March 11
Arabian opera nights
John Allison on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Baghdad opera house
Architecture and opera came together at the end—and in the aftermath—of Frank Lloyd Wright’s career, but not in the manner that America’s most famous architect might have envisaged. Nor in the way, he might have been surprised to learn, that most operatically-inclined people remember him now. His final masterpiece, the spiralling, seashell-inspired Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, stands on New York’s Upper East Side, a short flit across Central Park from where the Metropolitan Opera would move in 1966, seven years after the architect’s death—another landmark building, but very different to the sort of opera house that occupied Wright during his final years. And though few architects actually make it into an opera, that happened in 1993 when Daron Hagen’s Shining Brow (premiered by Madison Opera and since revived in several places) revisited the personal turmoil of an earlier phase in Wright’s life—his estrangement from the first of his three wives, relationship with Mamah Cheney and the notorious circumstances of her death in an arsonist’s fire at Taliesin.
Wright’s only New York building was completed shortly after his death in 1959, the culmination of a 16-year project, but during 1957 and ’58 he was more concerned with something that might have become his magnum opus: beginning with a commission for an opera house in Baghdad, he developed a far-reaching ‘Plan for Greater Baghdad’, a scheme largely forgotten now but perhaps of extra interest today in the light of recent events. Compared with Wright’s quintessential ‘Prairie style’—extended low buildings, gently sloping roofs, suppressed chimneys, natural materials—familiar from many of his 350-plus houses, the Baghdad plans were exotic and on a huge scale. Yet their positively holistic level of integration was nothing new for Wright, who from the time he began working so intensively in Chicago’s Oak Park suburb in the early 1900s had been interested in community planning. Another more specific precedent was the Imperial Hotel ensemble he completed in Tokyo in 1922.
In stark and tragic contrast to today’s Republican-New Labour Baghdad project, it is sobering to recall how many great western architects worked during the 1950s in what was then still a new country (King Faisal I having been installed by the British only in 1921). Apart from Wright, the list included Gio Ponti, Alvar Aalto (his art museum was never realized), Walter Gropius (Baghdad University) and Le Corbusier (whose sports hall eventually became the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium). Wright arrived in Baghdad for a visit in May 1957, just one month short of his 90th birthday, and was fêted. After two audiences with King Faisal II, he left with permission to build not only the originally proposed opera house but to incorporate it into development of a vast site in the middle of the Tigris River. Previously known as Pig Island, the uninhabited area was, Wright believed, the site of the Garden of Eden, and he renamed it…
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