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igenlodeInterestingly, there *was* actually an opera "La Muette" (written by Eugène Scribe, after whom the rue Scribe entrance was named), in which the heroine was played by a ballet dancer rather than a soprano -- allegedly because the opera company had no suitable soprano performers under contract at the time (in the original version of the libretto none of the female characters sang at all, although in its final form there is a smaller role for another woman, Elvire).
It bears no relation whatever to the fictional "Il Muto", however, which is clearly a spoof of eighteen-century operas.
Mireille de Ribière's footnotes on Leroux do mention that performances took place on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
This text looks somewhat relevant: The Opéra and Opéra-Comique in the nineteenth century: tracing the age of repertoire, though it mainly discusses developments pre-1870. At the Opéra-Comique in the earlier nineteenth century, "the continuity in repertoire resulted from the practice of performing two or three pieces almost every day of the week, which made room for old works to survive. Yet it was unusual for two old works to appear on one night, since the directors of the Opéra-Comique always sought for contrast in their programming" (and note that productions like the long-since-forgotten "Rose et Colas" were apparently single-act comic 'operas', like a one-act farce, explaining why the Opéra-Comique was staging multiple titles in a night!)
"by 1860 a new canonic repertoire was apparent in each theater: chiefly works by Auber, Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, and Fromental Halévy at the Opéra"; in the season 1862-3, eleven works are listed as having been performed at the Opéra de Paris, all of them written between 1828 and 1853.
Financial history of the Paris Opera from 1803-1914: http://www.ehes.org/ehes2015/papers/Velde.pdf
"It was managed by for-profit entrepreneurs who leased the institution.... They also received a sizeable subsidy" (hence my confusion as to whether (from memory) the directors were paying or being paid for the privilege!)
The "cahier des charges" (or contract between the private management and the government) specified various quite specific terms; in the contract of 1879 the government apparently found it necessary as a one-off to insist that "the Opera is not an experimental theatre" so far as the selection of repertoire went -- one wonders why!
A certain number of new works had to be performed ("In principle a new work had to be staged every three months" -- imagine that today! -- "and only one [?new] work by the same composer and librettist was allowed in a given year") and there was a minimum number of three performances per week and a stipulated minimum number of performances per year, along with a minimum number of artistes that must be employed in order to meet these requirements. "The requirement of producing at least one grand opera per year was in principle non-negotiable". "From 1891 the new works were to be by French composers, a requirement that produced no successful work" -- oddly enough, since a lot of the colossally successful grand opera of the previous decades had been by French composers, who more or less invented the genre.
The government subsidy ("whose purpose was to permit the performance of new works") was fixed at 800,000 francs from 1871 until 1928 (despite inflation). Expenses and revenues varied around 4-5 million francs annually in this period, having abruptly doubled after 1871 -- presumably representing a new epoch in terms of repertoire/ambitions.
Buying tickets:
Boxes could be rented for a minimum of 3 months up to a whole year at a time; a box contained 4-12 seats, with the most common seating capacity being 6.
It was also possible to rent a box for just one show per week (presumably this meant that specific boxes would be kept back for occupation by multiple subscribers, so that the same box could be filled by other people over the remaining performances of the week?)
Single tickets could be purchased "à la porte" from one hour before the performance or booked in advance from the box office ("bureau de location"), which entitled you to reserve a specific seat. Subscribers also often resold their unused tickets - unsurprisingly, if you had paid for the right to see 150 performances in a year and only attended, say, once a week on average! The cheapest seats were not available for subscription.
The Palais Garnier had a capacity of 2200. The "orchestra", the "parterre" and the "amphitheatre" were all of them ground-floor seating areas (Raoul stands up from a seat au centre de l'amphithéâtre, which was the raked area furthest back from the stage -- so not actually as close to the front as I'd pictured).
The ticket price for the most expensive (front-facing and 'forestage' boxes) seats was 16-17 francs from 1880, with the subscribers' rate coming out a couple of francs cheaper per performance. Advance prices on the door were around 11 francs; last-minute unallocated seating around 9 francs. The cheapest seats were 2-3 francs.
Annual revenues at the Palais Garnier varied fairly consistently around the 3-4 million franc mark between 1875 and 1914 (while the revenues at the Opéra-Comique climbed from 1 to almost 3 million over this period, and costs at the Garnier continued to rise). The vast majority of the costs of running the Opera consisted of paying the salaries of the personnel. There was a workforce of about 1200.
In earlier years, singers and dancers were paid an extra fee per performance on top of their annual salary (the 'feu'), but by the 1830s these became written in to the contracts as a fixed number of feux annually, becoming effectively part of the standard salary. "Singers could in addition negotiate congés, that is, periods of time every year during which they were not required to serve at the Opera, and which had to be bought out by management if it needed the singer during those times."
Between 1805 and 1895, the ratio of the highest-paid soloists to the lowest-paid went from 3.5:1 to 35:1 (although the major part of this increase in discrepancy apparently predated the move to the Palais Garnier), while the ratio of the highest-paid to the lowest-paid chorus roles changed only from 2.1:1 to 2.5:1 over the same period.
"The public comes not for a work but for an artist, caring little for the overall interpretation as long as the fashionable singer is heard; the theater is at the mercy of this singer, and if an accident deprives it of his services it is deserted because it sacrificed everything to an idol and there is no ensemble, no repertoire, no personnel that can attract the public. ... Most of the budget is devoted to what is called the "tête de troupe", the first roles, and such that there is no proportion between the earnings of the lead singers and those of the lesser roles." (Undated, uncredited quote (p35): tut, tut)
"It is known that, from 1884, the directors made a conscious effort to cut down on the costs of sets and costumes, reusing existing as much as possible"; note that the State retained ownership of all such properties after the end of the managers' contract!
An unexpected extra detail: the Paris Opera has operated its own pension scheme since the seventeenth century ("one of the oldest in France"), which allows ballet dancers to retire at the age of 42 and receive a continuing payment of about 45% of their previous salary, and apparently even technical staff were allowed to retire at 55.
https://www.dancemagazine.com/paris-opera-ballet-strike-2644830369.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/12/pension-strikes-have-cost-opera-de-paris-2m-week-ballet-stars/
So a soloist like La Sorelli would not have been entirely dependent on saving up enough cash from favours shown to her by the Opera's patrons in order to fund her old age...
Clarification on the mysterious marcheuses and figurants mentioned by Leroux as crowding behind the scenes (Ch 2: "Les figurants du dernier tableau qui s’en vont, les « marcheuses » qui vous bousculent"; Ch14: "Sur le plateau, c’est une cohue sans nom. Artistes, machinistes, danseuses, marcheuses, figurants, choristes, abonnés, tout le monde interroge, crie, se bouscule"):
From Understanding French Grand Opera Through Dance (pp40–1)
In the final act of "Le Prophète", for example, the stage directions specify a banquet splendidly adorned with food, drink, and women courtesans: "Not only do women in diaphanous skirts adorn the stage with their dancing, they also lay[sic] about in seductive poses" (p65)
Horses in the nineteenth-century theatre (resurrected from my comments at https://zellephantom.dreamwidth.org/6774.html?thread=35446 ):
The horses would be theatre-trained animals that could be trusted to walk on revolving stages, carry overweight tenors with the seat of a sack of flour and no idea how to mount, put up with ballerinas pivoting in front of them, etc. It's possible that this included ordinary work-horses as well in order to handle deliveries, scenery vans, and so on.
As to why they had twelve -- matching teams of different colours, at a guess? Little white ponies to pull fairy coaches and big placid animals for the conquering hero to ride in full armour?
It's not at all clear from the plot summary for Le Prophète (La Profeta) where César can have been required for that opera, for example, but his role was evidently a memorable one ;-p
A traditional 'tenting' circus could easily have a dozen stalls in its canvas stables; big rosinback horses for the bareback riders to stand on, a set of pretty little ponies for the clown acts and to perform clever tricks, maybe a 'learned' horse to count and answer audience questions with Yes or No, individual horse acts trained to jump through rings of fire or perform haute école manoeuvres ('airs above the ground'), and of course one or more sets of beautifully matched animals for the usual dashing riding displays around the ring, dressed in plumes and ridden by sequinned performers.
A nineteenth-century opera house would have been a bit more restrained, I assume (the stage is big, but not all that big), but I imagine that something like the infamous procession from 'Aida' could easily have involved more than one set of horses. French grand opera was all about the spectacle and stage machinery (sometimes to the detriment of the music, modern critics have claimed), and as 'chief stage machinist' (chef machiniste -- translated by de Mattos as a mere 'scene-shifter') Joseph Buquet would have been in authority over a crew of sixty or seventy men operating the elaborate and complex mechanisms involved.
(An interesting footnote is that -- according to the programme of the West End production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" -- the reason why it was staged at Her Majesty's Theatre was because the theatre retained its original Victorian stage machinery, thus enabling the various special effects, i.e. vanishing in a puff of smoke or diving into a pool of water.)
According to my annotated edition, a lot of Leroux's descriptions of the Opera House interior can be traced back directly to the reference books he evidently consulted, Charles Nuitter's Le Nouvel Opéra and Charles Garnier's own account, "Le Nouvel Opéra de Paris".
(The latter is available on Google Books; I did a quick search of the PDF to see if Garnier says anything about facilities for horses, and while the search didn't reveal anything about stables, it did throw up a lyrical passage about the grand staircase where he asks the reader to imagine entire operas taking place in that setting, specifically mentioning the procession from Le Prophète and the one from La Juive 'minus the horses, of course', since they couldn't manage the stairs ;-D
In fact I've just looked at the relevant chapter in Leroux, and he explicitly mentions those two operas as being ones requiring trained horses. So I'm guessing that these very precise details were probably the result of Gaston Leroux's own research!)
The footnote to this chapter in my annotated 'Phantom' comments that Charles Nuitter's book mentions "horses that will be hoisted onto the stage by means of an elevator".
Some concentrated Web searching throws up a page about the Opéra Garnier which mentions, as an aside, that the dimensions of "l'ouverture de la scène" (the proscenium arch?) were such that in the past it had permitted the arrival of horses at the gallop thanks to its 16-metre size: https://paris-guide-web.com/opera-garnier-paris/
The article also comments that it was possible to open up the foyer de la danse, which was situated directly behind this area, to form a continuation of the stage which created a depth of almost fifty metres, permitting the illusion of arrival from a great distance thanks to the reverse rake of the floor -- also useful for staging processions, I imagine.
(So much for my comments about "not all that big"!)
Apparently danseuse is actually French slang for a financially demanding mistress; 's'offrir une danseuse' is to become a 'sugar-daddy'.
So Philippe's caution that "once these little ladies from the Opera learn their way to a man's purse, life can become astonishingly expensive..." was extremely accurate, however 'hypocritical' and 'immoral' my readers found it :-p
He was generous to Sorelli, I hope...
Another page (also in French, but with good photos): http://curieuseartemis.over-blog.com/article-opera-garnier-paris-visitons-le-ensemble-96727982.html
At the beginning she comments that the Opera contained not only the singers, the corps de ballet, the ballet school and the singing school (which actually took place at the Conservatoire, where Christine studied), but also costume workshops, a stable, an armoury etc. It seems clear that there was one, even if I can't find any pictures or descriptions of it -- unlike the infamous 'lake'!
This page mentions that nowadays the chandelier is lowered to the ground to be cleaned annually, but that originally it was designed to be raised through the ceiling, where you can still see the little circle in the centre that opened to allow it to pass through, and that it remained lit throughout the performance -- presumably it was also raised in order to light it?
(By the era, I assume it would have been illuminated by gas rather than by candles, and they did have ingenious methods for lighting gas-lamps remotely: https://cassstudio6.wordpress.com/lighting/gaslight-era/ )
The Wikipedia page for the opera actually shows the staging for the final act of Le Prophète: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meyerbeer_Proph%C3%A8te_D%C3%A9cor_ActVTab3_Chaperon.jpg
By the looks of it, the various scenery flats crack up and fall apart and some thunderflashes get set off on stage, while everybody makes gestures of dismay and falls flat ;-p
As I mentioned, 'the technology at the time' did pretty much focus on dramatic special effects to draw in audiences; the finale of "La Juive" involves the heroine being executed in a cauldron of boiling water, and "Robert le diable" was famous for the ghostly effects used to create its ballet of sinful nuns rising from the grave...
One more mention of horses:
https://www.opera-online.com/en/articles/la-juive-from-oblivion-to-renascence--2
The first production of "La Juive" in 1835 by the Paris Opera (not at that time resident at the Palais Garnier) involved twenty horses borrowed from the Cirque-Olympique. So one can see how, when they were building a new opera house in the expectation of presenting this type of production, they would take care to equip it with a sizeable stable :-)
Another one in the list of astonishing things I didn't know about Le Prophète: apparently the classic ballet Les Patineurs is actually based on the music from a roller-skating scene from Meyerbeer's opera.
Starlight Express, eat your heart out!
It bears no relation whatever to the fictional "Il Muto", however, which is clearly a spoof of eighteen-century operas.
Mireille de Ribière's footnotes on Leroux do mention that performances took place on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
This text looks somewhat relevant: The Opéra and Opéra-Comique in the nineteenth century: tracing the age of repertoire, though it mainly discusses developments pre-1870. At the Opéra-Comique in the earlier nineteenth century, "the continuity in repertoire resulted from the practice of performing two or three pieces almost every day of the week, which made room for old works to survive. Yet it was unusual for two old works to appear on one night, since the directors of the Opéra-Comique always sought for contrast in their programming" (and note that productions like the long-since-forgotten "Rose et Colas" were apparently single-act comic 'operas', like a one-act farce, explaining why the Opéra-Comique was staging multiple titles in a night!)
"by 1860 a new canonic repertoire was apparent in each theater: chiefly works by Auber, Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini, and Fromental Halévy at the Opéra"; in the season 1862-3, eleven works are listed as having been performed at the Opéra de Paris, all of them written between 1828 and 1853.
Financial history of the Paris Opera from 1803-1914: http://www.ehes.org/ehes2015/papers/Velde.pdf
"It was managed by for-profit entrepreneurs who leased the institution.... They also received a sizeable subsidy" (hence my confusion as to whether (from memory) the directors were paying or being paid for the privilege!)
The "cahier des charges" (or contract between the private management and the government) specified various quite specific terms; in the contract of 1879 the government apparently found it necessary as a one-off to insist that "the Opera is not an experimental theatre" so far as the selection of repertoire went -- one wonders why!
A certain number of new works had to be performed ("In principle a new work had to be staged every three months" -- imagine that today! -- "and only one [?new] work by the same composer and librettist was allowed in a given year") and there was a minimum number of three performances per week and a stipulated minimum number of performances per year, along with a minimum number of artistes that must be employed in order to meet these requirements. "The requirement of producing at least one grand opera per year was in principle non-negotiable". "From 1891 the new works were to be by French composers, a requirement that produced no successful work" -- oddly enough, since a lot of the colossally successful grand opera of the previous decades had been by French composers, who more or less invented the genre.
The government subsidy ("whose purpose was to permit the performance of new works") was fixed at 800,000 francs from 1871 until 1928 (despite inflation). Expenses and revenues varied around 4-5 million francs annually in this period, having abruptly doubled after 1871 -- presumably representing a new epoch in terms of repertoire/ambitions.
Buying tickets:
Boxes could be rented for a minimum of 3 months up to a whole year at a time; a box contained 4-12 seats, with the most common seating capacity being 6.
It was also possible to rent a box for just one show per week (presumably this meant that specific boxes would be kept back for occupation by multiple subscribers, so that the same box could be filled by other people over the remaining performances of the week?)
Single tickets could be purchased "à la porte" from one hour before the performance or booked in advance from the box office ("bureau de location"), which entitled you to reserve a specific seat. Subscribers also often resold their unused tickets - unsurprisingly, if you had paid for the right to see 150 performances in a year and only attended, say, once a week on average! The cheapest seats were not available for subscription.
The Palais Garnier had a capacity of 2200. The "orchestra", the "parterre" and the "amphitheatre" were all of them ground-floor seating areas (Raoul stands up from a seat au centre de l'amphithéâtre, which was the raked area furthest back from the stage -- so not actually as close to the front as I'd pictured).
The ticket price for the most expensive (front-facing and 'forestage' boxes) seats was 16-17 francs from 1880, with the subscribers' rate coming out a couple of francs cheaper per performance. Advance prices on the door were around 11 francs; last-minute unallocated seating around 9 francs. The cheapest seats were 2-3 francs.
Annual revenues at the Palais Garnier varied fairly consistently around the 3-4 million franc mark between 1875 and 1914 (while the revenues at the Opéra-Comique climbed from 1 to almost 3 million over this period, and costs at the Garnier continued to rise). The vast majority of the costs of running the Opera consisted of paying the salaries of the personnel. There was a workforce of about 1200.
In earlier years, singers and dancers were paid an extra fee per performance on top of their annual salary (the 'feu'), but by the 1830s these became written in to the contracts as a fixed number of feux annually, becoming effectively part of the standard salary. "Singers could in addition negotiate congés, that is, periods of time every year during which they were not required to serve at the Opera, and which had to be bought out by management if it needed the singer during those times."
Between 1805 and 1895, the ratio of the highest-paid soloists to the lowest-paid went from 3.5:1 to 35:1 (although the major part of this increase in discrepancy apparently predated the move to the Palais Garnier), while the ratio of the highest-paid to the lowest-paid chorus roles changed only from 2.1:1 to 2.5:1 over the same period.
"The public comes not for a work but for an artist, caring little for the overall interpretation as long as the fashionable singer is heard; the theater is at the mercy of this singer, and if an accident deprives it of his services it is deserted because it sacrificed everything to an idol and there is no ensemble, no repertoire, no personnel that can attract the public. ... Most of the budget is devoted to what is called the "tête de troupe", the first roles, and such that there is no proportion between the earnings of the lead singers and those of the lesser roles." (Undated, uncredited quote (p35): tut, tut)
"It is known that, from 1884, the directors made a conscious effort to cut down on the costs of sets and costumes, reusing existing as much as possible"; note that the State retained ownership of all such properties after the end of the managers' contract!
An unexpected extra detail: the Paris Opera has operated its own pension scheme since the seventeenth century ("one of the oldest in France"), which allows ballet dancers to retire at the age of 42 and receive a continuing payment of about 45% of their previous salary, and apparently even technical staff were allowed to retire at 55.
https://www.dancemagazine.com/paris-opera-ballet-strike-2644830369.html
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/12/pension-strikes-have-cost-opera-de-paris-2m-week-ballet-stars/
So a soloist like La Sorelli would not have been entirely dependent on saving up enough cash from favours shown to her by the Opera's patrons in order to fund her old age...
Clarification on the mysterious marcheuses and figurants mentioned by Leroux as crowding behind the scenes (Ch 2: "Les figurants du dernier tableau qui s’en vont, les « marcheuses » qui vous bousculent"; Ch14: "Sur le plateau, c’est une cohue sans nom. Artistes, machinistes, danseuses, marcheuses, figurants, choristes, abonnés, tout le monde interroge, crie, se bouscule"):
From Understanding French Grand Opera Through Dance (pp40–1)
[The critic] Ropicquet aimed the harshest words at the most minor of dancers, the figurantes and marcheuses, bodies that [fellow critic] Gautier ignored. Unlike those individuals that the press routinely named, who enjoyed high salaries and general acclaim, these women earned just enough money to survive. They depended heavily on the sponsorship or patronage of wealthy men if they wished to enjoy a lavish lifestyle or even more than a subsistence existence after hours. Although classified as dancers, they literally walked on stage and became a decorative part of the stage design. They rarely danced a step, and could not be trusted to know how to dance if they were asked. In the course of an opera, they might at most escort characters on and off stage, or play a part in the figuration of a divertissement.
In the final act of "Le Prophète", for example, the stage directions specify a banquet splendidly adorned with food, drink, and women courtesans: "Not only do women in diaphanous skirts adorn the stage with their dancing, they also lay[sic] about in seductive poses" (p65)
Horses in the nineteenth-century theatre (resurrected from my comments at https://zellephantom.dreamwidth.org/6774.html?thread=35446 ):
The horses would be theatre-trained animals that could be trusted to walk on revolving stages, carry overweight tenors with the seat of a sack of flour and no idea how to mount, put up with ballerinas pivoting in front of them, etc. It's possible that this included ordinary work-horses as well in order to handle deliveries, scenery vans, and so on.
As to why they had twelve -- matching teams of different colours, at a guess? Little white ponies to pull fairy coaches and big placid animals for the conquering hero to ride in full armour?
It's not at all clear from the plot summary for Le Prophète (La Profeta) where César can have been required for that opera, for example, but his role was evidently a memorable one ;-p
A traditional 'tenting' circus could easily have a dozen stalls in its canvas stables; big rosinback horses for the bareback riders to stand on, a set of pretty little ponies for the clown acts and to perform clever tricks, maybe a 'learned' horse to count and answer audience questions with Yes or No, individual horse acts trained to jump through rings of fire or perform haute école manoeuvres ('airs above the ground'), and of course one or more sets of beautifully matched animals for the usual dashing riding displays around the ring, dressed in plumes and ridden by sequinned performers.
A nineteenth-century opera house would have been a bit more restrained, I assume (the stage is big, but not all that big), but I imagine that something like the infamous procession from 'Aida' could easily have involved more than one set of horses. French grand opera was all about the spectacle and stage machinery (sometimes to the detriment of the music, modern critics have claimed), and as 'chief stage machinist' (chef machiniste -- translated by de Mattos as a mere 'scene-shifter') Joseph Buquet would have been in authority over a crew of sixty or seventy men operating the elaborate and complex mechanisms involved.
(An interesting footnote is that -- according to the programme of the West End production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" -- the reason why it was staged at Her Majesty's Theatre was because the theatre retained its original Victorian stage machinery, thus enabling the various special effects, i.e. vanishing in a puff of smoke or diving into a pool of water.)
According to my annotated edition, a lot of Leroux's descriptions of the Opera House interior can be traced back directly to the reference books he evidently consulted, Charles Nuitter's Le Nouvel Opéra and Charles Garnier's own account, "Le Nouvel Opéra de Paris".
(The latter is available on Google Books; I did a quick search of the PDF to see if Garnier says anything about facilities for horses, and while the search didn't reveal anything about stables, it did throw up a lyrical passage about the grand staircase where he asks the reader to imagine entire operas taking place in that setting, specifically mentioning the procession from Le Prophète and the one from La Juive 'minus the horses, of course', since they couldn't manage the stairs ;-D
In fact I've just looked at the relevant chapter in Leroux, and he explicitly mentions those two operas as being ones requiring trained horses. So I'm guessing that these very precise details were probably the result of Gaston Leroux's own research!)
The footnote to this chapter in my annotated 'Phantom' comments that Charles Nuitter's book mentions "horses that will be hoisted onto the stage by means of an elevator".
Some concentrated Web searching throws up a page about the Opéra Garnier which mentions, as an aside, that the dimensions of "l'ouverture de la scène" (the proscenium arch?) were such that in the past it had permitted the arrival of horses at the gallop thanks to its 16-metre size: https://paris-guide-web.com/opera-garnier-paris/
The article also comments that it was possible to open up the foyer de la danse, which was situated directly behind this area, to form a continuation of the stage which created a depth of almost fifty metres, permitting the illusion of arrival from a great distance thanks to the reverse rake of the floor -- also useful for staging processions, I imagine.
(So much for my comments about "not all that big"!)
Apparently danseuse is actually French slang for a financially demanding mistress; 's'offrir une danseuse' is to become a 'sugar-daddy'.
So Philippe's caution that "once these little ladies from the Opera learn their way to a man's purse, life can become astonishingly expensive..." was extremely accurate, however 'hypocritical' and 'immoral' my readers found it :-p
He was generous to Sorelli, I hope...
Another page (also in French, but with good photos): http://curieuseartemis.over-blog.com/article-opera-garnier-paris-visitons-le-ensemble-96727982.html
At the beginning she comments that the Opera contained not only the singers, the corps de ballet, the ballet school and the singing school (which actually took place at the Conservatoire, where Christine studied), but also costume workshops, a stable, an armoury etc. It seems clear that there was one, even if I can't find any pictures or descriptions of it -- unlike the infamous 'lake'!
This page mentions that nowadays the chandelier is lowered to the ground to be cleaned annually, but that originally it was designed to be raised through the ceiling, where you can still see the little circle in the centre that opened to allow it to pass through, and that it remained lit throughout the performance -- presumably it was also raised in order to light it?
(By the era, I assume it would have been illuminated by gas rather than by candles, and they did have ingenious methods for lighting gas-lamps remotely: https://cassstudio6.wordpress.com/lighting/gaslight-era/ )
The Wikipedia page for the opera actually shows the staging for the final act of Le Prophète: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Meyerbeer_Proph%C3%A8te_D%C3%A9cor_ActVTab3_Chaperon.jpg
By the looks of it, the various scenery flats crack up and fall apart and some thunderflashes get set off on stage, while everybody makes gestures of dismay and falls flat ;-p
As I mentioned, 'the technology at the time' did pretty much focus on dramatic special effects to draw in audiences; the finale of "La Juive" involves the heroine being executed in a cauldron of boiling water, and "Robert le diable" was famous for the ghostly effects used to create its ballet of sinful nuns rising from the grave...
One more mention of horses:
https://www.opera-online.com/en/articles/la-juive-from-oblivion-to-renascence--2
The first production of "La Juive" in 1835 by the Paris Opera (not at that time resident at the Palais Garnier) involved twenty horses borrowed from the Cirque-Olympique. So one can see how, when they were building a new opera house in the expectation of presenting this type of production, they would take care to equip it with a sizeable stable :-)
Another one in the list of astonishing things I didn't know about Le Prophète: apparently the classic ballet Les Patineurs is actually based on the music from a roller-skating scene from Meyerbeer's opera.
Starlight Express, eat your heart out!
no subject
Date: 2021-01-30 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-01-31 10:35 pm (UTC)I have a habit of disappearing down a research rabbit-hole when trying to reply to people's PMs/comments, and then leaving the resulting hours of work scattered at random in weird places where I can't tag it or find it again, so I thought I'd better try to assemble some of it for once.