Pleyel grand piano – Piano à queue – number 1555
This beautiful and fully restored model, Chopin’s favorite – made by Pleyel, the leading manufacturer of the time – is a stunning symbol to me of the time when Romantic-period Paris was the center of the artistic world. I felt somehow this morning that it was the culminating high point of a new exhibit at the Petit Palais so far-reaching and comprehensive (1815-1848) that I have chosen not to show all of my pictures at one time. Maybe I’ll attempt that dizzying task in the future.
Imagine the surprise of discovering assembled for your pleasure, portraits of Pauline Viardot, Franz Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz (with several original manuscript scores such as the ‘Symphonie Fantastique’), or discovering a wonderful bronze statue of Rossini seated in disarray among his scores at the point of his sudden retirement from opera composition in 1829; a large and detailed watercolor by Viollet le Duc depicting exactly the atmosphere of a stage performance in 1835 (the year of the premiere of ‘I Puritani’) at the Tuileries palace – destroyed in 1871; a moving and unique sanguine drawing from a private collection of a funeral tomb for Bellini called ‘l’Ange de la Musique au tombeau de Bellini’ (c1839), the only remnant of a project that was constructed and then destroyed, for the tomb of the composer who died suddenly in 1835 and buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery; original posters for the Paris world premieres of ‘Guillaume Tell’ and for many plays and operas created in those heady days of theater on the boulevards of Paris; important illustrations and costume designs for the leading singers of the time; besides handsome displays of period porcelain tea sets, ladies dresswear, fabrics, wallpaper designs, and fabulous hand-made Romantic-period interior furniture; immense statues in plaster and bronze including the project for the Genie de la Bastille; the restored Delacroix masterpiece ‘Christ au jardin des Olivier,’ and an entire room dedicated to Victor Hugo’s classic novel ‘Notre Dame de Paris’ featuring breathtaking iconography, including from the period a gigantic gilded bronze clock representing the famous cathedral…
You might have guessed, the show is stupendous: immersive, instructive, beautifully curated and worthy of several revisits until it closes in September. I was lucky to have been among the first visitors, and feel the gratitude.