La Traviata

Benoît Jacquot confessed in 2014 “When I was asked to direct La Traviata, which is above all a literary and cinematic work, I immediately and instinctively thought of Manet,”. Just like Verdi’s heroine, the subject of Manet’s painting Olympia, is a “fallen woman”, a woman of loose morals. The work created a scandal when first shown because of the way it is lit from the front, as if the spectator were illuminating the painting himself to reveal the subject’s flesh in all its triumphant beauty. The director of the opera paid homage to the painter by hanging Olympia majestically over Violetta’s bed in the first act. A copy or the original? Rather than attempting to spirit a masterpiece out of the Musée d’Orsay, one of the Paris Opera painters took up the challenge and reproduced Manet’s celebrated portrait of a courtesan.

Thierry Desserprit is a scenery painter and set decorator at the Paris Opera. He was trained at a school of decorative painting where he learned the techniques of trompe-l'œil and patinas, in short, all the techniques used in creating the illusion of reality in a décor. He gradually specialised in theatre décor, in which a particular technique known as “Italian painting” is practised. This consists in painting on large canvasses stretched out on the floor, standing and walking on them as you work. Over the years he went from workshop to workshop, of which there were many in Paris at the time, and gained considerable experience, then joined the Painting Workshop at Opera Bastille about twenty years ago.

“In the Painting Workshop, some people work more on “environments”, that is, three dimensional sets. I work essentially on canvas backdrops. There are six permanent painters and we employ temporary staff if the production requires them. The teams working on the backdrops are small because you can’t have that many people working on the same canvas and there has to be a symbiosis between the painters. Sometimes we paint smaller items and accessories. In that situation, the painter works on his own, as was the case for the reproduction of Manet’s Olympia which was hung over Violetta’s bed in La Traviata. Before that, I’d been overseeing the trompe-l'œil work for the set, for example, the fake marble for the staircase in the second act, a replica of the grand staircase in the Palais Garnier.