The amazing thing about my visit to Paris in June 2006 was that in ten days I saw eight operas at seven different venues. As I wrote at the time, “I don’t know of any other city in the world where this would be possible.”
The operas I saw on that visit were:
- La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz and L’Elisir d’amore (The elixir of love) by Gaetano Donizetti, both at the Opéra Bastille (see below, in this post).
- Iphigenie en Tauride by Christoph Willibald Gluck at the Opéra Garnier.
- Le Château de Barbe-Blue (Bluebeard’s Castle) by Béla Bartók in a concert performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet.
- Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
- Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) by Gioacchino Rossini at the Opéra-Comique.
- La Carmencita (based on Carmen by Georges Bizet) at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet.
- La Flûte Enchantée (The Magic Flute) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in an open-air performance in the Senate Gardens, behind Luxembourg Palace.
Opéra Bastille
Opéra Bastille 2006
This new opera house was built in the 1980s and inaugurated in 1989 on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. It is one of two large venues run by the Opéra National de Paris, the other being the Opéra Garnier. “Raise the anchor of your emotions” was their motto for the 2006/2007 season.
The company does not have a permanent ensemble of singers, but hires the singers separately for each production. They do have a permanent orchestra and chorus, though. The orchestra has 170 members and is often divided into two halves, known as the green and blue orchestras, when two different productions are on the schedule at the two venues.
Seating in the Opéra Bastille
The Bastille Opera has 2703 seats (1571 downstairs, 518 in the first balcony, 516 in the second and 98 in the galleries), and they claim you can see and hear perfectly well from all of them.
In the lobby of the Opéra Bastille
The first opera performance I saw here was La Damnation de Faust by Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). There is some controversy about whether this is really an opera — the composer called it a “dramatic legend” — but it certainly seemed like an opera the way they staged it at the Bastille. They used stunning lighting and video effects, as well as large groups of perfectly synchronized dancers and acrobats. And musically it was first-rate as well, right up there with the two CD versions of it that I have at home.
Applause at the end of La Damnation de Faust
The second opera I saw at the Bastille in 2006 was none other than L’Elisir d’amore (The elixir of love) by Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848), an opera which I have seen many times before and since in Frankfurt, Vienna, Gießen, Halle, Heidelberg, Prague, etc. (In Czech it is called Nápoj lásky and I have written about it in my post The National Theater in Prague.)
Program booklet L’Elisir d’amore, Paris 2006
The mock advertisements on the cover of the program booklet all praise the elixir of the quack doctor Dulcamara, which he claims can cure everything from impotence to constipation. Of course the elixir is just ordinary red wine, but it works beautifully for the love-sick Nemorino in the opera.
Outside the Opéra Bastille after the performance
My photos in this post are from 2006. I revised the text in 2020.
See more posts on Operas in Paris.
See also Guided tour of the Opéra Bastille.
Great to see the pictures of the Opera Garnier.
Wonderful set of theatres.
Don I was at the steps of L’Opera, (Palais Garnier) once, but it wasn’t the Grand Staircase. The outside steps which it seems is also a meeting place, is where I was asked to wait to meet my French students. The only theatre I went to was the Folies Bergère. Actually, the original wasn’t as spectacular as the Las Vegas version. 🙂
Thanks, Linda. It’s great to hear from you. I’ve never been inside the Folies Bergère but I sometimes ride past at night on rue Richer in the 9th Arrondissement, and a few times I had to get off and walk my bike because the narrow street was so full of people entering or leaving the theater.
Wow! What a journey through opera.
If the grandeur of Opéra Garnier is mind-boggling, so is the enthusiasm of people gathering beneath the canopy of brollies to watch Mozart 🙂
Wonderful monuments indeed and glad worked next to Garnier. Carmencita is the little Carmen in Spanish like a sequel prefer Carmen. Cheers
Wow..quite the undertaking and worth the expense.
Did you have to prepare mentally for the Gluck? It’s so different from the golden age of opera.
Thanks for your visits and comments. I was really lucky this time (June 2006) because so many operas were playing at seven different venues in a ten-day period. I have seen several Gluck operas in Nürnberg and Frankfurt, so I didn’t need any unusual amounts of preparation. Somebody (I forget who) has described Gluck as a transitional composer: no longer Baroque but not yet Mozart.