Dance Class at the Opera

Degas painted this rehearsal room in 1872, in the opera house on the rue Le Peletier in Paris. He was no outsider there. A friend in the orchestra got him backstage, and he came again and again to watch dancers at the barre, a ballet master marking time with his cane, a violinist waiting by his stand. The picture is small and crowded with ordinary business, a girl resting, another fixing her costume, the tension of a lesson rather than a performance. The following year, in 1873, the whole Le Peletier building burned down one night, and the company moved into Garnier's grand new opera house across the city.