Christiansen Rupert - City of light: the making of modern paris

Garniers Opra, as seen from the Avenue de lOpra, circa 1880. (P RIVATE C OLLECTION / B RIDGEMAN I MAGES )

The show proved something of an anticlimax, dragging on interminably without aesthetic distinction. Exacerbated by opening-night panic and production problems, the scenery did not fit the space properly, and the stage management proved amateurish. The prima donna Christine Nilsson had withdrawn at the eleventh hour, as prima donnas tend to do, because of an indisposition. As the exasperated critic Lon Escudier wrote in his review, A corner grocers shop could have organized a more attractive artistic celebration. There were problems of protocol as well: so lengthy was the list of honored guests that Garnier, the genius who had fanatically devoted himself for over a decade to the creation of this wonder of the world, was assigned a seat in a box to the side of the auditorium on the second tier, an appalling snub that he brushed aside by choosing to remain in his office and continue working instead.

This was the publics first glimpse of the foyers where Garniers imagination had run free: gilded and mirrored salons, shimmering candelabra and marbled colonnades, ceilings covered with mosaics and frescoes, classical statuary, and flaming gas torchres, all enhancing a superb central stairwell that turned the ascending and descending audience into a spiraling spectacle far more impressive than anything that the clunking grand operas and silly, twittering ballets could display on stage. Patriotic hearts were exhorted to rejoice, and even the satirical weekly Le Sifflet responded to the call: Be proud of being French when looking at our Opra! Foreigners who come to visit this marvel will see that despite all our misfortunes, Paris is and always will be without rival.

Yet ultimately the significance of this opera house was not a matter of music, art, or even architecture. It was an ideologically charged symbol of Frances recent history and bruised national pride: an ambiguous monument to a triumph and a disaster that had started as one thing and ended as another.

The project had originated as a key element of a vast, unprecedented strategy to redevelop the capitals center that was conceived by Louis Napolon, authoritarian ruler of France from 1852 to 1870, and executed by his fearsomely effective left-hand man and de facto mayor of Paris, Baron Haussmann. An opera house would be a focal point for a network of new streets, new private housing, new public buildings and monuments, new parks, new sewers, and even new city boundaries that ranks among the greatest experiments in urban planning ever undertaken.

But in 1870 the French had foolishly gone to war against Prussia and suffered a crushing and unexpected defeat. Louis Napolons regime, known as the Second Empire, had collapsed, and Paris had in consequence endured a long siege, followed by a revolt that resulted in the brief establishment of the socialistic Commune, suppressed by the new republican government through a swift massacre of perhaps 20,000 French citizens.