And we all thought Angela was the difficult one. With less than a week before the premiere of Gounod's Faust at the Opera Bastille, conductor Alain Lombard has walked out following 'differences' with the titular hero, Roberto Alagna.
The testy septuagenarian attacked the tenor for delaying rehearsals with his repeated late arrivals. Alagna, for his part, disagreed with Lombard's aesthetic demands, and refused to comply with them.
A conductor is easier to replace at short notice than a star tenor. So when the inevitable "it's him or me" moment arrived, Paris Opera boss Nicolas Joel was left with no choice.
Lombard's replacement is the rising French-Armenian conductor, Alain Altinoglu, who arrived in Paris this morning fresh from conducting in Vienna last night.
