We visited Versailles a couple weeks ago (summary: happy to have seen it but it’s too crowded and the audio guide was disappointing. It just reiterates what most people already know, nothing about how Versailles worked — who actually built it, who did the daily chores and how or where they lived…). Sadly enough the Opera was closed for renovations, so we didn’t get to see that.

 

It is apparently renovation time for musical patrimonium near Paris as our other stop, the Cité de la Musique, was half-closed for renovations until March 2009. It’s a quite well organised museum, grouping instruments around a pivotal performance of the era (Baroque Italy, Music at Versailles,…) and with a pretty good audio guide…

 

Despite part of the museum being closed we did pick the right date to visit the place, as the conservatoire next door had an “open house” so their students could be found in different parts of the museum, playing period repertoire on facsimile instruments, copies of instruments from the museum’s collection.

 

As we were trying to decide which demonstration to go to next someone very helpful from the museum wandered over to see if she could help so we ended up chatting with her for a moment. She explained some of the things they were doing during the renovations and how they would revisit the audio guide as well, and how much fun they had when they did the children’s version of the audio guide. The adult version has music examples and (quite extensive) background information on the instrument or piece being covered, but to make the guide a bit more lively they decided that rather than just reading descriptions and playing an extract they would act out different scenes. Her enthusiasm was contagious, so we did revisit part of the museum with our audio guide switched to the children’s version and indeed, it’s fun.   

 

(The image is a demonstration of a harmonium-like instrument, but one that has the ability to also switch on a harpsichord-style keyboard… the combined sound being something that sounds rather more like an early electronic instrument rather than a completely acoustic one)