The Palais Garnier Celebrates 150 Years

The Palais Garnier is celebrating its 150th anniversary throughout 2025. The Opera de Paris’s recent anniversary gala on January 24th featured all the artists from the esteemed Paris Opera – its  musicians, singers from the chorus, dancers, ballet stars and students, as well as guest artists gathered to stage productions from Mozart, Wagner, Rossini, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, and Ravel, to name but a few. Raising funds for the Opera’s many activities, the evening’s event was aired live on television – France 5 – and the night is viewable online via subscription.

The Palais Garnier stands like a mammoth jewel box at the top of the Avenue de l’Opéra. For 150 years, it has remained the city’s formidable focus of music and make-believe. A million visitors a year gather in its prismatic halls of stone, sculpture and mosaics, stroll beneath its gilded ceiling, and climb the ever-so impressive white marble staircase. Yet before its inauguration day on January 5, 1875, this beautiful, imposing edifice struggled to become an opera house. Here’s how it came to be. 

When Baron Haussmann, under the direction of Emperor Napoleon III, redesigned the map of Paris, he wanted impressive buildings to visually anchor his new streets. An unfortunate occurrence hurried Haussmann’s plans. In 1858, an assassination attempt on the Emperor’s life at the existing rue Peletier Opera House affected Napoleon III to such a degree that he wanted a new Opera. Only one built on a major square with carriage access would ensure Napoleon III’s security. Fortunately, this fit well within the framework of Haussmann’s urban plan.  

The Emperor chose the prestigious Quartier Chausée d’Antin for the location of the new opera house. Hindsight reveals that in the 17th century, before this neighborhood gained its cachet, it had to be raised out of a swamp in order to be habitable. Despite this foreshadowing, Haussmann’s plans blasted through a slum to create a new street running from rue de Rivoli to the grand Quartier Chausée d’Antin. Crowning the nexus would be the new concert hall. 

In 1860, 171 architects vied to design the building. It was the virtually unknown Charles Garnier whose design won after a second round of competition. What the judges admired in Garnier’s scheme was his readily understandable beaux arts methods: an architectural style that used symmetry, classical details, and plenty of decorative elements. The committee and Napoleon III loved the monumental aspect of his façade with its balanced mix of sculpture and ornamentation. There was, of course, the grand interior staircase, which epitomized the structure’s basic purpose.  

Charles Garnier won because he recognized that the opera should provide the audience with a glittering backdrop for the social encounters that construed a true night at the Opera. Garnier’s complete synthesis of the arts included the fashionable audience members who wanted to see and be seen. Garnier said his palace was where one see the shimmer of well-groomed ladies, “the éclat of their jewels, the variety of outfits, the movement of the audience, and the sort of quivering of a whole crowd which observes and knows itself observed.” 

Charles Garnier regularly watched the hustle and bustle from the second to bottom step on his staircase, where he could view the ever-evolving throng. Garnier’s elegance denied his once humble beginnings. He was born in 1825 in the then insalubrious area surrounding rue Mouffetard. He was the son of a wheelwright who developed his own carriage rental business. Garnier embarked on his artistic career at Paris’s Écoles Gratuite de Dessin, and succeeded in getting into the École des Beaux Arts, where he was awarded the Grand Prix de Rome in 1848. (A bursary allowed winners to stay in Rome for three to five years.) Garnier also traveled and studied throughout Greece where he worked on the restoration of the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek Island of Aegina. His brilliant beginnings flagged until he was awarded the commission for the Paris Opera. The building of the Opera would occupy him for the next 15 years.  

When construction began in 1862, it was immediately hindered by the discovery of water under the building. The water table of the once marshy area swamped the Opera’s site. Months were spent pumping it out, but the site would not dry up. It was necessary for Garnier to build a sealed cement cistern in the cellars of the building. Today the opera is still situated over a ghostly subterranean reservoir.   

The main façade was unveiled as part of the 1867 Exposition Universelle, but construction was stalled by the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune when it was used as a shelter for food and troops. When Paris was finally able to rebuild, Garnier’s Opera house remained an unfinished hulk. It was an embarrassing reminder of the crumbled reign of the exiled Napoleon III and Paris made no move to complete it. Some even thought to rip it down and replace it with a memorial basilica similar to Sacré-Cœur. In the autumn of 1873, a devastating fire destroyed the infamous opera house on Rue Le Peletier. Garnier now had the go-ahead to gather an enormous work force who toiled on the construction for two more years.  

Hundreds of artists and craftsmen worked on Garnier’s cathedral to culture. In the public spaces emphasized in his blueprints, artisans created mosaic effect by using 33 different colored marble. Between its profusion of paintings and statues, the foyer dripped with gilding.  

The horseshoe-shaped auditorium enabled the audience to see both the stage and its self-absorbed self. Its rich gold leaf, caryatids, and nymphs spelled luxury. Garnier chose a red hue of velvet for the interior’s soft furnishings to best flatter a lady’s rosy complexion and her décolletage.  

The floating cherubs in the original trompe l’oeil ceiling were in keeping with the interior’s other festoons. To light all these elements fighting for attention was the giant, infamous crystal chandelier weighing seven tons.  

A different type of craftsman maintained the stage area. Behind the scenes, it resembled a ship at sea: an intricate machine of removable screens and panels, counterweights, cleats, ropes and pulleys. The stage itself was reported to support up to 500 people without collapsing.   

Busts of famous composers adorned the exterior’s colonnade, many of whose music was  represented at the Anniversary Gala. Carpeaux’s La Danse, once criticized for indecency, still stands on the steps. To top it off: Apollo with his lyre is found on the Opera’s roof.  

With great pomp the Palais Garnier opened on January 5, 1875, in the presence of French President MacMahon and an array of European dignitaries. The French public was awed by the immense size of the building –  119,000 square feet (11,100 m2)  –   but their  reception was divided. Many thought it was gaudy. Claude Debussy thought it resembled a railway station on the outside, and the interior could be mistaken for a Turkish bath. The recently widowed Empress Eugenie called the design a hodgepodge. She stubbornly didn’t like it because Garnier’s design won over that of her favorite architect, Viollet-le-Duc. “What style is this?’ she asked. Garnier responded,  “It’s Napoleon III style, Madame.” 

The first opera to be presented at the new theater was Fromental Halévy’s work La Juive. After having overseen the hall’s construction for 15 years, Charles Garnier, was obliged to pay for his box seat. 

In May 1896, a fire in the roof caused a one-ton counterweight from the theater’s chandelier to crash down from the ceiling, injuring several of the audience and killing one. Despite rumors to the contrary, the chandelier stayed put. The remaining counterweights were sufficient to stop the seven tons of crystal and bronze from falling. Yet the incident became the subject of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, The Phantom of the Opera.

Leroux – an investigative journalist – claimed in his prologue that “The Opera ghost really existed.” Leroux’s story included the Opera’s underwater lair – which still exists – and its system of behind-the-scenes tunnels. A small plaque is now attached to Loge 5, reading “Loge du Fantôme de l‘Opéra.” Along with a lucky horseshoe tacked up backstage, this is a tip of the hat to the Phantom story, which secured the Palais Garnier in the public’s imagination.  

When Charles Garnier won the commission to design the Opera, he had only one building to his credit. The Opera was his pièce de résistance and not many buildings were attached to his name. But because his name is forever tied to the Paris Opera, he is regarded as a grand old architect.   

In 1881, the Observatoire de Nice was built to Garnier’s plans with the collaboration of Gustave Eiffel who designed the observatory’s main dome. The two colleagues had a falling out. Charles Garnier was the topmost architect leading the charge against the design of the Eiffel Tower. He and a number of Paris’s leading citizens were appalled at Eiffel’s design, which they considered an unsafe eyesore.  

While Garnier’s building plans lay fallow during the war with Prussia and the Paris Commune, he built his own Villa Garnier, a beautiful structure in the Italian Riviera town of Bordighera. He went on to design the Opera de Monte-Carlo, the Cercle de la Librarie at 117 Boulevard Saint Germain, the stately but unremarkable Hotel Hachette at 195 Boulevard Saint Germain, and what is now the Marigny Theatre, situated near the junction of the Champs-Élysées and the Avenue Marigny. Garnier’s last work was the Magasin de Decors de l’Opera – the Opera’s prop storeroom – now the Ateliers Berthier, part of the Odeon Theatre de l’Europe at 32 rue Berthier. None of these rival Garnier’s design for the Paris Opera.