Arguably no monarch was extra enthusiastic in taking centre-stage than Louis XIV of France. And fairly actually centre-stage. As a seasoned dancer within the Court docket ballets, he danced some 80 roles – most famously of all that of the rising solar in Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit. It was a job that the 15-year outdated aspired to dwell as much as all through his reign, and it provided his soubriquet: The Solar King.
However though the theatre-loving Louis included plans for an ideal opera home in his ambitions for increasing the palace at Versailles, he didn’t dwell to see the fulfilment of his musical desires. And so it might fall to his successor to witness the grand curtain-up. There was an incentive to get it constructed, too. The theatre needed to be prepared for the nuptials of the Dauphin and Archduchess Marie Antoinette of Austria in 1770. Which it was, simply.
Why was an opera home constructed at Versailles?
It’s not that Versailles was with out its efficiency areas, however they lacked room for the type of stage equipment crucial for the grand spectacles of opera and ballet. Lavish entertainments had been housed in specifically constructed pop-ups, areas designed to be dismantled after use. They usually weren’t essentially modest affairs both. The gilded papier-mâché construction created for the premiere of Molière’s George Dandin comfortably seated in extra of 1,000 spectators. For one thing extra everlasting, Louis XV turned to his favorite architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who designed Paris’s Place de la Concorde. Gabriel despatched an assistant to see what Italy needed to supply earlier than deciding on a semi-elliptical format offering most visibility and acoustic readability.
When did work begin on the Royal Opera Home at Versailles?
Constructing work started in 1766 – the roof went on three years later whereas the luxurious inside was completed only a month earlier than the royal wedding ceremony. Apollo, the solar god and god of music and dance, loomed giant in sculptor Augustin Pajou’s ornamental scheme, with reliefs depicting operatic characters to animate the blues, golds and marbled wooden of the partitions. Topping all of it was an enormous ceiling portray by Durameau depicting Apollo fashioning the crowns with which to honour the ‘illustrious males of the humanities’.
What was the primary manufacturing?
First to christen the brand new theatre and greet the newly-weds was Lully’s Persée, a lavish manufacturing that includes 95 singers, 80 dancers, 15 soloists, an instrumental band of 80 musicians, 5 lavish units and over 500 costumes. Coincidentally, it had been written in 1682, the 12 months by which Louis XIV had made Versailles his official residence. It’s thought Lully’s opera was chosen to present Marie Antoinette a crash course in French operatic manners – in spite of everything, her inclinations favoured Italian and German music and Voltaire warned that ‘she should not be made to yawn’. A forlorn hope. One modern famous that ‘Madame la Dauphine didn’t appear to benefit from it’. And the splendidly named Baron Grimm deemed the piece ‘magnificently boring’.
Included within the festivities, too, had been Rameau’s Castor et Pollux; dramas by Racine and Voltaire; and a specifically composed ballet which received equally brief shrift from the hard-to-please Baron: ‘depressing, absurd, tedious and fully ridiculous’. Presumably he was extra enthusiastic in regards to the music chosen for the marriage of the Comte d’Artois three years later. Tastes had been altering. Lully and Rameau appeared more and more outdated hat in comparison with Gossec, Grétry and Marie Antoinette’s erstwhile harpsichord instructor, Gluck. Certainly Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide given in Might 1782, and Armide, two years later, could be the final two main productions to be staged earlier than the revolution.
Partially this was as a result of the Opéra Royal had by no means been supposed as a repertory home with a altering procession of standard performances. It was a theatre for courtly excessive days and holidays. And it had been designed to multi-task as a banqueting-hall-cum-ballroom. Neither designation got here low-cost. For staged performances, endlessly replenished candles illuminated the auditorium and lobby whereas, hid behind the set flaps, 3,000 oil lamps bathed the surroundings in mild. The musicians needed to be introduced in from Paris, the star singers typically demanding ‘sweeteners’; and regardless of some crafty equipment to lift the orchestra ground, an unlimited military of expensive carpenters was required to repurpose the area for feasting and dancing.
Sarcastically, a banquet and operatic air conspired to seal the theatre’s pre-revolutionary destiny when, on 1 October 1789, the royal bodyguards threw a dinner for the Flanders Regiment – newly detailed to Versailles to bolster the palace’s safety. Presciently doubtful about ‘wanting in’ on the proceedings, the King, Queen and Dauphin had been nonetheless current when cries of ‘vive le roi’ accompanied an impromptu rendition of ‘O Richard, mon roi, l’universe t’abandonne’ from Grétry’s Richard Cœur-de-lion. When phrase received out, the aria grew to become the rallying cry of the monarchists. The royal household, in the meantime, was hauled again to Paris, and the protracted march to the guillotine had begun.
What occurred to the Royal Opera Home at Versailles in the course of the French Revolution and nineteenth century?
However what of Versailles and its now mothballed opera home? In 1793 the revolutionary authorities decreed that every one the royal property within the palace be auctioned, and over the course of a 12 months something from furnishings to kitchen utensils was parcelled up into 17,000 tons. The deserted buildings grew to become retailer homes. And hidden in a secret cache beneath the orchestra, the musicians’ chairs and music stands remained forgotten, to be rediscovered throughout later renovations.
Now started probably the most chequered a part of the theatre’s story. Not till the restoration of the monarchy did issues start to search for. As a part of his plans to reimagine Versailles as a museum, a present to the French folks devoted to ‘all of the glories of France’, Louis-Philippe had the opera home redecorated and up to date. Furthermore, a particular opening gala instructed that the theatre may be again in enterprise. That was to not reckon on the operating prices, nonetheless, which had not gone away. A few glittering state banquets together with one for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert adopted maybe the one notable musical occasion of the interval.
In 1844 Berlioz had presided over a live performance for which he’d mustered over 1,000 performers and an viewers eight occasions that quantity. Now he was prevailed upon to conduct a profit on the Opéra Royal. On 29 October 1848 (with revolution within the air as soon as extra), he assembled 400 musicians for a programme of Beethoven, Gluck, Rossini and Weber. Not forgetting himself, there was the ‘Grand fête’ from Roméo et Juliette, the Marche Hongroise and, for his personal orchestration of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance, he enlisted 18 harpists. ‘The takings,’ he wrote, ‘had been large, and we had needed to flip away 500 folks.’
Turning away crowds desperate to catch a efficiency was not, nonetheless, going to be a difficulty for the subsequent 100 years and extra as issues turned predominantly political. First got here the Franco-Prussian Struggle throughout which the German military, laying siege to Paris, occupied the palace. With a nuanced sense of pageant, the Prussian King William I had himself topped Kaiser within the nice Corridor of Mirrors. And when the Germans left in 1871, the theatre grew to become residence to the French Meeting, making Versailles technically the French capital for the length till the Meeting and Paris had been reunited in 1879.
Not till after World Struggle II did main refurbishment restore the theatre to its unique 1770 glory – reinstating the ceiling portray and unique color scheme. Ongoing restoration continued into the twenty first century with painstaking work on the backstage areas.
It’s a theatre that has lengthy fired the creativeness of harpsichordist and director of Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset. He introduced his grandmother to Versailles on the age of ten to see Puccini’s Tosca. ‘Whilst a toddler I used to be fascinated by the aesthetic,’ he recollects. ‘It woke my creativeness to marvel what had gone on within the palace up to now. If you conduct there you actually contact the spirit of the place, and it touches you. And once I carry out Lully or Rameau, I’m not counting on a purely musical expertise. All the pieces in Versailles makes the music clearer. It’s about the entire atmosphere together with the gardens. Simply as you may discover a element, a window, or maybe a chimney, so it’s with the music. You’re feeling the dimensions is excellent for such refined music.’
The Royal Opera Home and the twenty first century
Over the previous decade the home has powered into motion, notching up extra productions than in all of the earlier 240 years mixed. Driving the Opéra Royal’s new-found head of steam is director of Château de Versailles Spectacle, Laurent Brunner. ‘An historic theatre have to be revered,’ he insists, ‘and performing music from the time of its building appears to me important. Versailles Opera is the one theatre whose programme largely consists of music composed between the delivery of opera and the French Revolution. The place different firms begin with Mozart, I do the alternative, placing collectively programmes that finish with him. Versailles itself is a museum, however its Opéra is a spot of dwelling spectacle.’ Someday plaything of kings, emperors and state, L’Opéra Royal is a theatre whose egalitarian time has absolutely come.
Images by Getty Photos
