At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the municipal theater of Aix settled permanently into the royal tennis hall, built in 1660. In 1756 the Duc de Villars had it remodeled, and it was decorated again in 1786. At this date it supported two troupes, one for opera and ballet, and the other for tragedy and comedy. There were also two concert societies in Aix, one functioning at the Town Hall and the other at the municipal theater …
Jean-Paul Coste, Aix-en-Provence and Its Countryside
FROM somewhere in my life I remember the smell, the feel even, of a very old jewel box lined in fat tufts with faded dusty velvet. Or perhaps it was a pincushion, set in a chased band of silver.
This seems vague, but is strong enough in my past for me to have recognized the interior of the Opera of Aix at once: it was the same feeling of dust, of elegance, that I got. I was at home there, rather like a forgotten earring or brooch caught in the frayed lining of the jewel box, or an invisible pin stuck into the fat dingy little trinket that may once have sat upon my grandmother’s dressing table.
Over the next years after my first comfortable recognition of the place, I sat everywhere I could in it, depending on how quickly I had got to the ticket office in the Parfumerie Truphème, what seats I had been able to buy for the seasonal “Gala d’Art Dramatique,” and the general state of my purse.
Once I sat in the second box, right stage, to watch the long afternoon of La Pastorale at Christmas. For a whole season I sat in the fourth row center of the second balcony, for the plays that sifted down from Paris. Once I sat front row center, first balcony, to listen to Presti and Lagoya, who had been rained out of the Cloister of St. Louis during the summer Festival. Once I left at the intermission, a variety show too loud and dull to tolerate, with a “public address system” pure torture there where the sound was so undistorted. And once I went to a political meeting which I did not quite agree with but which was exciting. A few times troupes of dancers did not turn up, and after some bored stampings and boos the thin audience left, to get back their money the next day at the Parfumerie.
The acoustics of the theater were very good, especially perhaps for orchestra, although the proportions of the small building were such that a provincial opera troupe could sound as swiftly mellow as if it were from the Métropole itself. The man who ran the downstairs bar told me that the best seat for listening to tenors was three rows under the first balcony, behind the pillar, but I never tried it. For full orchestra, which ranged from mediocre to very fine according to the available musicians from the Conservatory and “around,” I liked to sit in as near the center of the theater as I could get, or else very high.
There were two bars, both of them bleak rooms that had once been fairly elegant.
The one that looked down upon the Rue de l’Opéra had no doubt been built for the genteel occupants of the boxes and the first balcony, and was not always open. I liked the one behind the ground floor seats much better. It had sawdust on the floor, and a good smell to it, and it was run by the frail-looking man who advised me about acoustics. I always wondered how and why he knew so well. But he was too reserved to question, and I never saw him except there, between the acts.
Now and then, for something like the official balls of the Carnaval, a floor would be laid out from the stage over the pit and the seats, and surprisingly the first row of boxes would be almost at its level, with the dance bands playing at the back of the stage, against one of the familiar shabby old drops showing something like a Venetian canal or a formal park.
I went to one of the children’s costume parties, which was held an afternoon during the Carnaval, with a runway for the little Pierrettes and Mickey Mice to walk down for the judges, who sat in the panoplied Mayor’s box and kept notes. It was a touching spectacle, complete with essential tears and topplings. Already, over the sound of the bored jazzmen dressed in white trousers and bright blue jackets, there was hammering, and a general bustle for the main ball of the Carnaval that night, and baskets of confetti were being stacked in the corridors, and extra ice in sacks for the champagne, and the children sobbed in the corners and trembled with pleasure.
The best concert I ever heard in the Opera was given by the municipal orchestra in celebration of the 300th anniversary of André Campra’s birth in Aix. It was all Provençal music: Campra of course, Henri Tomasi, and then Darius Milhaud’s Le Tombeau de Mireille, and the Arlésienne Suite by Georges Bizet, but played as I had never heard them before, with solos by an old man with bagpipes from the Camargue, I think, and beautiful saxaphone-flute-harp in the Bizet, and the young boy who sometimes stayed on our floor at the Hôtel de Provence doing a long intricate kind of sonata in the Milhaud on his little drum and his tambour. I was put under a spell by it, and so was everyone in the crowded place. I have never felt more real delight come almost visibly from so many people at once.
I was very sorry Anne and Mary had not come with me, but they must study …
On looking back, it seems impossible that those two young girls managed to go so often to the theater and still keep up their schoolwork, which of course was all in French and already twice as demanding as it would have been at home in their mother tongue. Their teachers did not approve of seeing them with me so often, late at night, but they could not say that it seemed to affect the children’s work wrongly, and I myself believed that as long as they stayed healthy it was an experience that could never happen again and therefore should be seized and savored.
While we lived at the Provence we were within ten minutes’ walk of everything we wanted to see and hear, whether it was Josephine Baker doing another “farewell tour” at the Casino down past the Rotonde, or Zazie Dans le Métro at the Cézanne, the new movie house two blocks down from the Cours on the Rue Mazarine.
Up the Cours was the dingy old Rex, which showed everything from prizefights to second-run pictures, with now and then an exciting troupe of actors too poor or too late to book into the Opera … like one from Paris, most probably starving but gifted and well costumed, which gave a beautiful performance of a Greek tragedy written by Kazantzakis.
And then at the top of the Cours and past the little restaurant, and across from two noble old town-houses called Lestang-Parade and Grimaldi, was the theater, the Opera.
It was squeezed into a comparatively undistinguished block of lesser buildings, and before we left there was increasing talk of the need to build a big municipal auditorium which would do for all such present and future problems as legal congresses, international lunch club conventions, and even the Music Festival. Friends tried to quiet us by saying that such rumors had been thriving for at least one hundred of the two hundred and fifty years since the old royal tennis courts had been officially made the town’s theater, but it could not but be worrisome.
The Opera was plainly in a state of alarming if still functional disrepair, and local squabbles and scandals about responsibility (Should Monsieur Truphème act without municipal consent? Would he answer for the bills?) kept any activity at a minimum.
The theater was surprisingly clean, probably thanks to the frail barman who may well have been janitor too. The toilets were hopeless except in dreadful emergencies, and I was told that the dressing rooms were shockingly drab and ill lighted. There was of course no real ventilation at all. The gilt of the proscenium was dim and peeling. The carpeting was in tatters, and the upholstery on even the few rows of new seats in the orchestra was stained and shabby. The stairs and high stools in the boxes creaked and rattled, and the box doors banged loudly because all the padding had worn off.
But it was a little jewel box, that theater.
It had been remodeled from the tennis courts in the style of the mid-eighteenth century, like La Scala, like the Paris Opera, with tiers of boxes rising straight up its sides to right and left of the deep stage, and with three balconies curving around to meet them, steeply, facing the proscenium.
The young and limber, the students, sat mostly in the top balcony, and it needed a clear steady head to lean without dizziness over the rails, to listen and of course to flirt. The balcony below it was deeper, and the boxes were a little fatter, and it was made for the middle classes in age and station, who could stand hard uncomfortable seats at a middle price, and would take a middle view of things. The first balcony was somewhat more sumptuous, and the orchestra seats were the most comfortable, the most costly, often the best every way …
As always, the boxes were more to be seen in than to see from, and we avoided them except for La Pastorale, when the audience, dressed mostly in Provençal clothes and speaking the language of Mistral, was almost as much fun as the play. It lasted almost six hours, during at least two-thirds of which we were sure we could not stand to stay another minute, but which were unforgettable for the devout way the story was unfolded, of the birth of Jesus in a little Provençal village.
And here, partly to pamper my own amazed nostalgia, is a little of what we saw one single winter at the theater, not counting four operas given by the regional company, two or three evenings of ballet presented by my girls’ old ballet teacher, and about six other evenings of dance, one unusually good by the small American Ballet company … and of course several concerts like the one in honor of Campra:
The Choutes Sisters, by Barillet and Grèdy
The Year of the Final Exams, by José-André Lacour
The Diary of Anne Frank, by Goodrich and Hackett
Léocadia, by Jean Anouilh
Inquisition, by Diego Fabbri
Hard-Tack Inn, by Marcel Achard
The Doors Slam Shut, by Michel Fermaud
The King’s Filly, by Jean Canolle
Electra, by Jean Giraudoux
The Dressen Collection, by Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon
The Nitwit, by Jean Anouilh
Andromachus, by Jean Racine
The Tidings Brought to Mary, by P. Claudel
Rhinocérus, by Eugène Ionesco
The Prisoners of Altona, by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Ionesco was done by the Odéon-Théâtre of Paris, and Electra by the Comédie Française, and almost every play used the talents and occasionally the genius of the best actors and directors and designers in France. It was an exciting example of what touring repertory can do to keep the stage one of the great human expressions.
The Opera is said to have been made the official stage of Aix in about 1765 at the passionate request of a group of graduates of the College, who with a high percentage of the population of the snobbish little city found their greatest pleasure in amateur dramatics. In the schools it was taught, according to the dictum of André Campra himself, that opera, ballet, and tragedy would keep the body supple and light, and breed ease and “stage presence” in even the youngest thespians. Private theaters flourished in many of the Provençal country houses, as well as in town, and when the Aixois were not themselves on the boards they were cheering the performances of traveling troupes from Marseille and Avignon and Toulon, in what had for so long been the royal tennis courts.
There is still a little stone plaque in the corridor of the theater that leads up to the first balcony, stating in thin shallow letters that in 1660 this cramped building did indeed house the royal courts, and it is there that visiting actors played out their comedies and tragedies. Once I watched a real game in just such a place, on the grounds of Hampton Court Palace, and it was easy to see how the net-protected gallery for the ladies could turn into one for noble spectators of a drama, with the groundling let onto what would be the court itself, and then a kind of stage at the opposite end of the gallery for the actors. It had the accidental logic of all good public places.
By the time we got to it, the Aix Opera was still in much the form it had been given by the Due de Villars, with nineteenth-century incrustations of course, and in spite of its cramped size and its general decay, it was a strong and perhaps final proof that the town was still provincial, and passionately loyal to its own troupes and musicians as well as to the steady flow of talent from everywhere in Europe.
In the theater as in many other things, Aix seemed to be on the world’s path: Paris and Lyon to the north, for musicians and companies coming up from Rome and Barcelona and Lisbon and even Malaga and Morocco; Italy and Germany and Spain and Africa, for everything traveling south from the Métropole and even from England and Scandinavia.
At the Opera itself, the performances were most either local concerts and galas or plays from the North.
Most of the chamber music went to the Casino, an elegant and larger room with fine acoustics, and decorated with fairly uncompromising finesse in pale blue and white, with crimson velvet … as in the Vienna State Opera, I believe, and Carnegie Hall. Often in the afternoons there were somewhat elegant gatherings for fine chamber music sponsored by little groups like the Dante Alighieri Society, with duos and quatuors up from Florence, Bologna, Rome.… And once a month there was, in two performances (at six and nine) in one day, which must have been gruelling for the arts, a meeting of the Jeunesses Musicales.
When we first were in Aix, I could go into the “J.M.” with a regular ticket, because Mary was kindly accredited with needing an attendant. The next time I had to get my own card as a member auditor, since I was past thirty and she was past eight … but I was given a free and fairly good phonograph record for my dollar subscription, and it was amusing to have to show my card with the little passport picture on it when I bought tickets.
The young audience was vital, teeming, pulsating with life and curiosity: it made me feel more invisible than ever, in a good way. I usually went to the first performance, with my smaller girl, and toward the end of our stay Anne went to the later one with members of her bande.
It was lucky for us that the “J.M.” was very strong in those days, and I hope it will stay so. Its aim was to “enrich the general culture of young men and women by acquainting them with music” … and one winter, for instance, we listened to and saw the following concerts, all with erudite and witty lectures alongside:
Romance and Laughter in the French Operetta, with four soloists and piano.
The Paillard Chamber Orchestra, with twelve musicians and violin soloist.
The Beautiful History of the Dance, with four dancers and pianist.
The Jamet Quintet, with harp, violin, flute, alto and cello.
Campra and His Contemporaries, with the Provençal Ensemble and soprano.
Chopin and Schumann, Their Tone and Imagery, pianist.
Panorama of Jazz, with Claude Bolling and his group.
And besides a gala presentation of Molière’s L’Avare at the theater, for the “J.M.,” there was a fine rowdy performance, that same winter, of the Comédie de Provence’ Taming of the Shrew, and best of all there was the Comédie itself, always there in Aix.
It worked out of the Archbishop’s Palace. There was a steady titillating come-and-go, with loads of costumes being carried in, or screams and slashing sounds in the courtyard, from the rehearsals. Once Mary helped unload an old truck filled with props, when she was very little, and later Anne studied diction with the fine old coach Monsieur Rèbe. We got to know some of the young actors, at least enough to smile shyly at them across the café terrace. It was a good feeling, to have a troupe of real actors there in the town …
And of course there were concerts a few times a year in the Cathedral. They were always especially impressive, with artful lights focused on things like a great illuminated book on the edge of the pulpit, and the tapestries glowing with night color, and the altar masked. There was a worldly hum in the aisles. It would fall and then rise again with veiled excitement as the Archbishop came quietly into a seat in the side stalls, or the Mayor or an Air Force general walked toward the transept to be nearer the music, in fuller view.… It seemed like one of the rightest ways in the world for such a great prayerful structure to be kept alive, by the music that rose from the choirs and the orchestras and always from the organ with Monsieur Gay’s white head bent over the console … a double satisfaction it was.
And then there was the Festival …