ABSTRACT
Among the more familiar images associated with the Paris Opéra are the ballet dancers that Edgar Dégas portrayed in his paintings, where he offered to the gaze of observers, whether inside or outside his pictures, young female bodies in white-tulle tutus, often bent in graceful or provocative poses. Grand opéra was geared toward visual splendor, and dance contributed significantly to the brilliance of the spectacle, as Charles Soullier had already remarked in 1855. Thaïs was written at a key juncture between Wagnerian and French opera, and Massenet amalgamated various strands of music-theater from the "French" operatic ballet to the Wagnerian orchestral melody in a search to create a new music-dramatic medium for contemporary opera. In Thaïs not only the ballet but also several vision scenes and symphonic interludes contributed to this complex operatic narrative of voice, image, gesture and music.
