\n
Best operas for beginners: 5 operas newbies can\u2019t help being enthralled by<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
What language is opera sung in?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
Which are the best opera houses in Italy?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
What was the first opera ever written?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n
The greatest opera composers of all time<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
<\/p><\/div> <\/section>
Why was an opera house built at Versaille?<\/h2>\n
It\u2019s not that Versailles was without its performance spaces, but they lacked room for the sort of stage machinery necessary for the grand spectacles of opera and ballet. Lavish entertainments were housed in specially constructed pop-ups, spaces designed to be dismantled after use. And they were not necessarily modest affairs either. The gilded papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 structure created for the premiere of Moli\u00e8re\u2019s George Dandin<\/i> comfortably seated in excess of 1,000 spectators. For something more permanent, Louis XV turned to his favourite architect, Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who designed Paris\u2019s Place de la Concorde. Gabriel sent an assistant to see what Italy had to offer before settling on a semi-elliptical layout providing maximum visibility and acoustic clarity.<\/span><\/p>\n
When did work start on the Royal Opera House at Versaille?<\/h2>\n
Building work began in 1766 \u2013 the roof went on three years later while the sumptuous interior was finished just a month before the royal wedding. Apollo, the sun god and god of music and dance, loomed large in sculptor Augustin Pajou\u2019s decorative scheme, with reliefs depicting operatic characters to animate the blues, golds and marbled wood of the walls. Topping it all was a giant ceiling painting by Durameau depicting Apollo fashioning the crowns with which to honour the \u2018illustrious men of the arts\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n
What was the first production?<\/h2>\n
First to christen the new theatre and greet the newly-weds was Lully\u2019s Pers\u00e9e<\/i>, a lavish production featuring 95 singers, 80 dancers,\u00a0 15 soloists, an instrumental band of 80 musicians, five lavish sets and over 500 costumes. Coincidentally, it had been written in 1682, the year in which Louis XIV had made Versailles his official residence. It\u2019s thought Lully\u2019s opera was chosen to give Marie Antoinette a crash course in French operatic manners \u2013 after all, her inclinations favoured Italian and German music and Voltaire warned that \u2018she must not be made to yawn\u2019. A forlorn hope. One contemporary noted that \u2018Madame la Dauphine did not seem to take pleasure in it\u2019. And the splendidly named Baron Grimm deemed the piece \u2018magnificently boring\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n
Included in the festivities, too, were Rameau<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s Castor et Pollux<\/i>; dramas by Racine and Voltaire; and a specially composed ballet which got equally short shrift from the hard-to-please Baron: \u2018miserable, absurd, tedious and completely ridiculous\u2019. Possibly he was more enthusiastic about the music chosen for the wedding of the Comte d\u2019Artois three years later. Tastes were changing. Lully and Rameau seemed increasingly old hat compared to Gossec, Gr\u00e9try and Marie Antoinette\u2019s erstwhile harpsichord<\/a><\/strong> teacher, Gluck<\/a><\/strong>. Indeed Gluck\u2019s Iphig\u00e9nie en Aulide<\/i> given in May 1782, and Armide<\/i>, two years later, would be the last two major productions to be staged before the revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n
In part this was because the Op\u00e9ra Royal had never been intended as a repertory house with a changing procession of regular performances. It was a theatre for courtly high days and holidays. And it had been designed to multi-task as a banqueting-hall-cum-ballroom. Neither designation came cheap. For staged performances, endlessly replenished candles illuminated the auditorium and foyer while, concealed behind the set flaps, 3,000 oil lamps bathed the scenery in light. The musicians had to be brought in from Paris, the star singers often demanding \u2018sweeteners\u2019; and despite some cunning machinery to raise the orchestra floor, a vast army of costly carpenters was required to repurpose the space for feasting and dancing.<\/span><\/p>\n
Ironically, a banquet and operatic air conspired to seal the theatre\u2019s pre-revolutionary fate when, on 1 October 1789, the royal bodyguards threw a dinner for the Flanders Regiment \u2013 newly detailed to Versailles to reinforce the palace\u2019s security. Presciently dubious about \u2018looking in\u2019 on the proceedings, the King, Queen and Dauphin were nevertheless present when cries of \u2018vive le roi\u2019 accompanied an impromptu rendition of \u2018O Richard, mon roi, l\u2019universe t\u2019abandonne\u2019 from Gr\u00e9try\u2019s Richard C\u0153ur-de-lion<\/i>. W<\/span>hen word got out, the aria<\/a> <\/strong>became the rallying cry of the monarchists. The royal family, meanwhile, was hauled back to Paris, and the protracted march to the guillotine had begun.<\/span><\/p>\n
What happened to the Royal Opera House at Versailles<\/span> during the French Revolution and 19th century?<\/h2>\n
But what of Versailles and its now mothballed opera house? In 1793 the revolutionary government decreed that all the royal property in the palace be auctioned, and over the course of a year anything from furniture to kitchen utensils was parcelled up into 17,000 lots. The abandoned buildings became store houses. And hidden in a secret cache below the orchestra, the musicians\u2019 chairs and music stands remained forgotten, to be rediscovered during later renovations.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
Now began the most chequered part of the theatre\u2019s story. Not until the restoration of the monarchy did things begin to look up. As part of his plans to reimagine Versailles as a museum, a gift to the French people dedicated to \u2018all the glories of France\u2019, Louis-Philippe had the opera house redecorated and updated. Moreover, a special opening gala suggested that the theatre might be back in business. That was not to reckon on the running costs, however, which had not gone away. A couple of glittering state banquets including one for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert<\/a><\/strong> followed perhaps the only notable musical event of the period. <\/span><\/p>\n
In 1844 Berlioz<\/a><\/strong> had presided over a concert for which he\u2019d mustered over 1,000 performers and an audience eight times that number. Now he was prevailed upon to conduct a benefit at the Op\u00e9ra Royal. On 29 October 1848 (with revolution in the air once more), he assembled 400 musicians for a programme of Beethoven<\/a><\/strong>, Gluck, Rossini<\/a> <\/strong>and Weber<\/a><\/strong>. Not forgetting himself, there was the \u2018Grand f\u00eate\u2019 from Rom\u00e9o et Juliette<\/i>, the Marche Hongroise<\/i> and, for his own orchestration of Weber\u2019s Invitation to the Dance<\/i>, he enlisted 18 harpists. \u2018The takings,\u2019 he wrote, \u2018were huge, and we had had to turn away 500 people.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n
Turning away crowds eager to catch a performance was not, however, going to be an issue for the next 100 years and more as things turned predominantly political. First came the Franco-Prussian War during which the German army, laying siege to Paris, occupied the palace. With a nuanced sense of pageant, the Prussian King William I had himself crowned Kaiser in the great Hall of Mirrors. And when the Germans left in 1871, the theatre became home to the French Assembly, making Versailles technically the French capital for the duration until the Assembly and Paris were reunited in 1879.<\/span><\/p>\n
Not until after World War II did major refurbishment restore the theatre to its original 1770 glory \u2013 reinstating the ceiling painting and original colour scheme. Ongoing restoration continued into the 21st century with painstaking work on the backstage areas.<\/span><\/p>\n
It\u2019s a theatre that has long fired the imagination of harpsichordist and director of Les Talens Lyriques, Christophe Rousset. He brought his grandmother to Versailles at the age of ten to see Puccini\u2019s Tosca<\/i><\/a><\/strong>. \u2018Even as a child I was fascinated by the aesthetic,\u2019 he recalls. \u2018It woke my imagination to wonder what had gone on in the palace in the past. When you conduct there you really touch the spirit of the place, and it touches you. And when I perform Lully or Rameau, I\u2019m not relying on a purely musical experience. Everything in Versailles makes the music clearer. It\u2019s about the whole ambience including the gardens. Just as you might notice a detail, a window, or perhaps a chimney, so it is with the music. You feel the size is just right for such refined music.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n
The Royal Opera House and the 21st century<\/h2>\nOver the past decade the house has powered into action, notching up more productions than in all the previous 240 years combined. Driving the Op\u00e9ra Royal\u2019s new-found head of steam is director of Ch\u00e2teau de Versailles Spectacle, Laurent Brunner. \u2018An historic theatre must be respected,\u2019 he insists, \u2018and performing music from the time of its construction seems to me essential. Versailles Opera is the only theatre whose programme largely consists of music composed between the birth of opera and the French Revolution. Where other companies start with Mozart<\/a><\/strong>, I do the opposite, putting together programmes that end<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>with him. Versailles itself is a museum, but its Op\u00e9ra is a place of living spectacle.\u2019 Sometime plaything of kings, emperors and state, L\u2019Op\u00e9ra Royal is a theatre whose egalitarian time has surely come<\/span><\/p><\/body><\/html>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Paul Riley Published: Wednesday, 27 July 2022 at 12:00 am Arguably no monarch was more enthusiastic in taking centre-stage than Louis XIV of France. And quite literally centre-stage. As a seasoned dancer in the Court ballets, he danced some 80 roles \u2013 most famously of all that of the rising sun in Le Ballet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":17577,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"8"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century.jpg",1890,1260,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/07\/the-history-of-the-royal-opera-house-at-the-palace-of-versaille-from-its-birth-under-louis-xiv-to-the-21st-century.jpg",1890,1260,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Paul Riley Published: Wednesday, 27 July 2022 at 12:00 am Arguably no monarch was more enthusiastic in taking centre-stage than Louis XIV of France. And quite literally centre-stage. As a seasoned dancer in the Court ballets, he danced some 80 roles \u2013 most famously of all that of the rising sun in Le Ballet…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/17576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}