Letter from the Chorus of the Opéra to the Author

Summary

Cher maître,

You have dedicated a book (Evenings with the Orchestra) “to your good friends the artists of X***, a civilised city”. This city, which we understand to be in Germany, is probably no more civilised than many others, despite the mischievous intent which led you to call it that. We take leave to doubt that its artists are any better than those of Paris, and their affection for you couldn’t possibly be as lively or long-standing as ours. The choruses of Paris as a whole, and of the Opéra in particular, are devoted to you body and soul: they’ve proved it many times and in many ways. Have they ever grumbled at the length of your rehearsals or your insistence on musical perfection, or at your violent interjections—outbursts of fury, even— when they struggle to master the Requiem, the Te Deum, Romeo and Juliet, The Damnation of Faust, The Childhood of Christ, etc.? Never, absolutely never! On the contrary, they’ve always gone about their work with zeal and unfailing patience. Yet your own behaviour at those awful rehearsals is hardly gracious towards the men nor gallant towards the ladies.

When it’s almost time to start, if the entire chorus isn’t all present and correct—if even one person is missing—you pace around the piano like a lion in its cage at the zoo, growling through your teeth and chewing your lower lip, with glaring yellow eyes. If someone greets you, you turn your head away. Every now and again you violently bang out dissonant chords on the keyboard, revealing your inner rage and making it clear you would be quite capable of tearing latecomers and absentees limb from limb … if they were there.

Then you’re forever reproaching us for not singing quietly enough in piano passages and not attacking fortes together; you insist that we pronounce both s’s in angoisse and the second r in traître. And if even a single poorly trained wretch has strayed into our ranks and, forgetting your lecture on grammar, persists in singing angoise or traite, you take it out on everyone and heap cruel wisecracks on us all, calling us lackeys, scullerymaids and other such things! Well, we put up with that too, and we love you all the same, because we know you love us and we realise how much you adore music.