Opéra de Vichy

The Opéra de Vichy is an opera house located in the French city of Vichy. The building, designed in an Art Nouveau style is located adjacent to the Parc des Sources and across the street from the former Hôtel des Ambassadeurs.

The Vichy Opera offers year-round programming: the Saison (September to May) presents a multidisciplinary program: theatre, dance, opera, comedy, concerts, etc. Since 2018, a summer program in July and August with lyrical, symphonic, jazz, dance, pop rock and world music sounds takes place.

Since October 2017, Martin Kubich has been Director of Culture for the city of Vichy and of Vichy Culture, which brings together the opera, the Vichy cultural center and the exhibitions department; he thus takes over from Diane Polya-Zeitline.

History
The first casino was built at the request of Napoleon III from 1864 to 1865 by the architect Charles Badger, architect of the Compagnie fermière de Vichy. It was inaugurated on July 2, 1865. It then had a theatre hall. But its old-fashioned appearance and the inadequacy of the services it could offer meant that it was extended at the beginning of the 20th century, to the location of the bandstand of 1866, which was moved to the Place de la République (which would be destroyed in 1935 for the construction of the Post Office). The old theatre was then converted into a games room (now transformed into the large auditorium of the Palais des Congrès).

Aïda, by Giuseppe Verdi, was the first opera given at the inauguration of the theatre. First inaugurated on June 2, 1901, the entirety of this building would not be inaugurated until March 31, 1903, after the completion of the interior decorations of the opera, with the support of French architects Charles Le Cœur and Belgian Lucien Woog.

The hall, in Art Nouveau style, has a capacity of 1,482 seats with a stage measuring 11 x 9 metres long and 15 metres deep. It was then the largest hall in France after the Opéra Garnier.

It was decorated by the Polish painter Léon Rudnicki. The vault of the dome of the dome is decorated with the faces of artists: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Coquelin, Cléo de Mérode, Jean Mounet-Sully. The ironwork, the three doors, balustrades and banisters are by Émile Robert. The masks are by the sculptor Pierre Seguin.

The building was listed as a historic monument on August 13, 1991, in particular for the entrance hall and the large gallery, and listed on March 18, 1996, for the theater hall with the galleries and the vestibule, the rooms and the ambulatories of the old games room. This monument is the only “Art Nouveau” style theater in France.

Vichy was known between 1901 and 1964 as the “summer capital of music”. By the 1930s, more than 90 performances were given each summer. In July 1940, after the French defeat at the start of the Second World War, the Pétain government moved to Vichy and the opera house was the scene of the vote of full powers to Marshal Pétain by the parliamentarians, inaugurating the collaborationist regime.

In the second half of the 20th century, in addition to the decline of hydrotherapy and therefore of visitors, the activity of the opera would also decline, with the disappearance of the orchestras and troupes in residence.

A fire ravaged the opera in 1986. The city of Vichy acquired the building the following year and restored it in 1995, taking advantage of the work to install heating in the opera and thus allow a winter season to open.