Charade (1963)📽️Best Hitchcock Film 🎞️Hitchcock Never Made

Charade (1963)

The Best Hitchcock Film

Hitchcock Never Made.

The best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made. That’s how certain enthusiasts of American film think of Charade, Stanley Donen’s 1963 lightly comedic mystery thriller filled with international intrigue. 

Its cast list draws deeply from the era’s formidable well of cinematic icons: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy. 

Its action takes place in no less a screen-illuminating world city than Paris. 

Cary Grant   &   Audrey Hepburn

Comedy * Mystery * Romance * Thriller 

Restored and upscaled in 4K UHD from original materials, with careful use of AI, in Altea Media Studios.

🎫 🍿 📽️ 🎞️ 🍿
🇺🇸  👇 Full Movie 👇  🇫🇷

Wait.... really? A film of such seemingly high profile, made only 49 years ago? You don’t exactly come across the likes of Charade in the public domain every day. But I have an explanation, and it will surely delight those film fans who make sport of pointing out the incompetence of major studios. It seems that pre-1978 United States copyright law absolutely required you to include some sort of mark on your work indicating your intent to claim copyright at all - ©, for instance — and in Charade’s case, Universal Pictures seemed to have just sort of forgotten about it. The film thus went public domain as soon as it came out.  

Criterion’s provides a superior transfer and a wealth of cinephilic accoutrements besides, but if you want to dip into the picture right now, simply click play. An unknowable but capable Cary Grant and a Givenchy-clad Audrey Hepburn pursued through the early sixties’ City of Light for gold stolen in wartime - who, especially those on an office lunch break, could resist?

Directed by:     Stanley Donen 

Screenplay by: Peter Stone 

Music by           Henry Mancini

Based on The Unsuspecting Wife, a short story by Peter Stone. While on holiday in the French Alps, Regina "Reggie" Lampert, an expatriate American working as a simultaneous interpreter, tells her friend Sylvie that she is divorcing her husband, Charles. She also meets Peter Joshua, a charming American. On her return to Paris, she finds her apartment stripped bare. A police inspector says Charles sold off their belongings, then was murdered while leaving Paris. Their money is also missing...

👇    👇

The Criterion Collection has seen fit to give it a scholarly, respectable DVD and Blu-Ray release. 

It has inspired four remakes, including one in Bengali and one in Hindi. It director also made On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face, and Bedazzled. 

“A terrifically entertaining comedy-thriller,” critic Dave Kehr calls it, “perfectly crafted” and “a marvelous use of Paris.” All these qualities and more strongly recommend the picture, at least to my mind, and if you’d like to see it for yourself, you have only to pull it up on Archive.org.

 

 COMMENTS

1. One of my favorite films - I don't think there's one tiny substandard moment in it. Grant and Hepburn are perfect. The look on her face when he says, "It's lovely," is amazing. Not sure I've ever seen an actress do that as well.
2. This is one heck of a movie-enjoyment, right here.
3. You will be remembered as legends.
4. Cary Grant, who turned 59 during filming, was sensitive about the 25-year age difference between Audrey Hepburn (33 at the time of filming) and himself, and was uncomfortable with their romantic interplay.
5. Interestingly, Donen’s picture spans 3 genres: suspense thriller, romance and comedy.
6. If you're trying to frighten me you're doing a first rate job!
7. Is there a Mrs. Cruikshank?
8. Is Anyone Really Who They Seem To Be?
9. Romance and suspense ensue in Paris as a woman is pursued by several men who are in search of the fortune her murdered husband had stolen. Whom can she trust?
10. Thanks for uploading this classic ⚘️⚘️
11. No CGI, no explosions, no bizarre looking people, only stylish ladies and gentlemen speaking clearly in an entertaining story showing the beauty of Paris and coronated by Cary Grant's charisma and the gracefulness of Audrey Hepburn 👑 Love the classics ❤️
12. This was one of the best films ever made. Grant, Hepburn, music by Mancini, and clothes by Givenchy it doesn't get better than that!!!!
13. This movie has an all star cast and the music brings me back to the 60's.  What a thrill to see them on the screen.  Ms. Hepburn was beautiful, a wonderful actress and should have lived a longer life. I hope you enjoy the movie.
14. Incredible film! It truly has everything; plot twists, romance, funny moments. Grant and Hepburn are such a fantastic duo! Honestly cannot recommend this enough!
15. It a good old fashion movie no blood no guts  all over the screen super little movie. in fact I’m going to watch it again now

Charade = Absurd pretense intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance. An act or event that is clearly false.

🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

• RIP Cary Grant (January 18, 1904 – November 29, 1986), aged 82
• RIP Audrey Hepburn (May 4, 1929 – January 20, 1993), aged 63
  
• RIP Walter Matthau (October 1, 1920 – July 1, 2000), aged 79
• RIP James Coburn (August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002), aged 74

🎬 🎫 🍿 📽️ 🎞️ 🍿

Charade

by Stanlen Donen

👇  📽️  👇
https://youtu.be/_ECFxqPeBcM?si=6lygdA_N0bBhMAdT

he best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made. That’s how certain enthusiasts of American film think of Charade, Stanley Donen’s 1963 lightly comedic mystery thriller filled with international intrigue. Its cast list draws deeply from the era’s formidable well of cinematic icons: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy. Its action takes place in no less a screen-illuminating world city than Paris. The Criterion Collection has seen fit to give it a scholarly, respectable DVD and Blu-Ray release. It comes scored by Henry Mancini. It has inspired four remakes, including one in Bengali and one in Hindi. It director also made On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face, and Bedazzled. “A terrifically entertaining comedy-thriller,” critic Dave Kehr calls it, “perfectly crafted” and “a marvelous use of Paris.” All these qualities and more strongly recommend the picture, at least to my mind, and if you’d like to see it for yourself, you have only to pull it up on Archive.org.

Charade (1963 film)

Charade is a 1963 American romantic comedy mystery film produced and directed by Stanley Donen,  written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The cast also features Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass and Jacques Marin. It spans three genres: suspense thriller, romance and comedy.
Charade was praised by critics for its screenplay and the chemistry between Grant and Hepburn. It has been called "the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made". It was filmed on location in Paris and contains animated titles by Maurice Binder. Henry Mancini's score features the popular theme song "Charade".
In 2022, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
📽️ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charade_(1963_film)

🎬 🎫 🍿 📽️ 🎞️ 🍿

Watch Charade | Prime Video

https://www.amazon.com/Charade-Audrey-Hepburn/dp/B00170481E

🎬 🎫 🍿 📽️ 🎞️ 🍿

https://www.openculture.com/2012/09/charade.html

You can, of course, find Charade listed in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Seniors Traffic Jam 😊 Just For Laughs

A gang of seniors are headed on the way to their corner store, but they're so slow that they cause a traffic mayhem. Even the most patient driver in the world can't help but get frustrated at how long it takes them to cross the street!

Seniors Traffic Jam Prank

👴👵👴 Just For Laughs Gags 👵👴👵

👇  📺  👇

🇮🇹    🇺🇸

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Verdi 🎼 « La Traviata » 🇮🇹 Lyrics 🇺🇸

La traviata (Italian: The Fallen Woman) is an opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi set to an Italian libretto by Francesco Maria Piave. It is based on La Dame aux camélias (1852), a play by Alexandre Dumas fils, which he adapted from his own 1848 novel. The opera was originally titled Violetta, after the main character. 

It was first performed on 6 March 1853 at La Fenice opera house in Venice.  Piave and Verdi wanted to follow Dumas in giving the opera a contemporary setting, but the authorities at La Fenice insisted that it be set in the past, "c. 1700". It was not until the 1880s that the composer's and librettist's original wishes were carried out and "realistic" productions were staged. La traviata has become immensely popular and is among the most frequently performed of all operas.

Giuseppe Verdi

« La Traviata »

  🇮🇹  Lyrics  🇺🇸    👇

Verdi sees The Lady of the Camellias play

Verdi and Giuseppina Strepponi visited Paris from late 1851 and into March 1852. In February the couple attended a performance of Alexander Dumas fils's The Lady of the Camellias. As a result of this, Verdi's biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz reports, the composer immediately began to compose music for what would later become La traviata. However, Julian Budden notes that Verdi had probably read the Dumas novel some time before, and, after seeing the play and returning to Italy, "he was already setting up an ideal operatic cast for it in his mind", shown by his dealings with La Fenice.

Marina Rebeka,    Violetta Valéry (soprano)
Thomas Hampson,   Giorgio Germont (baritone)
Francesco Demuro,    Alfredo Germont (tenor)
Sharon Carty,   Flora Bervoix (mezzosoprano)
Keri-Lynn Wilson,    conductor
NDR Radiophilharmonie * Recorded at the NDR Klassik Open Air Festival, July 23rd, 2016, Maschpark Hannover Germany

Role	Premiere 6 March 1854	Voice type
Violetta Valéry	A Courtesan	Soprano
Alfredo Germont	A young provincial bourgeois	Tenor
Giorgio Germont,	Alfredo's father	Baritone
Flora Bervoix,	Violetta's friend	Mezzo-Soprano
Annina,	Violetta's maid	Soprano
Gastone de Letorières	Alfredo's friend	Tenor
Barone Douphol	Violetta's lover, a rival of Alfredo	Baritone
Marchese d'Obigny	Marchese d'Obigny	Bass
Dottore Grenvil	Dottore Grenvil	Bass
Giuseppe	Violetta's servant	Tenor

🎼 ♪ ♫  🤗  🎼 ♪ ♫

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Feeling Anxious? 🫁 Breathe On 🙏🏻 Keep Calm

Feeling Anxious?

🗣 The Way you Breathe 🫁 Could be Adding to it
     👇 📖 👇

  https://paulcpw.blogspot.com/2021/01/feeling-anxious-way-you-breathe-could.html

Breathe On 🙏🏻 Keep Calm

https://paulcpw.blogspot.com/2019/09/breathe-on-keep-calm.html

 

How Breathing

👃   &    🫁

Metabolism Are Interconnected

https://paulcpw.blogspot.com/2024/11/how-breathing-metabolism-are.htm

https://paulcpw.blogspot.com

How Breathing 🫁 & Metabolism Are Interconnected

How Breathing & Metabolism

Are Interconnected

Ruben Meerman 👃 TEDxBundaberg
 👇 📽️ 👇

Ruben shares his knowledge on how to breathe yourself thin by explaining where fat goes when you lose weight.  Ruben is better known to Aussie kids as the Surfing Scientist. 

He performed experiments on ABC television programs for more than a decade and was the first ever resident scientist on Play School. Ruben's research was published in the British Medical Journal and he is the Author of Big Fat Myths. 

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. 

Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

 

Lungs and Breathing 🫁 3D Medical Animation
This animation shows the lobes of the lungs and normal breathing.

👃 🫁

Opéra 🎼 French 🇫🇷

🇫🇷  French Opéra  🎼

Jean-Baptiste Lully  "Father of French Opera"

French Opéra  is one of Europe's most important operatic traditions, containing works by composers of the stature of Rameau, Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen. Many foreign-born composers have played a part in the French tradition as well, including Lully, Gluck, Salieri, Cherubini, Spontini, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi and Offenbach.

French opera began at the court of Louis XIV of France with Jean-Baptiste Lully's Cadmus et Hermione (1673), although there had been various experiments with the form before that, most notably Pomone by Robert Cambert. Lully and his librettist Quinault created tragédie en musique, a form in which dance music and choral writing were particularly prominent. Lully's most important successor was Rameau. After Rameau's death, the German Gluck was persuaded to produce six operas for the Parisian stage in the 1770s. They show the influence of Rameau, but simplified and with greater focus on the drama. At the same time, by the middle of the 18th century another genre was gaining popularity in France: opéra comique, in which arias alternated with spoken dialogue. By the 1820s, Gluckian influence in France had given way to a taste for the operas of Rossini. Rossini's Guillaume Tell helped found the new genre of Grand opera, a form whose most famous exponent was Giacomo Meyerbeer. Lighter opéra comique also enjoyed tremendous success in the hands of Boïeldieu, Auber, Hérold and Adam. In this climate, the operas of the French-born composer Hector Berlioz struggled to gain a hearing. Berlioz's epic masterpiece Les Troyens, the culmination of the Gluckian tradition, was not given a full performance for almost a hundred years after it was written.

Opéra  🇫🇷 Français

Click  (Corner)  to   Choose   a Video  👇   📺  👇

In the second half of the 19th century, Jacques Offenbach dominated the new genre of operetta with witty and cynical works such as Orphée aux enfers; Charles Gounod scored a massive success with Faust; and Georges Bizet composed Carmen, probably the most famous French opera of all. At the same time, the influence of Richard Wagner was felt as a challenge to the French tradition. Perhaps the most interesting response to Wagnerian influence was Claude Debussy's unique operatic masterpiece Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). Other notable 20th-century names include Ravel, Poulenc and Messiaen.

The birth of French Opéra: Lully

The first operas to be staged in France were imported from Italy, beginning with Francesco Sacrati's La finta pazza in 1645. French audiences gave them a lukewarm reception. This was partly for political reasons, since these operas were promoted by the Italian-born Cardinal Mazarin, who was then first minister during the regency of the young King Louis XIV and a deeply unpopular figure with large sections of French society. Musical considerations also played a role, since the French court already had a firmly established genre of stage music, ballet de cour, which included sung elements as well as dance and lavish spectacle. When two Italian operas, Francesco Cavalli's Xerse and Ercole amante, proved failures in Paris in 1660 and 1662, the prospects of opera flourishing in France looked remote. Yet Italian opera would stimulate the French to make their own experiments at the genre and, paradoxically, it would be an Italian-born composer, Jean-Baptiste Lully, who would found a lasting French operatic tradition.

In 1669, Pierre Perrin founded the Académie d'Opéra and, in collaboration with the composer Robert Cambert, tried his hand at composing operatic works in French. Their first effort, Pomone, appeared on stage on 3 March 1671 and was followed a year later by Les peines et plaisirs de l'amour. At this point King Louis XIV transferred the privilege of producing operas from Perrin to Jean-Baptiste Lully. Lully, a Florentine, was already the favorite musician of the king, who had assumed full royal powers in 1661 and was intent on refashioning French culture in his image. Lully had a sure instinct for knowing exactly what would satisfy the taste of his master and the French public in general. He had already composed music for extravagant court entertainments as well as for the theatre, most notably the comédies-ballets inserted into plays by Molière. Yet Molière and Lully had quarrelled bitterly and the composer found a new and more pliable collaborator in Philippe Quinault, who would write the libretti for all but two of Lully's operas. On 27 April 1673, Lully's Cadmus et Hermione – often regarded as the first French opera in the full sense of the term – appeared in Paris. It was a work in a new genre, which its creators Lully and Quinault baptised tragédie en musique, a form of opera specially adapted for French taste. Lully went on to produce tragédies en musique at the rate of at least one a year until his death in 1687 and they formed the bedrock of the French national operatic tradition for almost a century. As the name suggests, tragédie en musique was modelled on the French Classical tragedy of Corneille and Racine. Lully and Quinault replaced the confusingly elaborate Baroque plots favoured by the Italians with a much clearer five-act structure. Each of the five acts generally followed a regular pattern. An aria in which one of the protagonists expresses their inner feelings is followed by recitative mixed with short arias (petits airs) which move the action forward. Acts end with a divertissement, the most striking feature of French Baroque opera, which allowed the composer to satisfy the public's love of dance, huge choruses and gorgeous visual spectacle. The recitative, too, was adapted and moulded to the unique rhythms of the French language and was often singled out for special praise by critics, a famous example occurring in Act Two of Lully's Armide. The five acts of the main opera were preceded by an allegorical prologue, another feature Lully took from the Italians, which he generally used to sing the praises of Louis XIV. Indeed, the entire opera was often thinly disguised flattery of the French monarch, who was represented by the noble heroes drawn from Classical myth or Mediaeval romance. The tragédie en musique was a form in which all the arts, not just music, played a crucial role. Quinault's verse combined with the set designs of Carlo Vigarani or Jean Bérain and the choreography of Beauchamp and Olivet, as well as the elaborate stage effects known as the machinery. As one of its detractors, Melchior Grimm, was forced to admit: "To judge of it, it is not enough to see it on paper and read the score; one must have seen the picture on the stage".

 Gluck in Paris

Gluck in a 1775 portrait by Joseph Duplessis

While opéra comique flourished in the 1760s, serious French opera was in the doldrums. Rameau had died in 1764, leaving his last great tragédie en musique, Les Boréades unperformed. No French composer seemed capable of assuming his mantle. The answer was to import a leading figure from abroad. Christoph Willibald von Gluck, a German, was already famous for his reforms of Italian opera, which had replaced the old opera seria with a much more dramatic and direct style of music theatre, beginning with Orfeo ed Euridice in 1762. Gluck admired French opera and had absorbed the lessons of both Rameau and Rousseau. In 1765, Melchior Grimm published "Poème lyrique", an influential article for the Encyclopédie on lyric and opera librettos.^{[31][32][33][34][35]} Under the patronage of his former music pupil, Marie Antoinette, who had married the future French king Louis XVI in 1770, Gluck signed a contract for six stage works with the management of the Paris Opéra. He began with Iphigénie en Aulide (19 April 1774). The premiere sparked a huge controversy, almost a war, such as had not been seen in the city since the Querelle des Bouffons. Gluck's opponents brought the leading Italian composer, Niccolò Piccinni, to Paris to demonstrate the superiority of Neapolitan opera and the "whole town" engaged in an argument between "Gluckists" and "Piccinnists".

On 2 August 1774, the French version of Orfeo ed Euridice was performed, with the title role transposed from the castrato to the haute-contre, according to the French preference for high tenor voices which had ruled since the days of Lully. This time Gluck's work was better received by the Parisian public. Gluck went on to write a revised French version of his Alceste, as well as the new works Armide (1777), Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) and Echo et Narcisse for Paris. After the failure of the last named opera, Gluck left Paris and retired from composing. But he left behind an immense influence on French music and several other foreign composers followed his example and came to Paris to write Gluckian operas, including Salieri (Les Danaïdes, 1784) and Sacchini (Oedipe à Colone, 1786).

From the Revolution to Rossini

The French Revolution of 1789 was a cultural watershed. What was left of the old tradition of Lully and Rameau was finally swept away, to be rediscovered only in the twentieth century. The Gluckian school and opéra comique survived, but they immediately began to reflect the turbulent events around them. Established composers such as Grétry and Dalayrac were drafted in to write patriotic propaganda pieces for the new regime. A typical example is Gossec's Le triomphe de la République (1793) which celebrated the crucial Battle of Valmy the previous year. A new generation of composers appeared, led by Étienne Méhul and the Italian-born Luigi Cherubini. They applied Gluck's principles to opéra comique, giving the genre a new dramatic seriousness and musical sophistication. The stormy passions of Méhul's operas of the 1790s, such as Stratonice and Ariodant, earned their composer the title of the first musical Romantic. Cherubini's works too held a mirror to the times. Lodoiska was a "rescue opera" set in Poland, in which the imprisoned heroine is freed and her oppressor overthrown. Cherubini's masterpiece, Médée (1797), reflected the bloodshed of the Revolution only too successfully: it was always more popular abroad than in France. The lighter Les deux journées of 1800 was part of a new mood of reconciliation in the country.

Theatres had proliferated during the 1790s, but when Napoleon took power, he simplified matters by effectively reducing the number of Parisian opera houses to three. These were the Opéra (for serious operas with recitative not dialogue); the Opéra-Comique (for works with spoken dialogue in French); and the Théâtre-Italien (for imported Italian operas). All three would play a leading role over the next half-century or so. At the Opéra, Gaspare Spontini upheld the serious Gluckian tradition with La Vestale (1807) and Fernand Cortez (1809). Nevertheless, the lighter new opéra-comiques of Boieldieu and Isouard were a bigger hit with French audiences, who also flocked to the Théâtre-Italien to see traditional opera buffa and works in the newly fashionable bel canto style, especially those by Rossini, whose fame was sweeping across Europe. Rossini's influence began to pervade French opéra comique. Its presence is felt in Boieldieu's greatest success, La dame blanche (1825) as well as later works by Auber (Fra Diavolo, 1830; Le domino noir, 1837), Hérold (Zampa, 1831) and Adolphe Adam (Le postillon de Longjumeau, 1836). In 1823, the Théâtre-Italien scored an immense coup when it persuaded Rossini himself to come to Paris and take up the post of manager of the opera house. Rossini arrived to welcome worthy of a modern media celebrity. Not only did he revive the flagging fortunes of the Théâtre-Italien, but he also turned his attention to the Opéra, giving it French versions of his Italian operas and a new piece, Guillaume Tell (1829). This proved to be Rossini's final work for the stage. Ground down by the excessive workload of running a theatre and disillusioned by the failure of Tell, Rossini retired as an opera composer.

Grand Opera

Guillaume Tell might initially have been a failure but together with a work from the previous year, Auber's La muette de Portici, it ushered in a new genre which dominated the French stage for the rest of the century: grand opera. This was a style of opera characterised by grandiose scale, heroic and historical subjects, large casts, vast orchestras, richly detailed sets, sumptuous costumes, spectacular scenic effects and – this being France – a great deal of ballet music. Grand opera had already been prefigured by works such as Spontini's La vestale and Cherubini's Les Abencérages (1813), but the composer history has above all come to associate with the genre is Giacomo Meyerbeer. Like Gluck, Meyerbeer was a German who had learnt his trade composing Italian opera before arriving in Paris. His first work for the Opéra, Robert le diable (1831), was a sensation; audiences particularly thrilled to the ballet sequence in Act Three in which the ghosts of corrupted nuns rise from their graves. Robert, together with Meyerbeer's three subsequent grand operas, Les Huguenots (1836), Le prophète (1849) and L'Africaine (1865), became part of the repertoire throughout Europe for the rest of the nineteenth century and exerted an immense influence on other composers, even though the musical merit of these extravagant works was often disputed. In fact, the most famous example of French grand opera likely to be encountered in opera houses today is by Giuseppe Verdi, who wrote Don Carlos for the Paris Opéra in 1867.

Berlioz

While Meyerbeer's popularity has faded, the fortunes of another French composer of the era have risen steeply over the past few decades. Yet the operas of Hector Berlioz were failures in their day. Berlioz was a unique mixture of an innovative modernist and a backward-looking conservative. His taste in opera had been formed in the 1820s, when the works of Gluck and his followers were being pushed aside in favour of Rossinian bel canto. Though Berlioz grudgingly admired some works by Rossini, he despised what he saw as the showy effects of the Italian style and longed to return opera to the dramatic truth of Gluck. He was also a fully-fledged Romantic, keen to find new ways of musical expression. His first and only work for the Paris Opéra, Benvenuto Cellini (1838), was a notorious failure. Audiences could not understand the opera's originality and musicians found its unconventional rhythms impossible to play. Twenty years later, Berlioz began writing his operatic masterpiece Les Troyens with himself rather than audiences of the day in mind. Les Troyens was to be the culmination of the French Classical tradition of Gluck and Spontini. Predictably, it failed to make the stage, at least in its complete, four-hour form. For that, it would have to wait until the second half of the twentieth century, fulfilling the composer's prophecy, "If only I could live till I am a hundred and forty, my life would become decidedly interesting". Berlioz's third and final opera, the Shakespearean comedy Béatrice et Bénédict (1862), was written for a theatre in Germany, where audiences were far more appreciative of his musical innovation. 

The late 19th century

Berlioz was not the only one discontented with operatic life in Paris. In the 1850s, two new theatres attempted to break the monopoly of the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique on the performance of musical drama in the capital. The Théâtre Lyrique ran from 1851 to 1870. It was here in 1863 that Berlioz saw the only part of Les Troyens to be performed in his lifetime. But the Lyrique also staged the premieres of works by a rising new generation of French opera composers, led by Charles Gounod and Georges Bizet. Though not as innovative as Berlioz, these composers were receptive to new musical influences. They also liked writing operas on literary themes. Gounod's Faust (1859), based on the drama by Goethe, became an enormous worldwide success. Gounod followed it with Mireille (1864), based on the Provençal epic by Frédéric Mistral, and the Shakespeare-inspired Roméo et Juliette (1867). Bizet offered the Théâtre Lyrique Les pêcheurs de perles (1863) and La jolie fille de Perth, but his biggest triumph was written for the Opéra-Comique. Carmen (1875) is now perhaps the most famous of all French operas. Early critics and audiences, however, were shocked by its unconventional blend of romantic passion and realism.

Another figure unhappy with the Parisian operatic scene in the mid-nineteenth century was Jacques Offenbach. He found that contemporary French opéra-comiques no longer offered any room for comedy. His little theatre the Bouffes-Parisiens, established in 1855, put on short one-act pieces full of farce and satire. In 1858, Offenbach tried something more ambitious. Orphée aux enfers ("Orpheus in the Underworld") was the first work in a new genre: operetta. Orphée was both a parody of highflown Classical tragedy and a satire on contemporary society. Its incredible popularity prompted Offenbach to follow up with more operettas such as La belle Hélène (1864) and La Vie parisienne (1866) as well as the more serious Les contes d'Hoffmann (1881).

Opera flourished in late nineteenth-century Paris and many works of the period went on to gain international renown. These include Mignon (1866) and Hamlet (1868) by Ambroise Thomas; Samson et Dalila (1877, in the Opéra's new home, the Palais Garnier) by Camille Saint-Saëns; Lakmé (1883) by Léo Delibes; and Le roi d'Ys (1888) by Édouard Lalo. The most consistently successful composer of the era was Jules Massenet, who produced twenty-five operas in his characteristically suave and elegant style, including several for the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. His tragic romances Manon (1884) and Werther (1892) have weathered changes in musical fashion and are still widely performed today.

 Contents

• 1 The birth of French opera: Lully
• 2 From Lully to Rameau: new genres
• 3 Rameau
• 4 The growth of opéra comique
• 5 Gluck in Paris
• 6 From the Revolution to Rossini
• 7 Grand opera
• 8 Berlioz
• 9 The late 19th century
• 10 French Wagnerism and Debussy
• 11 The twentieth century and beyond
• 12 See also
• 13 References
  • 13.1 Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_opera

  The foyer of Charles Garnier's Opéra, Paris, opened 1875

 

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