... and contradictions. The fundamental problem was the work's ambiguous position: as a new grand opera appearing at a time when Parisian operatic culture was centered ever more on old masterpieces. Moreover, the new work's length (although characteristic of its genre) seemed ill suited to performance in Second Empire...

...Sarah Hibberd Grand opera's love of all-consuming spectacle is evident in its cataclysmic eruptions, explosions, and shipwrecks, its magnificent processions and ceremonies, and its breathtaking reconstructions of sublime landscapes, from Auber's La Muette de Portici (1828), through Halévy's La...