Held annually, the Bal des Petits Lits Blancs was a charity gala benefitting orphaned children in France. Here, a glamorous socialite waves a symbolic white bed sheet from within her opera box.
Cocorico was a magazine published between 1898 and 1902. As a literary and artistic publication, its main role was to promote the Art Nouveau movement and its primary artists included Grun, Mucha, Steinlen, de Feure, Villon and many others. In all, there were 63 issues. The name of the periodical is the French term for “cock-a-doodle-doo,” the crowing of a rooster.The light opera by Ganne bearing the same title as the well-known magazine is justly forgotten and the poster by Gruen extremely rare.
Igor Stravinsky is the Picasso of composers-every phase must have seemed bold, brash, colorful, and even revolutionary in its time. So many musicians have emulated his style subsequently that when one returns to his actual masterworks, they now seem rather familiar, quaint, and even clichéd. The Metropolitan Opera’s Stravinsky, first produced here in 1981, is a triple bill of masterpieces, each showing the composer’s rare ability to present traditional art forms in new and creative ways. Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) is a symphonic ballet while Le Rossignol (The Nightingale) is presented as balletic opera. Oedipus Rex, the most inventive of the trio, is treated as an operatic oratorio. Like great paintings hanging adjacent to each other in a museum, however, each one seems to lose a little of its luster in the presence of the others.
