Opera Garnier

Like any good mystery writer, Gaston Leroux builds his novels in layers. On one layer, his The Phantom of the Opera is a tragic love story about the reclusive, deformed Erik's obsession for the opera singer Christine Daae. But on the other layer, the book is a celebration of a particular city, Paris, and a particular building, the Paris Opera House. When I visited Paris one hot week in June, I made a pilgrimage to many of the locales mentioned in the book. This journey through Paris took me from the cool, shadowed sidewalks of a medieval street to the haughty decadence of the Opera's Grand Staircase. I had visited the City Of Lights as a child and read The Phantom of the Opera many times since then, so I had already created images of these places that were only reinforced and magnified by my new first-hand experience. And as my week in Paris played out, I treated myself to reading Leroux's novel in French in the setting that first brought the story to life.

I began my journey at the heart of the book, the Paris Opera House. Also named the Opera Garnier after its architect Charles Garnier, it sits in the Place de l'Opera in Paris's second arrondissement. It was commissioned in 1860 by the Emperor Napoleon III, nephew to Napoleon Bonaparte, after he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt at the former opera on the Rue Le Peletier. Construction dragged on through the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, the Paris Commune, and the resulting Third Republic. The building finally received its inauguration on January 5, 1875, long after Napoleon III's fall from power.

From the beginning, the architecture of the Opera drew puzzled comments and snide remarks--it has been compared to a Turkish bath and a labyrinth. One famous anecdote has the Empress Eugenie demanding of Garnier in what style he meant to build. Garnier replied, "In the Napoleon III style, Madame!" Without a doubt, the building possesses a hushed grandeur that comes from marble columns, stone mosaics, and bronze statues. The result is a gaudy jewel box dedicated to the musical arts, a fitting backdrop to Leroux's romantic thriller.

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