The story of this place
Commissioned by Napoleon III and opened in 1875, the Palais Garnier is the flamboyant masterpiece of architect Charles Garnier, a riot of marble, gilt and a grand staircase built for the theatre of high society itself. Beneath the building lies a genuine subterranean water reservoir—engineers could not drain the site's groundwater, so they contained it—which, together with a real 1896 accident when a counterweight of the great chandelier fell and killed a spectator, inspired Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. Marc Chagall painted its ceiling in 1964. Even after the Bastille opera opened in 1989, the Garnier remains Paris's temple of ballet and spectacle.