Reviewing the 1861 revival of Gluck's Alceste, the music critic A. Thurner made a radical suggestion: the Paris Opéra, the pinnacle of French musical culture, “must be an operatic Louvre, where Classical works—alternating with our great modern productions—would provide the invigorating energy necessary to give shape to a new generation of composers and artists.” In Thurner's scenario, the Opéra—the Académie Nationale de Musique—would serve the same cultural role as the Louvre museum, the model institution for preserving historical masterpieces. His comparison of the Opéra and the Louvre is in many ways apt. Both had origins in the ancien régime and were state-run institutions dedicated to displaying French artistic achievements. Just as important, both aimed at demonstrating, as historian Jean-Pierre Babelon points out regarding the Louvre, “the centrality of the relationship between state power and the arts.” More specifically, in the words of art historians Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, the Louvre “embodies the state and the ideology of the state … disguised in the spiritual forms of artistic genius.” Just as the Louvre was meant to house cultural treasures, the Opéra—followed closely by the Opéra-Comique, another state-subsidized theater founded with prerevolutionary origins—was the greatest stage in a nation obsessed with opera. As one early biographer of Camille Saint-Saëns wrote: