Moments musicaux: high culture in the Paris Commune
Moments musicaux, by Delphine Mordey, covers the 1871 Paris Commune’s relationship to the Paris Opera. It does not address what the Communards were doing at the un-finished Garnier because at the time, the Paris Opera’s home was at the Salle de le Peletier. The Peletier is mentioned once in Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in association with Sorelli’s mother, who had “known the glory days” of the theater, which had burned down by the time of the events of the novel.
The Communards occupied the Peletier, both the building and the Opera staff, on May 1, 1871. The article explores their motivations for involving themselves in the affairs of the Opera during their short governance of Paris. It describes some of the administrative issues and also the four concerts at the Tuileries Palace, where both classical opera and café songs were performed for the open public.
I highly recommend the article to anyone interested in both the Paris Opera and the Paris Commune, and, tangentially, in Leroux’s novel.
The article ends with a section called “Phantoms of the Opera” which describes how the Versaillais army occupied the Peletier in the final days of the Commune and used it as a prison and execution site. This should make fans of Leroux’s novel pause as he claims it was the Garnier that held a prison for victims of the Commune, when it seems it was the opposite that was true. Mordey provides this chilling anecdote:
“As audience to these sinister scenes [the executions], several young [Versaillais] soldiers were resting on the steps to the left, the fatal side of the Opera. In idle curiosity, a handful roamed through the building, and discovered some accessories from Der Freischütz, the last production that theatre had staged before the start of the [Prussian] siege. The donned the skulls, masks and cloaks used for the wolf’s glen scene, and reappeared on the steps to watch the executions.”
I found this anecdote so awful and unbelievable that I even checked Mordey’s reference for the story. Witnessed by the Opera’s archivist Charles Nuitter, she pulled his testimony from an 1898 book called Guerre et Commune, impressions d'un hospitalier 1870-1871 by Louis Gallet.
The Commune was over by the end of May 1871. The Peletier burned down in 1873. The Palais Garnier opened as the new home of the Paris Opera in 1875. The Commune haunts Leroux’s novel as it continues to haunt the actual city of Paris. Sometimes the truth is stranger than any horror story.
