#The Palais Garnier

[chalamet-chalamet]

Timothée’s Chanel ad on the The Palais Garnier in Paris. ✨✨✨

IG credit to bastiendebels

[opera-ghosts]

150 years ago, January 5.1875 Opéra Garnier, Paris was opened.

By ALAN RIDING/ New York Times;June 21, 2000:

PARIS, June 20 -- When Charles Garnier was commissioned to build a new Paris opera house in 1861, his job was to impress, not only his patron Napoleon III and elitist operagoers but also ordinary Parisians who could sense the power of France through the giant building's extravagant facade. Yet in recent decades, the Palais Garnier, as it is known, has impressed mainly with its dark and grimy appearance.

Now, long after most Paris museums and monuments have been given face-lifts, the Palais Garnier's turn has finally come. After a 12-month cleaning and restoration, its facade was formally reopened today by the minister of culture, Catherine Tasca, exposing a dozen gilded busts and statues, multicolored marble pillars, delicate mosaics and almost shockingly white stone. It looks as good -- or as strange -- as the day it was inaugurated in 1875.

In truth, the building has not always been universally loved. Garnier, an unknown 35-year-old architect when he began work on the theater, diplomatically described it as "Napoleon III style," although it is unlike any other building of the era, with its polychromatic facade showing a strong Italian influence.

It was this mixture of styles that brought criticism from some late-19th-century purists. Debussy, for one, said it resembled a Turkish bathhouse.

On the other hand, Hitler, that infamous former Viennese art student, is said to have considered it the world's most beautiful building. Certainly, he made a point of touring it before dawn on the only occasion that he visited Paris just weeks after the city was occupied by German troops in June 1940. From there he went to the Trocadéro, where photographs show him looking at the Eiffel Tower, but the opera house was apparently the city's main attraction for him.

More recently, the Palais Garnier has had to compete for attention with the ultramodern and larger Bastille Opera. Indeed, for five years after the new house opened in 1990, it presented all opera productions, while the Palais Garnier became the home of ballet.

But then the Palais Garnier was remembered. Once its auditorium was restored and its backstage modernized in 1995, it again -- like the Bastille Opera -- combined opera and ballet. And finally $7.7 million was assigned for cleaning its exterior. The building's facade, which still carries the letters E and N for the Emperor Napoleon, was completed in 1867 to coincide with France's first Universal Exhibition.

"I consider the facade to be the most typical and most personal part of the entire project," Garnier wrote. Indeed, he and his wife, Louise, spent months traveling around Italy studying gilding techniques and searching for the 10 different types and colors of marble eventually used on the facade.

But the facade was also the only part of the building that the Emperor would ever see. Construction was halted in 1870 when Prussian troops occupied Paris and Napoleon III fled into exile. The following year, even greater chaos erupted during the popular uprising known as the Commune of Paris.

Yet when Garnier resumed work in 1873, he changed nothing of his plans: the grandiose western entrance, now closed, remained the imperial entrance, while the eastern entrance, also now closed, still shows where the wealthy were supposedly to drive up in their carriages.

Indeed, the entire building was designed for people who went principally to the opera to be seen. Its Italian-style horseshoe auditorium, with some 2,200 seats, was no larger than, say, La Scala or Covent Garden. But the area between the entrance and the auditorium was palatial, dominated by a huge marble staircase and filled with gilded and stone statues scattered through wide corridors and galleries. The Grand Foyer, heavy with neo-baroque statuary and frescoes, was where people gathered in their finery: the intermission was more important than the opera itself.

For the building's restoration, the team of architects, headed by Alain-Charles Perrot, chief architect of France's historic monuments, turned the clock back to Garnier's day.

In some cases, they were able to obtain marble and tesserae for mosaics from the same places and even the same family firms that supplied Garnier 130 or more years earlier. As significantly, they also found French artisans who were able to work gold, bronze and stone in the traditional manner.

A modern sandblasting machine was used to clean the western, northern and eastern sides of the buildings, gradually revealing the stone busts of 24 prominent French musicians and thinkers as well as 38 stone theater masks. But the southern facade had to be worked by hand. Known in French as "Renomées," two groups of large statues presiding over the building and representing Harmony and Poetry had to be entirely dismantled and repaired before they could be regilded.

Above the open-air terrace that looks over the Place de l'Opéra, nine busts of famous composers and librettists of the day, long rendered invisible by pollution, are also now covered with gold leaf. Today, Garnier's choice of who should be so honored seems a tad strange. Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini are there, but so also are Spontini, Meyerbeer, Halévy, Auber, Quinault and Scribe, not exactly creators whose works are featured in the Palais Garnier these days.

The recovery of the terrace, known as the loggia, is one of the achievements of the restoration. In 1977, it was closed for security reasons when pieces of mosaic from its ceiling came unstuck.

Now it has reopened, its multicolored marble floors clean and shiny, its mosaics restored.

To re-enter the opera house from the loggia, though, still presents something of a shock: the Grand Foyer remains murky, its rococo design still carrying the soot of the city.

So the cleanup of the Palais Garnier is not over yet. If it took Garnier 14 years to build the opera house, it will have taken 13 years to fix it up by the time the Grand Foyer, other public spaces and numerous bronze statues at the western and eastern entrances are restored in 2007 at a cost of $40 million more.

This time, though, the authorities have pledged not to let the house fall into disrepair. They can do little about the city's air pollution, but at least they have concluded that maintenance is cheaper than starting afresh a decade or two hence.

[the-gilded-chronicles]

Opera Garnier, Paris, France.

August 2024.

Edited with Snapseed

[inthedarktrees]

Paris Opera | Walter Sanders, Life, 1949

[humblegeniusinboxfive]

In celebration of the birthday of this most-beautiful building (a few days late, I know), I upload these photos I took on my recent visit to its majestic halls. Nowhere else have I seen such beauty nor felt such awe; it is a sanctuary for divine art and a fitting home for the Angel of Music.

Words cannot express my love for it, so I won’t even try.

Let me only say: Gaston Leroux NAILED its description in that book, both visually and atmospherically. That building IS Erik.

[melit0n]

Something that always confused me when I read TPOTO was why The Phantom chose box five out of all the private boxes to be his.

Out of all the seats in the house, box five is among the worst and would be (and still is) sold cheaply (average 65 francs at cheapest in 1880, now sold a between 10-25 euros nowadays) on general sale. A higher profit would've been made from a year-long booking, especially since there are multiple seats, so it would be 65 francs per person on a yearly booking no matter how many people are in there at once, but still not as much as other seats.

Visual wise, a good chunk of the left side of the stage is cut off and parts of the performance that would occur in the higher wings would be completely unseen, so, why choose it? Isn't the main point of going to go watch an Opera is to actually see the performance?

(A screenshot from the Palais Garnier's seat listing stating the best seats for viewing and the view from the box five via this video)

Having been there myself in late May, I found an answer to my own question and I'm gonna share it with you guys because maybe someone else was asking the same thing!

Although yes, the stage is half cut off, it's one of, if not the, best seats acoustic wise. You're a perfect distance from the orchestra as well as the stage for everything to sound just right. As much as The Phantom would've loved the operatic performance, I don't doubt he would've been more focused on the music itself as well as the vocals, and, mainly, Christine.

Further, although going to the opera was more of a social thing than an entertainment thing, so the boxes were built for aristocracy to be seen above all things, you can disappear from public view quite easily in that box. There are two to three rows of seats going backwards to the door, so all one would have to do to disappear from sight of anyone on stage or in the audience would be to just move a seat backwards (which means he wouldn't have been able to see the stage at all, but would still be able to hear everything perfectly well).

Plus, the box is located right at the end of the row of private boxes, as well as very close to entry and exit stairs, both public ones and private ones meant for stage hands and general workers.

All in all, those three reasons are why the box was chosen and kept in high priority for The Phantom, because he could quite literally disappear, like a ghost, by just moving himself in the box, as well as disappear out of the box and hear Christine almost perfectly.

[ancientsstudies]

Opéra Garnier by jbperraudin.

[fdelopera]

shoutout to the time a few summers ago when i went to Paris, basically lived in the Palais Garnier for a week, and snuck into Box 5.

i walked up to the door of Box 5 that day, and saw it was open! the staff must have forgotten to close the door after cleaning. back in the early 2000s, the Palais Garnier administration put a plaque on the inside and outside of La loge n°5 that reads "Loge du Fantôme de l'Opéra". it is officially Erik's Box.

here's what Erik's plaque on Box 5 looks like from the outside. note all the fingerprints from phans (some of which are mine).

here's where Box 5 sits in the auditorium. contrary to popular belief, Erik didn't choose the Emperor's Box (the large, ornate box close to the stage) or even the box next to it. Erik chose the plain box on the other side of the column. Erik is Emperor's Box-adjacent. he's gotta keep some semblance of humility!

i immediately went and sat in Erik's seat (the second seat on the left side of Box 5). i also knocked on the column, like Gaston Leroux instructed us to do. the marble column itself appears to be solid, but the metal base is hollow. (Leroux claimed this was where Erik hid when he performed his ventriloquist tricks, like making poor Carlotta croak like a toad)

this is the view of the stage from Box 5 (what Erik would have seen when he watched Christine perform)...

aaand here's Erik's view of the chandelier, as he dreamed of dropping it on the audience... ("Erik no! don't do it!" –the Daroga, probably)

aaaaaand then shortly after this, security came and chased us out... au revoir, Erik!

[wgm-beautiful-world]

Opera Garnier à Paris

[famousinuniverse]

Eiffel Tower, Palais Garnier, Paris, France: The Palais Garnier, also known as Opéra Garnier, is a historic 1,979-seat opera house at the Place de l'Opéra in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, France. It was built for the Paris Opera from 1861 to 1875 at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III. Wikipedia

[livesunique]

Palais Garnier, Paris, France

[emaadsidiki]

Garnier Palace ❁𓂅 𓄼ꕤ༘ Paris

[richwall101]

The Opera House - Paris - 1900 & 2000

The Palais Garnier also known as L'Opéra Garnier is a historic 1,979-seat opera house at the Place de l'Opéra in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, France. It was built for the Paris Opera from 1861 to 1875 at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III. Initially referred to as le nouvel Opéra de Paris (the new Paris Opera), it soon became known as the Palais Garnier, "in acknowledgment of its extraordinary opulence" and the architect Charles Garnier's plans and designs, which are representative of the Napoleon III style. It was the primary theatre of the Paris Opera and its associated Paris Opera Ballet until 1989, when a new opera house, the Opéra Bastille, opened at the Place de la Bastille. The company now uses the Palais Garnier mainly for ballet. The theatre has been a monument historique of France since 1923.

[the-gilded-chronicles]

The Grand Foyer of the Opera Garnier, Paris, France

The grand foyer is 154 metres long, 13 metres wide and 18 metres high.

In order to complete its decoration, the Opera’s architect, Charles Garnier collaborated with the painter Paul Baudry(1828-1886) who at the time was in Rome painting replicas of the Sistine Chapel. In its tones of old gold, this vast space was created at the most prestigious level of the theatre close to the first-category boxes. It was intended to be a place to rest, stroll, and mingle with high society.

[kinkander]

Jean Béraud - Les abonnés de l'Opéra

[inthedarktrees]

Sisters Marina and Tania Baydarova dancing at the opera

Paris Opera | Walter Sanders, Life, 1949