Palais Garnier - The Paris Opera House

When guests arrive in Paris, we often meet them across from the Palais Garnier where the Roissy bus drops off passengers from Charles de Gaulle Airport. Coming out of the Opéra metro station, I am dazzled by the sight of the Palais Garnier as I come into the light.

The Paris Opera House, aka Palais Garnier, was built during the Second Empire under Napoleon III. A young architect named Charles Garnier was chosen through a competition. The opening of the grand opera house was meant to coincide with the 1867 Universal Exposition, but in fact it was not completed until 1875. By that time, Napoleon III was long gone following the disastrous defeat of the Franco-Prussian War and the project so far over budget that poor Garnier was not invited to the grand opening.

Considered a masterpiece by many, this apogee of Beaux Arts architecture has been criticized as an over-the-top temple to the rich and socially connected. 

                    The Ballroom                                         The Grand Stairway

Marc Chagall ceiling

Inside the auditorium
(Photographs courtesy of Alex Peacocke)

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In reality, most of the theatre of the Palais Garnier took place off stage.  The opera house was purposefully designed to showcase the patrons rather than the players--to flaunt and to dazzle.  Here, on the grand stairway, inside plush box seats and afterwards in the ballroom, Parisian high society came to see and be seen. 

The infamous chandelier

The Paris Opera House is probably most famous as the setting for Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera and the hugely successful Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, still playing on Broadway. How historically accurate is the story? In 1896, during a performance of Faust, the 8-ton chandelier broke loose, killing a woman in the audience and inspiring the novel. The foundation of the Opera House straddles an underground lake, which becomes the phantom's imaginary haunt in the story.

A new opera house was built under Mitterand in 1980’s “for the people".  It was pointedly built in the Place de la Bastille to emphasize the message. No doubt it functions much better as a venue for opera, music and dance, but in my opinion, it lacks the grandeur and pizazz of the Palais Garnier.

The new Opera House at Basteille