PARIS: Saudi Arabia will employ French expertise to set up a national opera and orchestra, under an agreement signed during a visit to Paris by the modernising Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The deal will see the Paris Opera company help Saudi Arabia produce its own classical music and shows, a further sign of Prince Mohammed’s desire to change the image of his homeland.
He has already announced the lifting of a ban on women driving, the reopening of cinemas for the first time in over three decades and new mixed-gender concerts, despite opposition from religious hardliners.
Saudi Arabia also revealed that it would enter short films at the Cannes cinema festival for the first time and send an official delegation to the celebration of often edgy and subversive silver-screen art on the Riviera next month.
“I cannot think of a better partner for culture and art than France,” the Saudi culture minister said.
Prince Mohammed, 32, was hosted by President Emmanuel Macron for a three-hour dinner at Paris’s Louvre museum on Sunday night after flying in on his first trip to France as heir to the Saudi throne.
Macron also tweeted a picture of the pair at the Louvre looking at the 19th-century masterpiece Liberty Leading The People by revolutionary painter Eugene Delacroix, which shows Liberty as a bare-breasted woman.
Hollywood and Cannes
Prince Mohammed’s visit is part of a global tour that has already seen him travel to the United States, Britain and Egypt as he seeks to project a more moderate vision of his country which is often associated in the West with exporting jihadist ideology.
Saudi and French aides stressed before the trip that cultural ties, as well as new business opportunities, would be at the heart of two days of talks between government and private-sector figures from both countries.
