In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the French conductor Jules Pasdeloup presented orchestral concerts at the Cirque d’Hiver, in Paris—a five-thousand-seat arena that still stands, at the edge of the Marais. Pasdeloup named the series “Concerts Populaires de Musique Classique,” hoping to attract an audience beyond the upper classes. Listeners occupied benches on various sides of the orchestra, and the cheapest tickets cost seventy-five centimes—perhaps the price of a movie ticket in today’s dollars. Verlaine, Mallarmé, Zola, and Cézanne were regular patrons, joining in fiery battles over current trends, most notably over Wagner’s so-called “music of the future.” Verlaine later recalled in a poem that he had “thrown a punch / For Wagner,” and a character in Zola’s “L’Oeuvre” emerges from one fracas at the Cirque with a black eye. Others found the spectacle irretrievably vulgar. Des Esseintes, the ultra-decadent hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel “Against the Grain,” bemoans the sight of Pasdeloup “beating sauce in the air and massacring disconnected episodes of Wagner, to the immense delight of an ignorant crowd.” In an era before recordings, the conductor helped to create a mass public not only for the classics but for the most daring music of the day.
Last month, as I attended programs at the Philharmonie de Paris, the city’s costly and controversial new concert hall, I thought of Pasdeloup’s enterprise. The Philharmonie, which opened in January, is, like its nineteenth-century predecessor, a project of popularization. It joins the sprawling complex of the Parc de la Villette, which was inaugurated in the nineteen-eighties, in a deconstructivist design by Bernard Tschumi; the grounds also encompass the Paris Conservatoire and the Cité de la Musique, which houses two smaller halls. All this is in the Nineteenth Arrondissement, in the northeast of Paris, just inside the Boulevard Périphérique, which surrounds the city. The aim is to draw an audience not only from the élite neighborhoods flanking the Seine but also from the poorer suburbs. In the Grande Salle, the Philharmonie’s main auditorium, listeners are seated in the round, with podlike balconies floating above a square-shaped stage. Such “vineyard-style” arrangements have lately become de rigueur, after the example of the Philharmonie in Berlin. The effect in Paris is particularly dramatic: you feel as though you were peering down at a musical boxing ring.
The most remarkable thing about the Philharmonie, though, is its pricing. While I was in town, the hall hosted a weekend series called “Orchestres en Fête,” or “Orchestras in Celebration,” in which twelve ensembles from France and Luxembourg appeared both in the Grande Salle and at the Cité de la Musique. Most of the events charged a flat fee of twelve euros for adults, eight for children; two offered tickets in a range from ten to thirty euros (at current rates, eleven to thirty-three dollars). At the New York Philharmonic, thirty-three dollars might get you a partial-view seat in the second or third tier. The Philharmonie’s prices are possible only because the institution is publicly subsidized. It’s an expensive gamble, for if crowds fail to materialize the enterprise could be dismissed as a boondoggle. Before the opening, pessimists predicted that traditional concertgoers, accustomed to patronizing venues in the fashionable area around the Champs-Élysées, would never venture out to the Nineteenth, which used to be considered a rough neighborhood.
So far, the doubters have been proved wrong. Some fifteen thousand people attended concerts that weekend, and nine thousand more visited the campus, whether to see exhibitions or to participate in educational sessions. (The Philharmonie provides hands-on instrumental workshops for children and adults.) One afternoon, I observed hundreds of schoolkids singing along to “Carmen.” Des Esseintes might have frowned at these antics, but the classical tradition seemed, for the moment, irresistibly vital.
The Philharmonie represents a belated and incomplete fulfillment of the vision of Pierre Boulez, the radical potentate of late-twentieth-century music, who, exasperated by the conservatism and inadequacies of extant Parisian venues, dreamed of launching a “Centre Pompidou for music” in the Parc de la Villette. The complex was originally to have contained both a concert hall and an opera house; only the smaller spaces at the Cité de la Musique survived political wrangling. Finally, in the first years of this century, the idea of a large new hall gathered support, not least because Laurent Bayle, a strong-willed Boulez disciple, had assumed control of the Cité de la Musique. Jean Nouvel was chosen as the architect, embracing Bayle’s call for a bridge between city and suburbs. There were inevitable delays and cost overruns; at various times, the project seemed on the verge of collapse. Last year, Bayle boldly decided to press ahead with the opening, even though it was clear that construction would continue for a while. Nouvel, in response, boycotted the first night and accused the management of sabotage. He is also taking legal action, complaining that the building does not match his original design.
As it stands, the Philharmonie is a strange and not exactly beautiful beast. The exterior is of cast aluminum, with interlocking gray and black pieces evoking flocks of birds. Despite that Arcadian touch, it is a hulking, even menacing presence. The midsection bulges out from a rectilinear frame in twisting, tubular shapes, like the intestines of a sci-fi monster. Much of the interior lacks warmth. The lobby corridors, whose ceilings are festooned with thousands of sharp-edged metal prongs, suggest a mildly outlandish hotel in the Emirates. Three months in, much work remains to be done: a rooftop terrace and an upper-level restaurant have yet to open, and everywhere you see the building’s innards exposed. Exiting one concert, I collided with a painter who was touching up the other side of a door. I thought of the immortal scene in Jacques Tati’s film “Playtime”—a comedic critique of glass-and-steel modernity—in which a would-be-stylish night club opens prematurely and begins to collapse around a party in progress. I wonder whether the Philharmonie’s dishevelled state might be part of its initial popular appeal: perhaps, as in “Playtime,” the disarray serves to loosen everyone up.
The Grande Salle itself is more or less finished, and it sounds rather wonderful. The firm of Marshall Day, the lead acousticians, enclosed the auditorium within an interior shell, which adds reverberation without making instrumental voices indistinct. The result is an acoustic at once precise and warm. It lacks the goose-bump-inducing immediacy of the greatest halls—Symphony Hall, in Boston, or the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam—and the balances are erratic if you are sitting to the side or at the back. Still, it is undoubtedly one of the more compelling concert venues of recent decades, worthy of comparison with Disney Hall, in Los Angeles—which, to be sure, has greater visual appeal. Although it’s strange that a building designed to seduce new audiences should present such a grim, fortresslike façade, crowds have hardly been deterred: Nouvel’s monster fascinates.
“Orchestres en Fête” provided a cross-section of the modern French orchestral system, which came into being in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, when the French Ministry of Culture lavished resources on musical institutions across the country. Overlapping concert times made it impossible for me to experience everything in the series, but I heard the Orchestre National de Lyon, under Leonard Slatkin, playing Gershwin, Barber, and Ravel; the Orchestre National d’Île-de-France, participating in the “Carmen” sing-along; the Luxembourg Philharmonic, stomping through “Carmina Burana”; the Bretagne Symphony, offering a semi-improvised piece by the jazz trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf; the Orchestre National de Lille, delighting in more Bizet; the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire, playing Debussy, Pascal Dusapin, and Stravinsky; and the Orchestre d’Auvergne, with works of Mendelssohn and Osvaldo Golijov.
The halls were mostly full, even for events taking place at odd hours of the morning and afternoon. Crowds included people young and old, black and white, dressy and hipsterish. Yet the musical pickings were fairly thin. Of the regional ensembles, the Lille orchestra, which has long been under the leadership of Jean-Claude Casadesus, set the standard for style and snap; its Bizet Symphony in C bustled brilliantly. Many other groups were merely serviceable, their programs miscellaneous. The Maalouf piece, titled “Parachute,” meandered interminably.
The weekend also brought a concert by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the perennially razor-sharp new-music group, which was founded in 1976, at Boulez’s behest. It is now one of two resident ensembles at the Philharmonie, alongside the Orchestre de Paris. The program featured Luciano Berio’s “Ricorrenze,” Aureliano Cattaneo’s “Concertino,” Kryštof Mařatka’s “Exaltum,” and, most striking, Harrison Birtwistle’s “Cortege,” composed in 2007 for fourteen instrumentalists. In the last, musicians take turns walking to the center of the stage and playing jaggedly expressive solos, with cello, double bass, piano, and percussion providing a rumbling continuo. At the end, the flute takes command, calling forth final comments from the remainder of the ensemble. “Cortege” has the feeling of a modernist jazz funeral, a memorial in motion.
Only here did I feel strongly the spirit of Boulez, who marked his ninetieth birthday on March 26th. (He is in poor health, and has withdrawn from public appearances.) Back in the sixties, Boulez passionately opposed the conventional-minded agenda of the Ministry of Culture; he wanted a more sweeping scheme of reëducation, a shift away from tradition and toward new music. He is at present being honored with an exhibition at the Cité de la Musique, which celebrates his work as composer, conductor, and agitator. For the most part, though, the populism of the Philharmonie diverges from Boulez’s philosophy. In the main building, there is a show dedicated to the music and couture of David Bowie, who is alphabetically close but spiritually distant.
Sing-alongs and symphonies, Bowie and Boulez: it doesn’t quite add up to an integrated vision. Yet the incoherence may be a necessary compromise in an age where noncommercial culture must fight every day for the right to exist. The barrage of sounds at the Philharmonie is, at least, bringing in the people. Bowie may draw the biggest crowds, but Boulez does not lack for admirers. I watched a woman pass the entrance with her young daughter. “Pierre Boulez—quel génie!” she exclaimed, pointing toward Boulez’s face. “What a genius!” The firebrand is passing into history. ♦
