late Ian Nairn, captures it vividly
in his indispensable Nairn’s Paris:
Quite rightly just l’Opéra, not a name like
Covent Garden or La Scala. This is the final justification of the gilded acres
of Versailles and Fontainebleau: a declamatory roulade of allegory that would
pump a sense of occasion into the limpest libretto. The outside gives clear
warning of what is about to happen, but it is only tuning up; overture, grand
march, love duet and final chorus are all inside, in the gorgeous sequence of
double staircase leading to the auditorium on one side and a third-floor foyer
– what a name for it! – on the other, immediately behind the façade. This is more
operatic than the opera…
Then he goes on to spoil it by nominating Offenbach’s La
Belle Hélène as the ideal,
“unforgettable” work to hear there. I’m not sure anything by that fine composer
of bubbling light operas has ever made it on to the stage of the Opéra. Something much more
sérieux is the
ticket.
Anyone for Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, preferably on a nuit de sept étoiles?
Posts
