Letter from Paris
Autumn
Opera national de Paris’s (ONP) 17/18 season opened on Sept. 9th, 2017 with a vintage production: Jorge Lavelli’s from 1997 featuring a glamourous new cast headed by Veronique Gens (Hanna Glawari) and Thomas Hampson (Danilo). Though Lavelli conceived his staging of Lehar’s Belle Epoque operetta for the gilded Palais Garnier, this reprise was adapted to the stage of the post-modern 2,723-seat rotunda built by Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott. Known prosaically as the Opera Bastille, it is rumoured to be the progeny of a very operatic imbroglio concerning mistaken identities. Ott, a Canadian resident who was completely unknown at the time, won the coveted competition in 1983, apparently because the jury (for whom the original 756 submissions were anonymous) chose his design project thinking it was that of the famous American architect Richard Meier. The new opera house was inaugurated on the eve of the 200 anniversary of the storming of the Bastille by then President, Francois Mitterrand, in the presence of 33 foreign heads of state. The venue has never ceased to stir political debate as governments shifted from left wing to right wing and the Socialist Mitterrand’s idealistic vision of an ‘opera for the people’
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