Peduzzi, architect of stage dreams

Anyone who has visited the Musée d'Orsay remembers the moment when, at the far end of the great nave, you look down from above on the Opéra district rebuilt in miniature, next to the monumental cross-section of Charles Garnier's building. Those models, part of the museum's installation since it opened in 1986, bear the signature of Richard Peduzzi. Forty years later, for Orsay's anniversary, the French stage designer returns to the spotlight with Vertige. Richard Peduzzi à Orsay, until 17 January 2027 in the Cabinet d'architecture. Born in 1943, Peduzzi is among the figures who most profoundly renewed theatre and opera design in the second half of the 20th century, above all through his long partnership with director Patrice Chéreau, with whom he created, among other productions, the celebrated centenary Ring at Bayreuth in 1976. Over the years he also directed the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs and, from 2002 to 2008, the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici. The exhibition, curated by Clémence Raynaud and Sylvie Patry, unfolds around the two large models and brings together paintings, drawings, sketches and set models. Among them are those for Alban Berg's Lulu at the Paris Opéra (1979), contemporary with the thinking Peduzzi was then developing on the museum's spaces, and for productions that made theatre history such as Marlowe's Le Massacre à Paris (1972) and Marivaux's La Dispute (1973) at the Théâtre national populaire in Villeurbanne, as well as Mozart's Lucio Silla, presented in 1984 in Milan, Nanterre and Brussels. From his first works with Chéreau, motifs emerge that run through his entire oeuvre: endless walls, towers, ruins, abandoned places. Imaginary architectures that do not simply serve as backdrops but become active parts of the narrative, protagonists of the stage revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Alongside his works, a selection of drawings from Orsay's collections chosen with the artist, including Viollet-le-Duc's Temple of Neptune at Paestum and a study by Gustave Eiffel, reveals sources of inspiration ranging from antiquity to the industrial age.