The Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires

Although I had a plan to post every Friday a new 'chapter' of my alternate futures explorations this had to be somewhat delayed; I was out of town for a week and after my return I had more pressing matters to attend to... So it might take a while to get going again; but before resuming the story, I would like to comment about the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, since it plays an important part in the story. It is one of the most renowned opera houses of the world, in par with its european counterparts, and has been visited by many first opera stars, many of whom consider a challenge to sing there, due to its superb acoustics.

There is much to wonder about the theater, things that go beyond the great musical quality of its settings: the massive building, the impressive panels made of tiny bits of stained glass, the paintings at the ceiling, some of them by renowned artists, the marble that greets the visitor almost everywhere; on a more technical side, it is also noted for housing a number of workshops that create everything needed to stage a performance: tailoring, painting, sculpting, carpenter's, make-up, photography and the like; ballet and music school... It is rare in its kind for having all of this in-house.

I was hoping to see the workshops, especially the tailoring one, which occupied a great deal of my thoughts since I was young and will be the subject of some of my musings into a different future; to my disappointment precisely these were closed to the public due to some restoration work they're undergoing; I think I should schedule another visit for a future time, when they open... but it was nevertheless worth every minute of the tour, you'll see.

The main entrance is located at the Libertad St., Nr. 611, it faces a park where sometimes the Colon Orchestra plays free concerts. The building was designed by an Italian architect named Francesco Tamburini; the construction started on May 1890 under his direction until he died next year; it continued under the direction of architect Vittorio Meano, an associate of Tamburini, who made some changes to the original design; but he, too, died long before the building was finished and was followed by the belgian Jules Dormal. All in all, the construction took about 20 years, much longer than initially intended. The full history is here (Spanish) or here in English.

Once inside, everything is really grand. There are marble sculptures lining the stairs, marble paneling the lower half of the inner walls (there are three different colors of marble), heavy velvety curtains, lamps with hundreds of light bulbs, ancient loveseats, a floor made of thousands and thousands of tiny tiles arranged manually in a semicircular pattern... The ceiling has a cupola of stained glass and there are stained glass panels on other parts of the ceiling and on the walls, as windows, all of them incredible beautiful and proof of a great artisanship, since they are made of small pieces of colored glass soldered in place by lead bars; their assembly demanded a great amount of manual work.

The performance hall has an enormous painting by Argentine artist Raúl Soldi given by him as a gift to the theater; he painted 16 canvases that were afterwards affixed at the cupola, 21 m in diameter. A picture can be found at wikipedia.

The theater also houses an original sculpture by german artist Gustav Eberlein, named "The Secret", portraying Cupid and Venus sharing a secret being told by Cupid, of incredible softness.