Comfort and Joy!
Comfort and Joy!
When the great Wagnerian soprano, Birgit Nilsson, was asked the secret of her enormous success, she replied: “Comfortable shoes!”. After my recent experience in Paris, one could adapt that conversation thus: “What is the secret of a great night at the Opera?” “Comfortable seats!”
As a performer myself, I realise now that I didn’t think enough about the audience experience of my thousands of performances over the 40 years of my career. This has got me thinking about both that audience experience and also related matters of comfort and accessibility, in life.
This whole subject matter has been sparked by our short trip last week to Paris to celebrate the 45th Anniversary of our marriage in 1979. Fran and I spent our honeymoon in Paris all those years ago, and we were attempting to recreate some of that magic by staying in the same hotel, eating in the same restaurant and going to an opera at the Palais Garnier, the old Paris Opéra, which we had done then too.
In 1979, we stayed at the Hotel Chopin, a quirky old hotel on the Passage Jouffroy, off the Boulevard Montmartre, near the Musée Grevin, the Paris Waxwork Museum. I was delighted to discover that it was still there and going strong. Opened in 1846 as the Hotel de la Famille, it is one of the oldest continuously used hotels in Paris. It changed its name to the Hotel Chopin in 1970 (the famous composer lived nearby), but it has changed little over the years. Built on four storeys over a couple of adjoining houses, it has loads of stairs, differing room sizes, and fortunately, a lift. Since our room was on the fourth floor, the lift was a lifesaver, although there were still various stairs to negotiate. As a 3 star hotel, and just that, it was less luxurious than we have become accustomed to over the past 45 years, but it is cute and the staff are very friendly, multilingual and helpful.
Just round the corner, in the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, is the wondrous Bouillon Chartier, one of our favourite restaurants in the world, and we went there for lunch on our first full day, meeting up with Gregory Reinhart, an American bass who has lived in Paris even longer than we have been married. Greg and I sang in the production of ‘L’Incoronazione di Poppea’, conducted by Richard Hickox, and subsequently recorded, in the late 1980s, and we hadn’t met up since. Opened by the Chartier brothers in 1896, the restaurant has hardly changed in all that time, and not at all since 1979. An enormous room on two levels, with mirrors and chandeliers, bustling apron-clad waiters, and an ever changing clientele of locals and tourists from morning till night, Chartier serves hearty meals at ridiculously low prices, and is one of the wonders of the world. I imagine it as the prototype for the Café Momus in La Boheme, and you can easily envisage Rodolfo and Mimi eating there with their friends, and Musetta creating a scene! On our honeymoon in 1979, we went from Chartier to the Opera and saw - ‘La Boheme’! It was like reality in reverse!
This time, I bought tickets for a performance of Charpentier’s opera, ‘Medée’, written to a libretto by Thomas Corneille and first performed in 1693. Thomas was the younger brother of the more famous Pierre, but an important figure in the history of French literature in his own right. The opera was initially well-received but only ran for four months, and the composer never wrote another. Charpentier was famous for his religious music and the incidental music he wrote for dramas by Corneille and Molière, but ‘Medée’ lay largely unnoticed for nearly two centuries. In 1984, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants recorded the opera and interest was sparked in this bloodthirsty drama once again. David McVicar’s production in 2013 for ENO at the London Coliseum set the story in World War II France, and it was that production that we saw at the Garnier on our anniversary night on the 23rd of April. Sadly, and the reason this is a Blog and not a review, we had to leave after the first interval (there were two intervals in a 4 hour evening) and I point you back to my first paragraph for the cause.
I have only ever left an opera before the end twice previously. I became frustrated with a production of ‘Eugene Onegin’ at an EIF performance a few years ago, and many decades ago, I couldn’t stand any more of Hans Werner Henze’s opera ‘Elegy for Young Lovers’, also at the EIF.
For ‘Medée’, we had bought tickets for the Amphitheatre, right at the back. These seats were priced at 50 Euros, and because I was loath to spend 250 Euros for posh seats for an opera I didn’t know, I assumed there would be limited leg room in the Gods, but enough for us.
Oh no, there wasn’t! Honestly, a child or someone under 5 ft 4 ins might have had a chance, but for anyone our size, it was impossible. This got me thinking about size discrimination in general. I am used to sitting in good seats to review concerts and operas, and when I was personally involved in opera, I could usually expect decent complimentary seats for other shows within the company where I was working.
When I was younger, I used to sit in the Upper Circle of the Usher Hall, but I have been unable to sit there for years, due to the lack of leg room and the vertigo inducing height. The Queen’s Hall balcony seats are ghastly for tall people, and they’re not even cheap.
We are fortunate that most new theatres and concert halls in the world have realised that it is intrinsically unfair to discriminate against tall or big people, but with old venues, it is often a nightmare. I had never really thought, as I sang on stage, that some of my audience were experiencing awful discomfort (even listening to me!). I was astonished, when I went to Bayreuth the first time, how uncomfortable the seats in that iconic theatre were. The leg room is OK but the seats are not in any way luxurious, and Wagner operas last a long time.
I was enjoying most of ‘Medée’ when I had to leave, since musically it was superb, with Les Arts Florissants on top form. I enjoyed the special quality of Lea Desandre as Medée, Ana Viera Leite as Créuse and Laurent Naouri as Créon. Laurent and I go back a long way, to a terrible production of ‘Peter Grimes’ in Nantes, a superb ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in Strasbourg and a stunning ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ in Lyon, and it was good to see him still dominating the stage. McVicar’s decision to update the plot from Ancient Greece to WWII was partially successful, but the large amount of ballet music written by Charpentier, typical of the period, meant that there were many risible moments, involving dancing WAAF officers, and improbably, sailors and whores, during a pageant arranged by Orontes to demonstrate his love for Medée! What is it about directors dressing women in stockings and suspenders? It’s NOT sexy!
Sadly, I can’t tell you any more about the show, as we had to leave, so we missed Créon’s mad scene, and Medée’s vengeance on Jason and their children, with, apparently, blood everywhere!
A word here about the Old Paris Opéra. The Palais Garnier, designed by the great Charles Garnier, who also designed the Monte Carlo Opera and Casino where I sang ‘Peter Grimes’ in 2017, was opened in 1875 at the behest of the Emperor Napoleon III, and is perhaps the most ornate and grand opera house in the world. It seats 1,979 people, some in more comfort than others, and, since the opening of the Opéra Bastille in 1989, it has been home to ballet, concerts and period operas. I was lucky enough to sing in a performance of Purcell’s ‘King Arthur’ there in 1992 with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, and it remains one of the highlights of my career. The public areas, the staircases, the foyers and corridors, are a riot of gold, marble and glass, and as a statement of national pride, it is largely unsurpassed. With the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, the Palais Garnier makes up the trio of buildings which emphasise France’s power and glory in the 19th Century.
Our journey back to our hotel highlighted another strange anomaly about Paris. Its public transport system is rightly hailed as fantastic, but, if, like me, you have problems with mobility, it is utterly unsuited to people who struggle with stairs. Some Métro stations have up only escalators to the street, but I failed to find a single one that was accessible to a wheelchair user. Lifts are few and far between, and often there are long walks underground from one line to another. Given that the Olympic Games come to Paris in two months, and obviously the Paralympics as well, it is clear that anyone with a wheelchair will be simply unable to use the Paris Métro at all!
