Palais Garnier
The opera house of the Second Empire, designed by an unknown 35-year-old architect who won the competition. Garnier blended Renaissance and Baroque into something he called the “Napoleon III style”. The staircase is built so that the audience can see and be seen, and the façade is filled with gold, marble and sculpture.
In the 1850s and 1860s Napoleon III had Paris rebuilt with broad boulevards, and a new opera house was to be the crowning achievement. The competition of 1860–1861 attracted a large number of entries, and the winner was the then unknown Charles Garnier. Construction began in 1861 but was delayed by difficulties with the foundations, as groundwater was encountered. Garnier solved the problem with a huge tank of concrete and masonry beneath the building, which holds the water in place and gave rise to the myth of a lake under the opera house. The war of 1870 and the Paris Commune interrupted the work, and by the time the building was inaugurated in 1875 the emperor had been overthrown. Beneath the rich surface of stone and marble is a load-bearing iron frame, which made the large spaces possible.
The building is arranged as a sequence of spaces that prepare the audience. From the façade one enters the vestibules and then reaches the grand staircase, a space rising through several storeys with marble of different colours, balconies and candelabra, where the audience was meant to display itself to one another. Next come the foyers, where the Grand Foyer with its gilding and ceiling paintings resembles a palace gallery. The auditorium is horseshoe-shaped, with several tiers of boxes in red and gold and a great chandelier in the centre. Behind it lies a very deep stage with advanced machinery. On one side is a special pavilion into which the emperor could drive in his carriage. The façade is adorned with sculptural groups, among them Carpeaux’s much-discussed group The Dance, whose original is now in the Musée d’Orsay.
The opera house immediately became one of the landmarks of Paris and inspired Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera, which is set in the building’s cellars and attics. In 1964 the auditorium was given a new ceiling painted by Marc Chagall, installed above the original ceiling painting, which caused debate but is now one of the building’s hallmarks. Since the Opéra Bastille opened in 1989, the Palais Garnier has been used mainly for ballet. The building has been restored in stages, including the façade and the Grand Foyer. Garnier’s opera house became a model for theatres and opera houses around the world, where the staircase and foyers were given as much weight as the auditorium itself. In Stockholm the same idea can be seen in the Royal Swedish Opera, which Axel Anderberg designed in a Neo-Baroque style and which was inaugurated in 1898 with a magnificent foyer.