One says that the original Lenepveu’s version (The Muses and the Hours of the day and night, a spectacular and mythological representation of Art showing the muses inspiring the authors) fits perfectly in the setting and in the architecture of the building without distracting the audience from the performances on stage.Ĭhagall’s work must nevertheless bring a fresh impetus to the opera – judged old-fashion and dusty, needing to be shaken up. One stigmatizes the “artificial modernity” and the anachronistic features of this reinvention of the opera ceiling. This order becomes official in 1962… and quickly arises a breaker of criticisms in the newspapers.
Chagall, suspicious about orders, makes sketches and models before finally accepting (voluntarily) this challenge, both because of his friendship for André Malraux and to pay tribute to the great composers who brings life to the Palais Garnier opera house. During the intermission, André Malraux asks Marc Chagall (whom he admires for a long time and has known for thirty years) to design a new ceiling.
The history says that, not much interested in what was going on on the stage, the minister raised his eyes on the ceiling and discovered the very academic work of Jules Lenepveu.
On the 17 th of February 1960, General de Gaulle and André Malraux, then Ministry of cultural affairs, welcome an official Peruvian delegation and attend the premiere of Daphnis and Chloe, the ballet that Maurice Ravel performed at the Palais Garnier opera house with both the set and the costumes designed by Marc Chagall. The avant-gardism sometimes discussed, even criticized, has marked this place all along its history and especially on the 23 rd of September 1964, exactly fifty years ago, for the inauguration of the main auditorium’s ceiling made by Marc Chagall – ceiling covering over 240 m² hiding the original one designed in the 19 th century by the painter Jules Lenepveu whose we are celebrating the anniversary today. Charles Garnier, who will give his name to the Parisian opera, imagines then a building mixing different styles and inspirations in order to design a temple dedicated to arts looking like a theatre set, at the same time sumptuous and modernist in its conception. The creator of the building that would become Paris opera house would be chosen after an anonymous contest whose, unexpectedly, is won by the young Charles Garnier (unknown and who hasn’t built anything yet) right under the noses of the renowned builders of the second Empire. In 1860, Napoleon the third ordered the construction of an imperial Academy of music and dance in the heart of Paris.