FIRST OFF . . .

Conductor Daniel Barenboim has been fired as artistic director of the new Paris Opera de la Bastille after a salary dispute, but the new so-called “People’s Opera” was plunged into deeper trouble Sunday when the man contracted to direct its first production resigned in sympathy with the sacked artistic director. Barenboim was dismissed when he refused to take a cut in his $1.1-million salary. The 46-year-old Argentine-born conductor and pianist also angered the new Socialist government with a program regarded as too highbrow for the Opera de la Bastille. Patrice Chereau, who had been scheduled to direct Mozart’s Don Giovanni when the opera opens this summer, quit over the weekend and said that other international music figures may now refuse to work with the Opera. Chereau called Barenboim’s firing by Pierre Berge, director of Paris’s three opera houses and chairman of the Yves Saint Laurent fashion house, “despicable.” The new opera is built on the site of the Bastille prison, the battleground of the French revolution 200 years ago. The opera is scheduled to open on the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.