Grand Théâtre

The full story

Before the Grand Théâtre, Dijon went to plays in a former real tennis court, the Barres hall on Rue du Grand-Potet, today Rue Buffon, bought by the town in 1717. Until 1817 the audience stood. Narrow and hard to evacuate, the hall was frightening: a report of 1800 recalls that a false alarm a few years earlier had blocked the corridors and that, by a miracle, no one was crushed to death. As early as 1786, a decree of the King’s Council granted the town the former convent of the Jacobin nuns for a new hall, designed by the Dijon-born architect Jacques Cellerier. But the bishop objected in 1788, then the Revolution froze everything. In 1803 the town finally chose the site of the Sainte-Chapelle.

Cellerier’s design, adopted in 1809, planned 1,256 seats, against 856 in the old hall. But the contractor, whom the town was slow to pay, stopped work as early as 1811, and Cellerier died in 1814. According to the City, work resumed in 1821: engineer Simon Vallot then changed the shape of the auditorium so that the stage could be seen better from the boxes. The columns and cornice were cut from Jura stone brought from Damparis by the canal, the capitals were carved by the Parisian Jean-Baptiste Plantar, and Ciceri, the famous decorator of the Paris Opera, supplied the sets and stage machinery. The theatre, which cost 624,559 francs, opened on 4 November 1828, the feast day of King Charles X, with a play by the Dijon poet Charles Briffaut.

Behind its portico of eight Corinthian columns, inspired by Antiquity as Empire fashion required, the stone building stretches for 61 metres. The Italian-style, U-shaped auditorium has three tiers of balconies and proscenium boxes. It has never stopped changing: galleries and boxes redesigned in 1855, electricity replacing gas in 1900, first balcony rebuilt in reinforced concrete in 1934, full renovation in 1970, with a reopening on 3 November with Rigoletto. Since 2005 it has seated 692.

Listed as a historic monument in 1975 for its façades and roofs, the theatre joined forces with the Auditorium in 2002. Their joint organisation, named Opéra de Dijon in 2008, received the Théâtre lyrique d’intérêt national (national-interest opera house) label in 2017. Since 2021 the City has been carrying out a renovation in several stages, led by heritage architect Fabien Drubigny. On Place du Théâtre, its colonnade stands next to the wing of the Musée des Beaux-Arts completed in 1856.