The Fantôme simply threw himself towards the frame and disappeared between the strips, which shimmered briefly, and then were still. The mirror on stage had been created with vertical strips of reflective mylar in a huge gilt frame. In another scene, the Fantôme vanishes into a mirror. As the chandelier started to fall, the curtain swung shut, so one heard only the crash as it landed and saw the pandemonium among the frightened dancers on stage as they tried to figure out what had just happened. The dancers performed facing this curtain, with their backs to the real audience. That is, the back of the real stage showed the reverse side of a huge curtain, with an audience dimly suggested beyond it and a chandelier visible near the ceiling. The story unfolds in twelve scenes, for which the set designer recreated parts of the building on stage – from the domed roof with its statues and the grand foyer with its staircases to the backstage areas ( coulisses) and the underground lake ( la cuve).įor the scene in which the chandelier crashes into the orchestra pit in the middle of a performance, the stage was recreated back to front. I remember so many details, even after all these years. Roland Petit’s version, with music by Marcel Landowski, was darker and spookier, with no trace of sentimentality, and the staging was extraordinary. This was well before Andrew Lloyd Webber got his hands on Gaston Leroux’s story and turned it into a cliché. Appropriately enough, it was his take on Le fantôme de l’Opéra.
I think of Roland Petit whenever I catch sight of the Paris Opéra, because the first performance I ever attended in that building was one of his ballets. The most accessible version (though not necessarily the best) is the opening scene of the film White Nights with Mikhail Baryishnikov.* Take a look. If you want to see all five elements in one short sequence, just watch the six-minute YouTube video of Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (Death and the Young Man), based on a story by Jean Cocteau using music by J.S. His best-known works were not the pretty-pretty ballets of fairies and swans in white fluffy tutus, but human dramas of passion, violence, elation, despair, and sex. On July 10, 2011, the world of dance lost Roland Petit, a brilliant and original French choreographer.
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