Paris Spectacles

*Jane in Paris*

Last Friday I went to my first opera in Paris. The state opera here actually has two houses, one that looks really ritzy and is in an affluent part of the city (Palais Garnier), and one built in 1989 in a lower middle class area with a modern design (Opera Bastille). The opera hall itself was designed to have no obstructed seats (Garnier does because of all the decorative architecture) and to evenly disperse the sound so that there are no dead spots. Some people roll their eyes at the idea that the French government did this, but I actually think it's a pretty brilliant idea. While opera started out as a genre for the incredibly privileged few, there's no reason why it can't be both a high art activity and an art "for the people" today. The Bastille site offers free concerts once a week, and standing room tickets to all of the operas and ballets shown there. Furthermore, the Palais Garnier tends to show the more classic operas.

Unlike the vast majority of opera goers, I like to see modern operas - the more recently it was written the better! So it was fitting that the first opera I saw was at the Bastille, the newer, modern opera house, and that it was Salome by Richard Strauss, which was composed in 1905. Most people reading the blog don't know this opera - it's really wonderful. The music is beautiful. It sounds like Wagner, but its better and gets to the point much quicker. The entire opera is in fact only one act. The singers did an excellent job - in particular the soprano who sang Salome. The libretto is based on Oscar Wilde's telling of the Biblical tale of the death of John the Baptist. Since Salome dances for Herod in the story to bring about John's beheading, the singer in Strauss's opera has a big dance scene. It was amazing. You know that an opera is good when what the composer has done makes you really think about the words, and as I was listening to the opera I was struck by the beauty of Wilde's libretto. It's actually pretty profound from a spiritual point of view.

I bought a standing room ticket, which required getting in line several hours before the performance like in Vienna. But there were several procedural differences: each person can buy two tickets and not just one, when you first arrive a worker hands you a number with your place in line on it, and the tickets are dispensed by machines and not a box office. Oddly, there are still workers that operate the machines for you - this is perhaps so that no one can buy more than one ticket.

Just as the line was moving, finally allowed to proceed to the machines, I heard someone shout my name. I turned around and there was an Ohio State student I had I taught last year, a violinist. This caused me to lose my place in line, but luckily I had my number 10, so I just went through the line showing it to everyone, who seemed to take it very seriously - "oh, you're 10, please..." This student, Leah, just happened to be in Paris this weekend and also just happened to have bought a ticket for Salome. What she was doing there 90 minutes early I don't know. She hung around with me and the people I had come with before the show, and then I invited her to dinner on Saturday. Ryan Stewart, who some of you know, was also in Paris on Saturday, so I ate dinner with him, one of his work colleagues, and my student Leah. It was pretty random - but I feel like a lot of things that have happened to me in Paris feel like that. I can't explain why; perhaps its just such a bustling city and it draws such a diversity of people that magical things are bound to happen.

On Sunday evening I went to another, very different performance. I met a Scottish jazz guitarist here in Paris last month, Tam de Villiers, and he played a show in the jazz district of Paris with his quartet. The name of the club is Le baiser sale, quite a racy label fitting for jazz music.



The quartet's music was very complicated, and I had to listen very closely or I really had no idea what they were doing. I went to the show with my German friend Andreas, who Nick and I met on the train when I moved to Paris, and his friend Carouli. Andreas is a drummer, so we had to sit right next to the drums. Luckily, though, this was jazz drumming, so there wasn't a lot of banging. All of the players were amazing, but the drummer caught my attention the most because of his proximity. He hardly ever played a groove, but was instead constantly improvising. For one piece he played the snare drum with his fingertips, and in one hand he held an egg shaker that would rattle whenever he hit the drum, and then he also had a stick made of a bunch of little sticks tied together. The drummer, whose name I eventually learned is Karl, is from Manitoba. Like many of the North Americans I meet here, he married a French person.

So this was a busy weekend for me! I'm visiting Nick next weekend, and we're going to try to put away the books while I'm there, so for the next few days I'll be hard at work at the Bibliotheque Nationale.