He wanted to pay homage to the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The stage curtain, painted by the Franco-Russian master Marc Chagall, to immortalize the first performance of The Magic Flute at the Met Opera in New York in 1967, has just been sold by the Bonhams house, € 837,000, more than twice its initial estimate.
Decorator inspired as were Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Marc Chagall accepted in 1964 the proposal of the director of the Metropolitan Opera, Sir Rudolf Bing, to realize the scenic setting of the famous Masonic opera of Mozart, chosen to enter the history this new Met at Lincoln Center which had been inaugurated a few months earlier.
Frescoes for history
Chagall (1887 -1985), who was already 77 years old at the start of this monumental work, took three years to finish it. Like the parties organized by Leonardo da Vinci, helped by the scenographer Vladimir Odinokov, he designed no less than 120 costumes, 26 accessories and some 13 sets including this flamboyant purple curtain, 20 meters high and 12 meters wide.
Fascinated by lyrical art and its greatest masters, Chagall dedicated works to his passion from the 1940s. Stage sets, stage clothes, he first magnified ballets. Daphnis et Chloe by Ravel and fire Bird de Stravinsky will have the gift of letting his genius run.
Then we know, it is André Malraux, who also in 1964, offered to paint the ceiling of the great hall of the Opéra-Garnier in Paris. And of course, in his homage the master, before New York, did not forget, among 14 other praises to the great composers, the couch Wolfgang Amadeus.
Successor of Michelangelo, who had painted the fresco in the Sistine Chapel for eternity, Marc Chagall, realizing that he too was entering fully into the history of painting, declared, almost moved: “There is nothing on Earth that comes close to these two perfections that are “The Magic Flute” and “the Bible”.»
Marc Chagall presents his work in French at the Met Opera
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