Down in the lobby bar, where French opera poured from the sound system, we nursed cups of coffee and nibbled on croissants as we sought to preserve our Left Bank fantasy a bit longer.
"There are tables upstairs in the banqueting room, and just yesterday we chose to open up the opera bar, a small room where you sit up to 80 people".
The "Falstaff" autograph contains three sketches for the first 30 bars of the opera.
In the lull before the after-opera bar rush, the staff eats pasta concocted out of whatever didn't sell at dinner.
Overlapping melodies flow for dozens of bars; humming the opera is tough.In fact, the music was so unusual that, at first, musicians struggled to play it, says Laurence Dreyfus of Oxford University.
The second coup arrives during the final bars of the opera, as Alexei's long-drawn-out dissolution at the gambling tables is compressed into the single line "Red came up twenty times in a row!" The granitic closing chords are damaged versions of major triads, with extra tones fixed to them, like barnacles on the back of a beached whale.
But while the scene onstage closely resembled a Cultural Revolution-era performance, the audience members -- mostly middle-aged and stylishly dressed, casually taking cell-phone calls, slurping Cokes and licking ice cream bars as the opera proceeded -- were decidedly Shanghai 2000.
In one work, he uses a complex mathematical formula to re-sequence several bars of the opera, then repeats them in such a way that a full performance would take 39 billion years.
According to a letter he wrote to Edith Sitwell on 14 December, "the final bars of the opera [were] punctuated by hammer-blows" from workmen busy at the Red House.
Rudolf offers the following instructions on the first bar of Weber's opera "Der Freischütz," in which the orchestra enters on a soft C and rumbles toward a forte on the same note, one octave higher: "If the forearm has sufficient intensity and the facial expression is convincing, you can indicate the crescendo... with small baton gestures, even without using the left hand".
Maybe indulge in some pre-drinking before your Parsifal, though: opera house bars are not bargainous.
