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The Palais Garnier in Paris is among the world\u2019s oldest theaters that still functions more or less in its original state. And long before the appearance of the selfie-stick, the Garnier was a place not just to see art, but to be seen.<\/p>\n
At a 150th anniversary gala on Friday, before guests reach the marble staircase, the baroque sculptures, the inlaid golden mosaics and the elaborately painted ceiling, they will pass two giant mirrors set on the ground floor.<\/p>\n
These were the architect Charles Garnier\u2019s gift to season ticket holders, for a quick once-over before they stepped onto a marble catwalk beneath four levels of viewing galleries.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were there to give them some psychological reassurance. To look at themselves and say, \u2018Everything is good. You are ready,\u2019\u201d said Sandrine Lamiable, a Palais Garnier tour guide leading a group of tourists up the marble steps earlier this month. \u201cThen, they were plunged into a veritable palace, as princesses and princes.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The point of the Garnier Opera building was never just the show onstage. It was the show of being on display, particularly for the rising bourgeoisie that had profited off France\u2019s booming industrial revolution.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe point of the opera was to parade, for the elites of the time to offer a spectacle: themselves,\u201d said Lamiable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The grand opera house is home to the Paris Opera, but since the opening of the much larger Op\u00e9ra Bastille theater across town in 1989, the Palais Garnier has become a bastion of ballet. This is where the Paris Opera Ballet performs, though the opera company still presents some smaller works on the Garnier stage. Around 400 permanent employees work in the building, from musicians to stage hands.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Up on the sixth floor on a recent afternoon, Xavier Ronze was rushing between five costume ateliers where dozens of seamstresses work on tutus, tailored coats, feathered headdresses. Over the years, Ronze, the head of the building\u2019s dress making and sewing department, has worked with star designers including Karl Lagerfeld<\/a> and Christian Lacroix<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis building has a soul,\u201d Ronze said, stepping into a wood-paneled room where costumes are brought out of storage for repair. White and yellow tutus hung from overhead metal rails for the dancers in the upcoming production of \u201cThe Sleeping Beauty.\u201d His current staff of 62 were working on 300 costumes for the show, Ronze said.<\/p>\n The opera house was born, in part, from an assassination attempt in 1858. Emperor Napoleon III of France ordered a new more spacious and secure building after he and his wife, Eugenie, survived a bomb attack on their carriage outside the Salle Le Peltier, an earlier Paris opera house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His government held a competition. More than 170 proposals were submitted, including by famous architects like Eug\u00e8ne Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who was in the midst of restoring Notre Dame cathedral.<\/p>\n Garnier\u2019s win was a surprise. He was relatively unknown and had extremely modest roots. The son of a blacksmith and a lace maker, he had risen to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and then won the prestigious Grand Prix de Rome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Garnier represented the esprit of his time\u2019s burgeoning middle class, when artists, writers and businessmen could get ahead through merit and skill, not birth, said Christopher Mead, a retired art history professor who wrote a book about the Palais Garner<\/a>.<\/p>\n His idea was to build a palace for that growing class, Mead said by phone from Albuquerque, where he lives.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Instead of being the reserve of the emperor and his entourage, the grand escalier<\/em> and the golden grand foyer<\/em> were for anyone who had a ticket \u2014 whether a very expensive season pass or a cheaper evening seat.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone performed there, everyone got a star turn,\u201d said Mead. \u201cIt was quite radical in that way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Garnier set up his atelier on the site, chosen by the Emperor\u2019s prefect Georges-Eug\u00e8ne Haussman, who had been charged with modernizing Paris. For the next 14 years \u2014 with a pause during the Prussian invasion of the city and the civil uprising known as the Commune \u2014 Garnier oversaw the construction closely.<\/p>\n He mixed elements of neoclassical, romantic and baroque architecture and introduced mosaics and gilding for the first time to Paris, according to G\u00e9rard Fontaine\u2019s book \u201cCharles Garnier\u2019s Opera<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Garnier designed the bronze grills of the balconies and ticketing counters, as well as the vases on display, and personally traveled to quarries as far away as Algeria and Sweden to pick out red, green, yellow and white marble for the building \u2014 a riot of color in a city whose palette tends toward cream and gray.<\/p>\n Still today, workers in the building speak about Garnier, who died in 1898, as though he was a treasured colleague.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe chose everything. He designed the curtains in the grand foyer,<\/em> he picked all the artists,\u201d said Benjamin Beytout, a marketing director at the Paris Opera, who has worked at the Palais Garnier for two decades. \u201cIt was his masterpiece.\u201d<\/p>\n Garnier had the audacity to write his name on the building \u2014 something few architects dared to do 150 years ago. Like many of his touches, it\u2019s subtle \u2014 almost an inside joke between Garnier and those who love him. Guides regularly use laser pointers to trace the curly, overlapping letters on the ceiling of the first floor rotunda: \u201cJean Louis Charles Garnier, architect 1861-1875.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n He tucked sculptures and paintings of salamanders throughout the building, mostly near wiring and gas outlets. They were to symbolically ward off fire, since European myth held salamanders could survive flames. In 1873, the Salle Le Peletier theater was destroyed by a blaze. By then, Napoleon III had died in exile, and it was unclear whether the Palais Garner would ever be completed. But, with the Salle Le Peletier gone, there was renewed motivation to finish: The city needed an opera house.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Philippe Moyal, a bartender at the Garnier who has served champagne to the likes of Bruce Willis and Catherine Deneuve, said he had considered the salamanders a symbol of regeneration. \u201cEven when we are tired, given how magnificent it is, we find momentum again,\u201d he said, adding that he often pops into the show before intermission champagne service, to catch a snippet of inspiration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On the building\u2019s top floor, dancers including the star ballerina Roxane Stojanov were rehearsing on a floor that is tilted just slightly at a 5 percent incline. That\u2019s to allow the dancers to get used to one of the building\u2019s many quirks: The stage was built that way, so viewers in the back of the auditorium could see better. It took some getting used to, when she first joined the Paris Opera Ballet 11 years ago, Stojanov said.<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially when it comes to pirouettes, it can be destabilizing,\u201d Stojanov, 29, said in an interview between rehearsals.<\/p>\n