A Phantom at the Paris Opera
Angela Gheorghiu is coming to the Met in New York to sing Puccini's "Tosca" in two performances. For me the news brought back a flood of memories of old days in Paris.
It’s funny what can trigger old memories to unexpectedly come flooding back. For me, it was a story in the New York Times this morning: “Angela Gheorghiu, Diva of the Old School, Is Back at the Met.” The paper reported that the fiery, famed soprano would sing two performances of “Tosca,” the first time she has sung at the Met in eight years.
In the early 1990s, Gheorghiu, who is from Romania, together with her (now former) partner, the French-Italian tenor Roberto Alagna, swept onto an international opera scene hungry for new, younger stars. At the time, I was a journalist living in Paris with my British wife, writing about everything I possibly could (we married in 1988, and I moved there from Los Angeles, where I grew up.).
As part of that journalistic mix, in 1991, I became the Paris correspondent of Science; but for several years that was only a part-time gig. In the meantime I also wrote about travel, food, and politics, for a large number of publications including the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.
Before the arrival of Gheorghiu and Alagna, the French government had decided to open a new opera house that would be worthy of such stars. The old opera, at the Palais Garnier in the Place de l’Opéra, was ancient and could not handle the high-tech stage movements and pyrotechnics that get modern opera-goers excited.
So the government built a new, $400 million (in 1990 dollars) opera house at the Place de la Bastille. Your reporter was on the scene. I described the numerous dramas behind the new opera’s creation in a piece for the Los Angeles Times which amazingly is still online. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, as I described in my lead:
PARIS — It is opening two months late, only two operatic productions have been scheduled and the state-of-the-art, computerized machinery for changing sets is not working properly--hardly an auspicious beginning for Paris’ new opera house at the Place de la Bastille. Yet open it will, tonight, with Grace Bumbry singing the role of Cassandra in Hector Berlioz’s “Les Troyens” (The Trojans).
I even quoted the joke that had been going around Paris while the massive opera building was under construction and still looking for musicians, typical of French humor:
“What is the difference between the Bastille Opera and the Titanic? The Titanic had an orchestra.”
To prepare the article, I went to interview the late Pierre Berge, known to some as the lover of Yves Saint Laurent, but also a major mover and shaker during the presidency of Socialist Francois Mitterrand (back then the Socialists, now nearly moribund, were a major political party in France.) Berge gave me lots of good quotes, although I recall that he criticized me for interviewing him in English (his was very good) rather than in French (mine was still very bad.)
I had gotten the assignment thanks to Rone Tempest, who was then the Paris correspondent for the L.A. Times and recommended me for the task. (I wrote many articles for the Times while still living in L.A.) After it was published, the lifestyle editor I had worked with called me up and asked, “We really liked that. Do you only write about opera, or music more generally?”
I had to honestly tell her that I was not even a music writer. I never heard from her again. But it gave my wife and I a good joke to share, even today.
It wasn’t until 1997, however, that I got to hear Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna sing at the Opera Bastille. The occasion was a production of Verdi’s “La Traviata” produced and directed by Jonathan Miller, the late British “polymath” known for his imaginative and often controversial re-staging of old classics.
Even before the opera opened, the production was controversial in Paris for a number of reasons. Chief among them was that Miller had decided that Violetta—the doomed courtesan whose lover, Alfredo, eventually abandons her after some machinations by his father (a little more complicated than that, but that’s the gist)—would die of tuberculosis not at home in bed, as traditionally staged, but in a hospital.
Le Monde took note of this scandalous choice with an actual headline, “Jonathan Miller Fait Mourir Violetta Dans L’Hopital” (“Jonathan Miller has Violetta die in the hospital”.) I cannot now find that article, but the newspaper Liberation’s account of the production, which is still online, mentions it.
I was active in the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris at the time, and we were all invited to attend a rehearsal of the opera. As it neared the final scene, Violetta (played by Gheorghiu) and Alfredo (played by Alagna) were up on the stage, with Violetta in bed and a remorseful Alfredo kneeling by her side. Miller, a tall, imposing figure, strode up and down the aisle near where we were all sitting. At one point he stopped, looked at us sternly, and said: “In those days, tuberculosis patients died in the hospital.”
A few minutes later, in the middle of this sorrowful scene, Gheorghiu suddenly started kicking her feet from under the covers and laughing gaily. It was 10 PM, and the agreement the opera had with the French stagehand union dictated that they could not be forced to work beyond that time during rehearsals. (As you can see, not much has changed in France since then.)
So it was over, and Violetta did not have to die that night.
I was mightily impressed by all this, and have been sort of an opera fan ever since, especially if the opera is by Puccini (I have a very limited operatic range.) Some years later my wife and I returned to the Opera Bastille for a production of “La Boheme,” also staged by Miller, although that one was much more conventional. Perhaps Miller did not want to have to endure any more operatic correctness from the Parisians, which is just as strong as that of the Italians.
We left Paris to return to the U.S. around 2017, and now live in New York’s Hudson Valley. I did write a farewell to Paris just before we departed, prompted by a very different kind of episode. You can read it here.
The line that Rick (Humphrey Bogart) spoke to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in the film “Casablanca,” “We’ll always have Paris,” is an obvious cliche. By time I left the City of Light after 30 years, I was more than ready, which is hard for many Americans to understand. But that’s a different story.
You may not always have Paris. But it is definitely true that Paris will always have you.
“We’ll always have Paris”