The Night Degas Put the Ballerinas in the Back Row

Picture Paris in the late 1860s: velvet boxes, diamonded patrons, ballerinas floating like chandeliers. And then an unknown painter plants his easel where no one is looking—down in the orchestra pit.

Why risk it? Because reputation was on the line. Degas was switching gears, ditching history painting for modern life, and the Opéra was the city’s most ruthless stage: art, money, and gossip in a single address.¹ If he chose wrong, he’d stay a nobody.

He also had a personal stake. The man gripping that diagonal bassoon is Désiré Dihau—a real friend, a working musician whose salary depended on staying visible to an audience that never looked his way.^[2][3] Degas knew the rules of this house, and he was about to break them on canvas.

He crowded the frame with black jackets, cropped the ballerinas to tutus and shins, and let a double bass loom like a mast. He lit the musicians with footlights, not spotlight. For a painter chasing legitimacy, this was a dare to the public eye: stop applauding glitter and look at the work.

When the painting hit the Salon of 1870, it wasn’t the dreamy spectacle audiences expected.^[2] It was a social map. The pit—traditionally the lowest place in the room—took the high ground. Somewhere up there the stars danced, but here, at eye level, men labored in sync, faces intent, cheeks pinched around reeds. The glamour is literally out of frame.

And here’s the twist: the picture that feels like a dancer scene began as a portrait commission in disguise. Dihau stands center, anchored by his bassoon; Degas built a whole world around a friend’s profession, making the orchestra the subject and the stage a rumor.^[2][3]

“Degas flips the theater’s hierarchy… turning backstage labor into the subject and spectacle into a fragment.”Painting Meanings

That move wasn’t just aesthetic. It bought Degas access. Thanks to allies within the Opéra—composers, librettists, musicians—he secured those coveted backstage and rehearsal passes that would fuel decades of work.^1[5] He wasn’t peeking from a ticketed seat; he was embedded.

By the time critics started calling him the painter of dancers, Degas was already bristling.

“People call me the painter of dancers.”^[4]

He knew the line was a trap. The Opera Orchestra shows why. He isn’t worshipping swan-neck mystique; he’s diagramming a machine built of bodies and money. The diagonal bassoon that slices the canvas? It’s a visual lever that pries open the illusion and tilts the audience toward labor. The cropped tutus? A cold editorial cut: celebrity as scenery.

This is why the Opéra obsessed him “throughout his career,” as curators like to say: it was Paris in miniature—stagecraft, class, desire, discipline—everything modern about the city under one roof.^1[5] In 1868–69 he found the angle that would let him tell it straight. He centered the workers and forced the spectacle to orbit them.

A century and a half later, the painting still corrects the feed. We scroll for stars; Degas reroutes the algorithm to the pit. What looks like a detour from ballet is the origin story of his myth and the rebuttal to it, in one stroke.

He made the pit the star. The rest is noise.

¹ Musée d’Orsay — Degas at the Opera: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/whats-on/exhibitions/presentation/degas-opera

^[2] RMN–Grand Palais / L’Histoire par l’image — L’orchestre de l’Opéra: https://histoire-image.org/etudes/orchestre-opera

^[3] Google Arts & Culture — The Orchestra at the Opera (Musée d’Orsay/RMN): https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-orchestra-at-the-opera/zgGLjRgFDFBXbA

^[4] The Met Heilbrunn Timeline — Edgar Degas: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/dgsp/hd_dgsp.htm

^[5] National Gallery of Art — Degas at the Opéra (exhibition): https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/degas-opera