Aria that cost Marie-Antoinette her head is sung again at Versailles
Published: 07:10 PM,Oct 15,2019 | EDITED : 04:05 PM,May 05,2024
Scandalous ‘orgy’ - “It caused a scandal in revolutionary Paris,” said Brunner, with radical leaders like Marat and Danton branding the banquet “counter-revolutionary”. Rumours circulated “that the revolutionary tricolour rosette has been trampled underfoot” by the royalist revellers, he added. The fake news was further fuelled by revolutionary tracts portraying the banquet as an orgy and claims that the rosette had been turned over to show only the white side, the symbol of the king. “Three days after (the news broke), the women of Paris marched on Versailles and the day after the palace was empty,” Brunner added. By then the three-minute song about Richard the Lionheart, the English king who had also been taken hostage while he was returning from the Crusades, had become a royalist anthem.It was quickly banned by the revolutionary government. Even before the monarchy fell, the comic opera had never been fully performed on the Versailles stage — which was formally inaugurated on Marie-Antoinette’s wedding day as a gift to the opera-loving teenager.
Revolutionary - She later built her own little theatre, the Trianon, in the grounds of the palace where she would put on amateur dramatics starring herself and her friends, and stage concerts by her favourite composers like Gretry and Gluck. Having hardly hosted another opera from the revolution right up until its restoration in 2009, the theatre is something of an 18th-century time capsule, with machinery to match. Its design may have been revolutionary in its time — allowing for the stalls to be removed for balls and banquets — but today it takes brawn as well as brains to operate. Six levels above the stage, Carlos Casado hauls the backdrops up and down by hand, one of the last machinists in France to do so. “It is quite tough physically,” he admitted. “It is like working at theatre’s very beginnings. “The movements need to be very quick, and a lot depends on ‘feeling’ so it all goes with the music,” he added. Even though “Richard the Lionheart” is a story from the Middle Ages, American director Marshall Pynkoski has set the new production in Versailles’ 18th-century heydey. “There is a real emotion about working here at Versailles,” said Camille Assaf, the wardrobe mistress. “The atmosphere gets deeply into you,” she told AFP. She reproduced costumes “by looking at an awful lot at paintings by Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher” to catch “the very particular grace” of the period. The next production at the Opera Royal will be another nod to the palace’s rich history — “The Ghosts of Versailles”, which was created by the New York Metropolitan Opera nearly 40 years ago. In it Beaumarchais — the author of “The Marriage of Figaro” — tries to change the course of history so that Marie-Antoinette keeps her head and never has to face “Madame Guillotine”. — AFP