Tophats and Tutus
The Spectator US
Edgar Degas caught the high life and low life of the Paris Opera. Carolyn Stewart goes behind the curtain.
For a few nights in the winter of 1870, the wealthier diners of Paris could enjoy one of Europe’s most exclusive meals: a tender steak from Castor or Pollux, the elephants formerly of the Paris Zoo.
You couldn’t be picky about protein that winter.The Prussian army’s blockade turned into five months of hell for Parisians. Despite the deprivations of the siege — starvation, epidemics, elephant suppers — one Parisian mainstay showed admirable resilience: the Paris Opera. Within months of the siege’s end in January 1871, the Opéra was reconstituting its corps de ballet, its orchestra and, despite the collapse of Paris into the revolutionary Commune, its audience.
Founded by Louis XIV, the hallowed bal- let and opera company was a stage for the dance of high and low in society. For subscribers with season passes, it was a place to socialize and flirt, to acquire a new business client or mistress. For Edgar Degas, the Paris Opera was the epicenter of his artistic and social life. Over four decades, Degas explored every studio, stage and seat it had to offer. His Impressionist friends could gaze at gardens en plein air as much as they chose. Everything Degas needed was in the cramped, smoke-filled aisles of the Opéra. Degas at the Opéra, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, shows how he captured the dancers, singers, musicians and punters in paint, pastel, charcoal and wax.
Degas had traditional tastes in music, preferring Mozart and Gluck to the peacocking of Wagner, but he spent decades recasting the Opéra’s classical nuances in modern ways. He ennobled its lowly musicians in ‘The Orchestra of the Opéra’ (c.1870). He drained the dancers of their lyricism in pas- tels like ‘The Dance Examination’ (1880). He exposed the patrons as creeps in the monotype ‘Virginie Being Admired While the Marquis Cavalcanti Looks On’ (c.1880-83). He elegantly knocked the Opéra off balance with the skill of a man who had spent his ado- lescence sketching at the Louvre.
By today’s standards, Degas’ reasoning sounds like that old Playboy defense: ‘I read it for the articles.’ But the dancers were a means to an end for Degas, a living and ever-renewing extension of the twisting, classical figures of Rubens and Titian. He attended hundreds of performances and saw Sigurd, the 1883 opera by the French composer Ernest Reye, 37 times.
Before Degas was the ‘painter of dancers’, he was the painter of bassoons. His entrée into the Opéra came from the bassoonist and composer Désiré Dihau, who played in the orchestra and at the music salons that Degas’ banker father would host in the family’s apartment near the Tuileries, the royal palace destroyed by the Commune. In those days, pit musicians were not esteemed. ‘The orchestra is good for nothing,’ Hector Ber- lioz complained, ‘it does not stir and wears no costume.’ If opera-goers noticed the musicians, it was when the neck of a double bass obstructed their view of the dancers’ legs.
The commission from Dihau launched Degas’ artistic reputation, giving him more renown than he had won in several years of exhibiting in the Salon, official France’s annual art showcase. ‘The Orchestra of the Opéra’ (p43) places us in the pit, at eye level with the musicians. We see Dihau in profile, gripping his slender bassoon with utmost concentration. His jaw is tense, his cheeks slightly pillowed as he blows into the reed. Degas endows him and his fellow players, a bunch of cleaned-up bohemians, with the dignity that Ingres might grant a wealthy portrait sitter. Over their thinning hairlines, a stage supports a tangle of legs and tuile. The flash and spectacle of the dancers is reduced to a few ghostly ankles. In classic Degas fashion, the main event becomes the sideshow.
When Wagner debuted Tannhäuser for French audiences at the Opéra in 1861, he complied under duress with the French opera custom of inserting a ballet scene as a treat for the rich young aristocrats who bought season tickets. The first night was a disaster — not the music, the dancing or the singing, but the timing. Wag- ner inserted the ballet at the end of the first act — rather than the second — when most of the bloods were still out to dinner. Once they arrived, they booed the performers off the stage. After three nights of near-riot, the Opéra canceled Tannhäuser. Wagner the revolutionary had been voted down by the people.
The separation and mingling of social sets is a leitmotif of Degas’ operatic oeuvre. Behind the curtain is a compartmentalized world of plodding men in dark suits and the ethereal, fleet-footed dancers whose sexual availability was assumed. While the show is in motion, the two worlds are separated by stage, balustrade and propriety. But after the performance, the divisions dissolve. The Opéra building was designed to encourage rendezvous between subscribers and dancers. While the location of the Paris Opera changed in Degas’ life, moving from the Salle Le Peletier to the Opéra Garnier four years after the Siege, some things never changed. Charles Garnier, the architect of the new building, placed floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the foyer, where the dancers warmed up before per- forming — not for the dancers, but for the wealthy financiers who lingered there and often underwrote productions. ‘Three-day subscribers’ with tickets to performances on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays — a privilege Degas desperately sought and eventually acquired — had access-all-areas passes.
As the National Gallery’s catalogue euphemistically puts it, some dancers sought ‘protectors’. Degas’ dancers are trailed by dark-suited suitors across a range of medi- ums and settings. In ‘The Curtain’ (c.1880), the coarse silhouettes of top-hatted men punctuate the pastel-toned backstage scene; as one suitor gravitates toward her, a dancer flutters out of the frame and out of reach. In ‘Virginie Being Admired While the Mar- quis Cavalcanti Looks On’, a young dancer is dwarfed by a ring of men. Further monotypes depict the girl’s mother as a procuress, arranging assignations for her daughter with subscribers. Like Toulouse-Lautrec’s car- toons, Degas’ later characterizations may reflect the anti-Semitism that broke out when the Dreyfus affair began in 1894.
‘The secret,’ Degas told his fellow painter Pierre-George Jeanniot, ‘is to follow the advice that masters give us in their works, while doing something other than what they did.’ In 1874, he took his own advice by exhibiting not in the official Salon, but with the ‘rejects’ in the Salon des Refusés, the exhibition that marked the beginning of Impressionism. Amid the dappled colors of Renoir, Cezanne and Morisot, and the orange and purple mists of Monet’s ‘Impression, Sunrise’, Degas hung the ‘The Ballet Rehearsal’.
‘The Ballet Rehearsal’, here on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, is a modern grisaille. The grisaille originated in the 12th century and presents the technical challenge of painting only in grays. Degas adapts this medieval method to capture the latest advancements in artificial stage lighting. And he departs from traditional head-on depictions by adopting the skewed perspective of the view from a box.
The introduction of gas lighting in the 1820s had revolutionized staging techniques, allowing designers to plan operas around simulating daybreak or the movement of clouds. Its effects on the dancers did not go unnoticed. Charles Garnier notes in Le Nou- vel Opéra de Paris (1878) how a row of footlights transformed a dancer’s appearance: ‘the eyes sparkle, the teeth shine, the legs are lit up, the bosom takes shape and fullness’.
‘The Ballet Rehearsal’ is a choreography of bodies. Degas attended rehearsals daily, collecting a repertoire of poses that he could combine in endless variations. The dancers in ‘The Ballet Rehearsal’ warm up on stage, illuminated from below by a strip of footlights. As they yawn, rub sore muscles, practice poses and step onto their points, their skin and costumes are like bleached alabas- ter couched in a deep umber darkness.
Degas’ girls are cultivated and wild, realistic in their pinched Parisian faces and strained tendons, but also formal models of movement, muscle and color. He has been criticized for his treatment, but he recognized the Opéra’s underlying economic reality. Its dancers came from the lower classes. If they failed to conform their bodies into the shapes required by the Opéra and its sub- scribers, less savory contortions beckoned. Degas saw that if the girls weren’t pleasing men from the stage, they would, like hapless Castor and Pollux, end up on the menu.
‘Queens are made of distance and greasepaint,’ Degas wrote in a sonnet. He embraced the artifice of the Opéra, the fantasy and artistry that wove together the dancers, subscribers and his own efforts. He also captured a distinctly modern reality.
Degas at the Opéra is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC until July 5.
This article originally appeared in The Spectator US, March 2020.