The Musicians Came Out of the Pit. On Sunday Night the Paris Opera's Players Gave the First Concert of an Orchestra They Run.

The musicians of the Paris Opera spend their working lives below the level of the stage, playing for singers and dancers the audience is watching instead of them. On Sunday evening, 6 September, the musicians of Philopéra, which 116 of the house's 174 players have joined, walked up onto the stage of the Palais Garnier and played Schubert's Third Symphony and Mahler's First, under a conductor they had chosen themselves, for an orchestra they run.

The orchestra is called Philopéra, and its own slogan is the whole story in ten: Les musiciens de la fosse d'orchestre montent sur la scène. In the association's own English, "Musicians step out of the pit and onto the stage."

The document

From the orchestra's own site, and from the French press that has followed it since June.

It does not replace anything. The Opéra national de Paris still has its orchestra, and these are the same players; Philopéra is a second life for them, played around the opera house's schedule, on a programme the association says is deliberately separate from the opera house's.

What they have actually built

Read the four aims on the association's own site and the ambition is larger than a symphony series.

The first is symphonic concerts, with "works and conductors chosen by the musicians" and "a programme separate from that of the Opera". The second is chamber music, in ensembles the players form themselves, "at festivals, cultural venues and unusual locations". The third is what the site calls cultural activities: masterclasses, educational projects, and "reaching out to marginalised groups". The fourth is heritage and influence: "rare repertoire and little-known works", "celebrating French music", and concerts in France and abroad.

It reads as a full artistic policy, and it is published by the players themselves. Their stated commitments include one line that reads oddly in a list of artistic aims: "Cultivating a sense of community to strengthen the cohesion of the orchestra."

Étienne Tavitian, the violist who chairs it, told Classica's Philippe Venturini in August what had driven it. "Les musiciens avouaient une petite frustration depuis quelques années," he said: the musicians had been admitting to a small frustration over some years. Since the end of 2023, he went on, there had been simmering "l'envie de prendre le destin de l'orchestre en main de façon à pouvoir choisir les chefs à inviter et les programmes de concert", the desire to take the orchestra's destiny into their own hands so as to be able to choose the conductors to invite and the concert programmes.

The model they are copying, and how old it is

Philopéra names its three models on its own site.

The Vienna Philharmonic has been governed by its own members since 1842, when, as the orchestra puts it, "the organizational form chosen for this new enterprise was democracy". Its statutes admit only members of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra, after three years in the pit; the Philharmonic is what those players do as themselves.

The closest precedent is arguably Milan. The Filarmonica della Scala was founded in 1982 by Claudio Abbado together with the musicians of La Scala, on the Vienna model, precisely so that an opera orchestra could build a symphonic life of its own. Its members must be La Scala players, and its board, ten musicians and seven outside advisers from Milanese business and cultural life, appoints the president and the artistic director. Abbado conducted it first; Riccardo Muti was chief conductor from 1987 to 2005, the first to hold a title; Bernstein, Giulini, Sinopoli, Barenboim, Chailly, Gatti, Luisi and Myung-Whun Chung have all stood in front of it.

So Paris in 2026 is doing what Milan did in 1982 and what Vienna did in 1842, and all three grew out of the same situation: an opera orchestra of first-rate players who spend their careers in a pit. The news is not that the idea is new. The news is that in France it is.

The second half is ours

Three things in this story are worth doing arithmetic on.

The scale of the vote of confidence. One hundred and sixteen of 174 is not a faction. It is exactly two-thirds of a national opera orchestra signing up to run something in their own time, and it took just over sixteen months to assemble, from the association's declaration at the Préfecture de police on 29 April 2025 to a first concert in September 2026, longer still if you date it from the wish Tavitian says was already simmering at the end of 2023. Classica puts the numbers differently, at around 120 of a body of more than 160, which would be nearer three-quarters. The two counts do not reconcile, and Philopéra and the opera house are the sources for their own figures; what is not ambiguous on either count is that a clear majority of the orchestra has signed up.

What it costs the players. This part gets less attention than the programme. Tavitian told Classica the association had to find patrons to get the project off the ground, and that the symphonic musicians are paid per service, which he says covers the rehearsal as well as the concert, while chamber players take a fixed fee per concert. That is not a salary and it is not the day job. These are players with a full opera and ballet schedule, who have decided to build a second orchestra on top of it and to be paid by the service for it. On this model, a good deal of the artistic freedom is bought with the musicians' own time.

The fortnight it happened in. Cadenza has now reported three separate cases of orchestral musicians acquiring a say in things that boards normally decide. In Warsaw, a Polish magazine reported that every player backed the orchestra's new artistic director, which is a sentence Cadenza could not find in any other appointment announcement this season. In Boston, the players ratified a contract in August that their committee chair says "guarantees the musicians a critically enhanced role in the engagement of titled conductors, including the music director", after voting unanimously to authorise the first strike in the orchestra's history. And in Paris, two-thirds of an opera orchestra has incorporated itself and hired its own conductor.

Three cases reported in a week is a coincidence of Cadenza's own timing rather than proof of a movement, since the Boston contract was signed a fortnight before Paris played, and it would be overreaching to call it one. But the three are answers to the same question, asked in three languages, and the question is who gets to decide what an orchestra plays and who stands in front of it. In Warsaw the answer arrived through a search. In Boston it took a strike authorisation and a signed contract. In Paris the musicians stopped asking and set up an association.

If you want to hear it

The opening concert was recorded by Radio Classique and filmed for Mezzo and medici.tv, so the performance is due to be watchable rather than merely reported. Philopéra's own site carries the concert and ticketing information at philopera.paris, and the association has so far named six of its players there, beginning with Tavitian: the double bassists Lorraine Campet and Amandine Dehant, the cellist Tatjana Uhde, the violist Pierre-Antoine Codron and the violinist Charlotte Chahuneau.

The programme to watch for is the fourth aim rather than the first. Plenty of orchestras play Mahler. An orchestra whose players have put "rare repertoire and little-known works" and "celebrating French music" among the four aims they publish as their own, and who answer to their own general meeting about it, is a different proposition, which is why the second season may tell you more than the first.

Every player in it won a Paris Opera audition first. Cadenza carries the current orchestral vacancies, free to musicians, on its jobs board.

The Opéra national de Paris has its own succession under way: Semyon Bychkov becomes the house's music director in 2028, having been designated from August this year. Philopéra's musicians, meanwhile, will keep choosing their own conductors, on a programme they say is deliberately separate from the opera house's. For now the two arrangements sit alongside each other without difficulty. The question Paris has set, and the one Milan and Vienna answered long ago in their own ways, is what happens the first time the players' choice and the house's choice are not the same person.

Sources: Philopéra, the association's own site; The Violin Channel, 1 July 2026; ResMusica, 29 June 2026; Crescendo Magazine, 22 June 2026; Classica, Philippe Venturini, 28 August 2026; Moto Perpetuo, 30 June 2026; Slipped Disc, 7 September 2026; Opéra national de Paris, the orchestra; Filarmonica della Scala, history; Vienna Philharmonic, Tradition; Journal officiel des associations, RNA W751279071; GBH, 25 August 2026; The Boston Globe, 22 August 2026.

Cover photograph: The auditorium of the Palais Garnier in Paris, where Philopéra gave its first concert on 6 September 2026. Joe deSousa, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.