Edgar Degas - Orchestra at the Opera Tile

The Orchestra at the Opera (L'Orchestre de l'Opéra), painted around 1870 in oil on canvas by French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. The musicians of the orchestra pit dominate the foreground, while only the lower bodies of dancers are visible on the brightly lit stage above them. Degas gives portrait-like attention to several players, especially his friend Désiré Dihau, a bassoonist at the Paris Opéra and part of the musical circle that brought Degas into the world of ballet and backstage life. To emphasize Dihau, Degas even altered the normal arrangement of the orchestra and placed the bassoon prominently in the front row. The radical cropping joins two spaces audiences normally experience separately: the working orchestra below and the performance above. This early success established a compositional idea that Degas would revisit repeatedly as the Opéra became one of the central subjects of his career.