The very aura of the building invites dramatic stories to be told and enacted. I can’t even write the title without hearing the theme in my mind.īronze busts of Beethoven and Mozart on the front façade of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. This was also the story that was later adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber to the musical, The Phantom of the Opera in 1986 and became one of Broadway’s longest running musicals of all time. This is the ideal setting and one can think that Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1909) must have basically written itself.
Above the golden frilly edge of the roof are statues of Apollo, ‘Poetry’ and ‘Music’. The grandeur strikes you already when you set your eyes on it from across Place de l’Opéra.
On the roof are sculptures of Apollo, Poetry and Music by Aimé Millet and Liberty by Charles Gumery. You just need to step inside and the grand entrance staircase will within the blink of an eyelid place you in the spotlight, on stage in the theatre of life, cast as the star.
All sets the stage in our minds for a great theatre play. The realization that there actually is an indoor lake under the basement make you half and half believe that there probably is a phantom somewhere in there too. Just consider that they started to plan this building with its surrealistic grandiosity less than half a century after the French Revolution in 1793, when Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been publicly beheaded because of their opulent life style. It’s an orgy in marble and gilt, exudes a love of life and is a grand example of how to do things with panache! It’s in the fashion, women in skyscraper skinny stilettos in the Metro in the morning, their passion for life and, in their architecture. If there is something that makes the French French, I think that is a certain spirit – they just don’t do boring. Photo © JE Nilsson, CM Cordeiro-Nilsson 2009 The Paris Opera house, also known as Opéra de Paris or Opéra Garnier.
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