Reconnecting the Romantic Opera Repertoire: The Forgotten Stage Photographs of the Grand Théâtre de Gand / Forment, Bruno

Forment, Bruno, «Reconnecting the Romantic Opera Repertoire: The Forgotten Stage Photographs of the Grand Théâtre de Gand». Fontes Artis Musicae, 66,  4, (2019), pp. 336-352

Abstract
On 7 January 1888, La nature announced a new technique for the indoor photography of theatrical spectacles. Combining electric light with magnesium flash powder and flexible film, the method reduced exposure times to less than a second, thus enabling the photography of performances inside the auditorium. A welcome by-product of this innovation was the arrival of illustrated registers, with which venues could keep track of their growing collections of scenery. One such inventory, the six-volume Décors du théâtre – ville de Gand at the Ghent University Library, records the stage decorations used by Ghent’s francophone opera house, the Grand Théâtre, in the years 1900–1912., When compared with engravings and studio shots of the Parisian operas in question, the stage photographs of Ghent’s Grand Théâtre do not merely constitute a haunting, uncannily direct icono-graphic resource for the study of local performance practices at one particular moment. Analysis of the 144 photographs in corroboration with archival sources shows that the pictured sets cover a time span of eighty years (ca. 1835–1912), representing the works of Ciceri, Philastre, Cambon, Desplechin, and other renowned decorators after (unphotographed) originals at the Opéra-Salle Le Peletier. Moreover, since the sets reveal intriguing permutations of flats and drops which are now generic (e.g., forêt), then idiosyncratic (e.g., Château the Chenonceau), the photographs provide a valuable tool to understand the formation and interconnectedness of the Romantic opera repertoire as seen from the auditorium.

Other data

ISSN: 2471-156X
DOI: 10.1353/fam.2019.0036
URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/743955
Language: EN
key: RL2ZJZMH