Marc Chagall titled his work "a coloured mirror of silks and glittering jewels". In green: the love stories: Hector Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet and Wagner's Tristan and Isolde with the Arc de Triomphe and Concord Square in the background.Īt the central circle of the dome, around the chandelier, we find Bizet's Carmen as well as works by Beethoven, Verdi, and Gluck. The blue segment is Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Mozart's The Magic Flute.Īgainst the yellow background, we see Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and Adolphe Adan's Giselle. The red segment is Stravinsky's The Firebird and Maurice Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé ballets featuring the Eiffel Tower.
The white segment is dedicated to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande opera and shows the Opéra building itself. Each segment is dedicated to a certain opera and ballet composer, featuring Chagall's favourite motifs of lovers, animals, musicians, and angels. The 220 square metre plafond consists of polyester panels which were then fixed at a height of 21 metres.Ĭhagall conventionally divided the plafond into five segments. The Minister of Culture, André Malraux, was in no doubt about his choice he had seen Chagall's set for Daphnis et Chloé and realised that Chagall was the only artist who could manage to renovate the plafond.
The Grand Opéra, covered in gold and paintings from past centuries, almost a museum piece, suddenly found a new history. Criticism, however, subsided after the opening. A Jew from Soviet Belorussia, an emigrant and a very old man - Chagall was 77 at the time - an artist with a very unclassical style of painting: all this led to various malicious gossips. Inviting Marc Chagall to do such a work was a rather brave decision that provoked much controversy. The chandelier was then switched on and everyone in the audience could see the Opéra's new plafond. The chandelier under the ceiling was doused, the entire corps de ballet came on stage and the 'Jupiter' by Mozart, Chagall's favourite composer, was performed. On 23 September 1964, more than two thousand guests came to the Paris Opéra for the unveiling of the plafond painted by Marc Chagall.
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