The Gingerbread Opera

French music critics and a large segment of the Parisian public have a favorite seasonal pastime: griping about the Paris Opera. The huge gingerbread palace at the head of the Avenue de 1'Opera, which Composer Claude Debussy referred to as "a Turkish bath," and Choreographer Serge Lifar as "a glorious cemetery," has traditionally offered more for the eye than the ear. But the embarrassed French Ministry of Cultural Affairs is out to change all that. Last week the administrator's silk-paneled office was being prepared for a new tenant: Modernist Composer Georges Auric, 63. For the first time in 50 years, Paris Opera buffs exulted, a musician was top man at the palace.

Great for Guzzling. Largest theatrical building in the world, the Paris Opera boasts a mirrored, marbled, gilt-encrusted interior so lavish that it had cost $40 million by the time it was completed in 1875. During part of its long history, it has been a respectable, even an outstanding house: in it were staged world premieres by most of the great names in French operatic history--Rameau, Auber, Bizet, Berlioz, Saint-Saens, Gounod, Massenet. And it developed an early reputation for spectacular staging that it retains to this day, e.g. a production of Rameau's heroic ballet Les Indes Galantes in which a volcano erupts onstage, compressed air blows sponge rocks into the air, and a full-rigged ship sails into view and sinks beneath heaving canvas waves.

But for all its pomp-and-circumstantial splendor, and its whopping government subsidy (nearly $3,000,000 this season), the Paris Opera has deteriorated sadly since World War II. Today it is mainly a tourist attraction; its audience comes to guzzle champagne at mammoth bars, and gape on gala nights at the gold-and-silver-helmeted Gardes Republicans. The music is incidental.

Bar for Cocktails. Main reason for the decline is that the opera is a nationalized institution, notoriously overstaffed and burdened with a bureaucracy that threatens to strangle it. By government order, two-thirds of the operas it presents must be French (which accounts in part for its flagrant neglect of Mozart, Wagner and most modern scores), and no more than 10% of its singers can be foreign. French choruses are still entitled to extra pay if required to sing in an alien tongue when there is a French version for the libretto.

As a result, soloists and choruses sometimes sound off in something less than harmony: in a recent production of Verdi's Masked Ball, the chorus sang in French while the principals sang in Italian. To make matters worse, casts are often studded with the stagestruck female friends of politicians (one petite amie of a bureaucrat, noted L.'Express, seemed "to prefer the cocktail to the exercise bar").

By union regulations, rehearsals are limited to a scanty three hours, and programs are usually decided upon only two weeks in advance, making it all but impossible to import famous, heavily booked stars. Nevertheless, New Opera Administrator Auric is guardedly optimistic. "I believe that we can approach the problem in a novel way," says he, "from the artistic point of view." Perhaps. But the Cultural Affairs Ministry also has plans to put a 13-member "administrative council" over Auric--possibly to insure that deserving petites amies will still get their turn at the bar.

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