The Paris opera house where a ceiling painter fell ill finishing on scaffolding
Napoleon III wanted a new home for the Paris Opera, and Charles Garnier gave him a building that leaves almost no surface bare. Seventeen kinds of stone and metal dress its front, fourteen painters and seventy-three sculptors worked on the ornament, and a gothic novel later made it the most famous stage on earth.
Construction ran from 1861 to 1875. Parisians first called it simply the new Opera, but the name soon shifted to honour its architect and the sheer lavishness of his design. It seats 1,979 people in the 9th arrondissement, and it served as the main theatre of the Paris Opera and its ballet company until 1989, when the Opera Bastille opened. Today the Garnier is used mostly for dance, and France has protected it as a historic monument since 1923.
Garnier reportedly told Empress Eugenie that his style was simply Napoleon III. In practice that meant mixing Baroque swagger, Palladian classicism and Renaissance motifs over a hidden iron frame, the same modern skeleton used at the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Les Halles markets. Outside, Carpeaux's sculpture group The Dance drew complaints of indecency, and gilded busts of composers such as Mozart and Beethoven sit between the columns. A frieze of fifty-three gilt cast-iron masks runs along the attic storey.
Inside, a white marble staircase with red and green balustrades splits into two flights toward the Grand Foyer, an idea borrowed from Victor Louis's theatre in Bordeaux. Isidore Pils painted its ceiling, but two months before opening Garnier judged the canvases too dark. Pils, then 61, reworked them overhead and became ill, so his students completed the job; the scaffolding came down only the day before the inauguration. Nearby, the vault of the Avant Foyer carries mosaics of mythical couples such as Orpheus and Eurydice, with a Greek inscription boasting that decorative mosaic was used in France here for the first time.
The west wing was meant to let the emperor drive straight in by a double ramp, but work stopped when the Empire fell and the stone was left rough. It now holds the Opera's library and museum, with nearly 600,000 documents. Fame arrived partly through fiction: Gaston Leroux set The Phantom of the Opera here in 1910, and the 1986 musical spread that story worldwide.
Source: Palais Garnier
