As the newly appointed director of the Paris Opera Ballet, he joins a wave of glamorous young innovators heading up legendary arts companies, from Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Andris Nelsons at the Boston Symphony Orchestra.įrance takes its cultural life very seriously indeed. (Its unrestrained exuberance has been mimicked as far afield as Hanoi and Manaus, Brazil.) Now this storied institution is turning a new page with the arrival of the 37-year-old French dancer and choreographer Benjamin Millepied. “Why, madame,” Garnier responded artfully, “it’s Napoleon Trois!”Īlthough the Palais Garnier took fourteen years to build, and the emperor was long deposed by the time it opened in 1875, the recently installed Third Republic applauded it as a symbol of the lofty respect that the French reserve for their cultural patrimony.
“It’s not a style it’s neither Louis Quatorze nor Louis Quinze nor Louis Seize!”
“What is this?” asked Napoleon’s empress, Eugénie, testily when she was shown the design (she was said to favor the architect Viollet-le-Duc). Chosen from among plans submitted by 171 architects, his heady Renaissance pastiche defined the embellished excesses of the Beaux Arts school. Occupying more than 120,000 square feet and twelve stories (five of them belowground), this temple to opera and ballet was named for its architect, Charles Garnier. When Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to replace the rambling streets of his nation’s capital with arteries of wide, stately avenues, the centerpiece of the scheme-and its costliest building-was to be the Paris Opera House. Hair: Oribe for Oribe Hair Care Makeup: Stéphane Marais On Millepied: Doyle+Mueser three-piece suit and Church’s lace-up shoes (worn throughout). On Vodianova: Oscar de la Renta tulle dress embroidered with beads and organza flowers. It was “probably the only job that was going to bring me home,” Millepied says.
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