la madeleine

The concert I was trying to make on Sunday was a chamber choir performing at La Madeleine. I realized I'd never actually been in La Madeleine, so I thought this free concert would be a good opportunity. It turned out to be a small (20 person) select choir from a British college - meaning specialized high school, I believe. Anyway, I'll talk about that later.

La Madeleine is, for those who don't know, one of the newer Parisian monuments: it's a church started during Napoleon's time, but was not actually finished or consecrated until the mid 1800's. There was a lot of arguing about what the building should be, but finally it made its mark as the church for the elite who lived near l'Opera.

Looking at La Madeleine one would hardly know it's a Christian church. It's not set up in the traditional cross layout, it has no windows, but mostly it looks exactly like every Classical pagan temple you've ever seen. It is designed to fit in with the Parthenon and company, and certainly wouldn't look out of place in the neo-Classic-obsessed D.C. area. Inside it is stuffed full of Ionic columns and domes galore. What would normally be chapels look like mini-temples, and the statues of the saints are done in the neo-Classical style so they look like they could easily be Zeus or Aphrodite. The outside walls of the church are lined with statues of saints that one would never be able to recognize unless they read the names under them.

La Madeleine is quite pretty, and has amazing acoustics, but gives the overall impression of trying too hard. It is simply odd to come across this ancient Greek-inspired temple sitting in the middle of the Bouls Grands Magazins - the boulevards laid out in the 19th century to be modern and classy. It is in the same area as l'Opera and other buildings and roads of that nature. Nice, but I find it out of place. Perhaps if it were sitting next to the Pantheon I could pretend I were a snooty 17th century philosophe and marvel at the two.