Le Grand Theatre de Bordeaux 1963/4 season

 

After leaving school and before going to university I spent 8 months as 'Assistant de langue anglaise' at the Lycee mixte de Libourne to improve my French. Libourne is 30 odd kilometers from Bordeaux so one of the first things I did was to check out the season at the rather beautiful opera house there, designed by Victor Louis:

'his masterpiece, the Grand-Théâtre in Bordeaux  the largest theatre in pre-Revolutionary France. With its impressive colonnade of 12 huge Corinthian columns and its elegant Neoclassical vestibule and symmetrical staircase lit by a glass dome, this building became the model for subsequent French theatre buildings and was the prototype for Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House.'  (Wikipedia).

The theatre was a bit run-down in those days and would much later be restored to its former glory. The musical programme was even more run down. First impressions were deceptive. On a big poster outside the theatre were it seemed to me the names of some of the greatest singers of the day such as Maria Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, Tito Gobbi, Boris Christoff etc. I'm not sure exactly these were the names but you get the picture. One by one the names somehow failed to materialise. I remember them being substituted by singers you had never heard of and who were uniformly execrable: 'Mme Callas ne peut pas chanter. Elle est remplacee par Michelle Le Bris.' That sort of thing. There was even the occasion when a telegram was pinned over the ticket office reading;

'Ne peux pas chanter a cause de maladie' and signed Tony Poncet who was one of the better French tenors of the day. I assume the glittering names on the season poster had been put there possibly following some tentative approaches without any actual contractual steps. A sort of wish-list.

On my very first visit to the theatre, there was a spectacle more interesting than the performance itself. I had bought a seat in a box. In front of me were a very young couple wearing what looked to be their Sunday best. They were obviously on a date but behaved with the utmost decorum not least because they were accompanied by a much older woman who was clearly not related to them but nonetheless seemed to be somehow in charge. I then formed the conclusion that this must be a chaperone. there was no other explanation. I thought to myself that all this had a whiff of a bygone age.

A whiff of a bygone age, a very provincial and mediocre one also pervaded the musical and production standards. 

The actual standard of the orchestra didn't seem totally inadequate but the conductors were really poor. The musical director was one Jacques Pernoo and the resident conductor the truly awful Robert Herbay. Of the guests I remember one name, Richard Kraus. Reading his 'Lebenslauf' I see he had a reasonable career including a position at the Deutsche Oper Berlin and even a 'Hollaender' at Bayreuth but even he couldn't make an impression with the Bordeaux company. 

On stage things were terribly old-fshioned in a bad way. The chorus used to stand around in SATB formation and acting consisted of gesticulation with each man to himself or herself literally waving their arms around. As for the soloists, they were pretty terrible such as the tenor Angelo Loforese or has-beens at the end of their careers. I remember Teresa Stich-Randall as Violetta lurching about the stage as if intoxicated. Maybe this was part of her portrayal of Violetta? She was however unable to reach her notes without the most extreme facial contorsions. This was a pity because she has been a very beautiful woman with a voice to match. Toscanini said she was 'the find of the century' and engaged her to sing Nanetta in his recording of 'Falstaff' which she did very beautifully.

The nadir came during a performance of 'Aida' when during the Nile Scene with somebody's cleaning woman singing Aida, a man dressed in a greay suit walked across the back of the stage, realised about two-thirds of the way over that he was in full view of the audience and so promply turned round and walked back the way he had came.

Roger Lalande was the head of the Bordeaux opera in those days. He was apparently a producer. His claim to fame seems to have been the introduction of 'Peter Grimes' to France at the Strasbourg Opera in 1948.