Cirque d'Été
The Cirque d'Été (French pronunciation: [siʁk dete], Summer Circus), a former Parisian equestrian theatre (and a type of indoor hippodrome), was built in 1841[1] to designs by the architect Jacques Hittorff.
[8] In 1836 Louis Dejean, the owner of the Cirque Olympique on the boulevard du Temple, obtained an additional license for a summer tent-circus at the Carré Marigny on the Champs-Élysées.
The ceiling was decorated with compartments enclosing equestrian figures, and a chandelier with 130 gas jets hung over the center of the performance ring, which was surrounded by sixteen rows of seats.
"[11] The director of the theatre, a man by the name of Gallois, soon installed heating, and, being aware of the great success of the monster concert presented by Hector Berlioz at the nearby Festival de l'Industrie during the summer of 1844, engaged the composer for a series of six grand concerts to be presented at the Cirque that winter on Sunday afternoons, a day when no competing ones would be given at the Paris Conservatoire.
[12] The first concert on 19 January 1845 included Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto with Charles Hallé as the piano soloist, excerpts from Gluck's operas Alceste and Orphée, as well as works by Berlioz, including the overture Le carnaval romain, La tour de Nice (the original version of the overture Le corsaire), and the "Dies irae" and "Tuba mirum" from his requiem mass, the Grande Messe des morts.
The program included Félicien David's symphonic ode Le désert, the Austrian "lion-pianist" Léopold de Meyer playing his Marche marocaine, Op.
The finale from Berlioz's dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette had a Russian bass singing the role of Friar Laurence.
The concert also included L'invitation à la valse, Berlioz's orchestration of Carl Maria von Weber's piano piece Invitation to the Dance (which Berlioz had inserted as part of the ballet in his edition of Weber's opera Der Freischütz prepared for a production at the Paris Opera in 1841).
[4] The fourth program on 6 April was billed as a séance Berlioz and included the overture from Weber's Freischütz, excerpts from Berlioz's symphonies Harold en Italie and Roméo et Juliette, and Quasimodo's aria with chorus from Louise Bertin's opera La Esmeralda sung by the tenor Jean-Étienne-Auguste Massol, who had created the role at the Paris Opera in 1836.
The takings of the four concerts, for which we had engaged five hundred performers, were inevitably insufficient to cover all the cost of such huge forces.
This time the sound reverberated so slowly in that heart-breaking rotunda that compositions of any complexity gave rise to the most horrid confusions of harmony.
