The Palais Garnier

Some buildings are made for people to walk into and walk out of again. Others make you want to come back for a feeling you cannot quite name. The Palais Garnier — what most people simply call the Paris Opera — is one of those.

Imagine the house with every light switched off, only the great chandelier hanging in the dark. Is the Phantom of the Opera still sitting quietly in box five? Nobody knows. But that question turned a theatre into a legend.

The Louvre holds the masterpieces of painting; Notre-Dame holds the memory of history. The Paris Opera is where music, architecture and dreaming are folded into a single stage.

Many Parisians will tell you that even without seeing a performance, simply walking into the Garnier is a complete experience of art.

An architect barely past thirty

The building was inaugurated in 1875, designed by the young Charles Garnier after he won a national competition in his early thirties.

Napoleon III wanted a house worthy of the splendour of the Second Empire, and Garnier answered with a masterpiece that joins Baroque, Renaissance and Beaux-Arts. A façade covered in gilded figures, a grand staircase of many-coloured marble, massive columns and a blazing ceiling give anyone who enters the sense of arriving at a ball of the European aristocracy.

A ghost that came out of a novel

What made the Garnier famous far beyond lovers of classical music came from literature. In 1910 Gaston Leroux published The Phantom of the Opera. It tells of Erik, a musical genius with a disfigured face, living in the secret cellars beneath the house and in love with the young singer Christine Daaé.

From that novel came dozens of films, plays and, above all, Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, which made the Palais Garnier a global cultural emblem.

What is striking is that Leroux did not invent it all. Beneath the theatre there really is an enormous underground reservoir, built to stabilise foundations on damp ground. That hidden space fed the legend of the ghost.

In 1896 part of the great chandelier in the auditorium fell, killing a member of the audience. Leroux worked the detail into his novel, blurring the line between fact and fiction.

But the depth of the book is not in its horror. It is a story about wanting to be loved, about beauty of soul obscured by prejudice, and about the redeeming force of art. Music is the language that carries a person out of solitude.

What to see

If you have the time, try an opera, a ballet, or a comédie musicale. Opera brings together a symphony orchestra, the human voice and the stage at full emotional pressure. French ballet has an airy, exacting beauty. Modern musical theatre is more immediately accessible, mixing song, acting and dance.

Even if your French does not carry you all the way, what the music transmits is enough to make an evening in Paris hard to forget.

The best angles

For photographers, this is one of the finest buildings in the city. In the morning, the sun on the façade brings out cream stone and gilt sculpture. In the evening, with the whole house lit, the square in front becomes one of the most elegant corners of Paris.

From the steps you get a balanced frame with the Avenue de l'Opéra running away in front of you. Inside, the marble staircase is where nearly everyone lingers longest — stand in the middle of it and you feel like the lead in a classical film.

Where to pause

Afterwards, take a coffee at the Café de la Paix, the legendary house opposite the theatre since 1862, which received Oscar Wilde, Émile Zola and countless artists.

For a meal in a Belle Époque room, Le Grand Café Capucines is well worth considering. Anyone who loves pastry can go to Cédric Grolet Opéra, where the desserts are made like works of art.

A curtain that never comes down

The Palais Garnier is not only a theatre. It is where architecture sings, where music tells stories, and where the imagination has never taken its final bow.

The Phantom probably never existed. But the love of art that the story left behind is still present in every note, every step of the staircase and every lamp in Paris.