Word: garnier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is actually some difference of opinion about whether Paris really needs an expensive new opera house. The grand old Palais Garnier, with all its gilt mirrors and chandeliers and its resident phantom, has delighted audiences for more than a century. But cultural-monument building is a beloved Parisian occupation, and after the success of President Georges Pompidou's imposing modern-art center, Mitterrand naturally began in 1981 to think about a new opera house. Being a Socialist, he talked glowingly of popular, modern opera, and the edifice was assigned to the gritty Bastille area...
...contrast to the gaudy old Garnier, the 2,700-seat Bastille opera is designed to be austerely functional -- a bleak concrete, stainless-steel and glass oval, with gray-black granite floors and walls and five revolving stages for fast changes of scene. "The whole idea of this opera house is that it is very sober," according to architect Carlos Ott, 42. "You don't have decoration inside the hall. The decor is on the stage...
Operaphiles may agree on little else, but on one subject they are unanimous: Charles Garnier's Paris Opera, conceived in a burst of Second Empire glory and opened in a blaze of Third Republic splendor, is the world's most opulent opera house. The Paris Opera (Vendome; 187 pages; $75), with text by Martine Kahane, curator of the Opera's library-museum, and musicologist Thierry Beauvert, succinctly recounts the history of the fabled hall, but the real tour d'horizon is provided by Jacques Moatti's photographs, which take the reader from the subterranean lake beneath the mammoth building, where...
...nearly 30 years. Then, in 1898, the Orleans railroad company bought the site and raised on it a railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris, was quite a lot: a vast semicircular barrel vault of iron and glass...