One thing I’ll say for the Lyon opera house: you can’t mistake it for any other building in Lyon, or for any other opera house in the world that I know of. Or do you know of any other building that has a nineteenth century façade topped by a huge Read More …
Whatever else you might have heard about Toulon, you should be aware that it has a gorgeous nineteenth century opera house — one of the largest opera houses in France outside of Paris. The Toulon Opera aka Théâtre Municipal was inaugurated in 1862. A few years ago it was beautifully Read More …
The sun never shines on the façade of the Municipal Opera House in Marseille because the building faces north (or more precisely north-northwest). So whatever time of day you take a picture, it will always be in the shade. This was not seen as a problem in 1786, when the Read More …
The original Municipal Theater in Lille was built from 1784 to 1787 and served its purpose for over a century, until it burned to the ground in a mysterious fire on the night of April 5-6, 1903. After five years of discussion, the city council held an architectural competition to Read More …
The opera house in Nancy is on an elegant public square called Place Stanislas, which was designed and built in the 1750s on orders of the Duke of Lorraine, Stanislas Leszczynski. The buildings on the four sides of Place Stanislas all have similar neo-classical façades, and two of the corners Read More …
Instead of being shipwrecked, captured by pirates and sold into slavery, the Italian travelers in David Hermann’s staging of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri were flying comfortably in an Airbus when it crash-landed in the jungle in some remote part of the world. The wrecked plane was apparently found by some sort Read More …
In the Royal Opera in the north wing of Versailles Palace I saw an elaborate performance of the musical comedy Le Bourgeois gentilhomme by the playwright Molière (1622-1673) and the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687).
The Reims Opera House was originally called the Grand Théâtre when it was first built in 1873. It was severely damaged in World War I. After several years delay it was rebuilt by two architects named François Maille and Louis Sollier, who kept the original façade but redesigned the interior Read More …
When I was in Reims in 2013 I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Francis Albou about the second act of the opera Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The lecture was held at the Conservatory, not the opera house, but it’s a good thing I asked at Read More …
Metz, which in French is pronounced approximately like the English word mess (but with a different vowel sound, in French it’s open-mid front unrounded and in English it’s close-mid front unrounded, okay?), is a city of 124,000 people on the Moselle River. Their opera house, the Opéra-Théâtre on Place de la Read More …