#charles garnier

[7pleiades7]

A ceiling designed to steal the show.

Inside Paris's Palais Garnier, the Grand Foyer rises like a gilded gallery of music, myth, and spectacle. Designed by Charles Garnier and opened in 1875, the opera house was built not only for performance, but for being seen.

[darquitectura]

Charles Garnier. Opera Garnier, Paris, 1861

[opera-ghosts]

150 years ago, January 5.1875 Opéra Garnier, Paris was opened.

By ALAN RIDING/ New York Times;June 21, 2000:

PARIS, June 20 -- When Charles Garnier was commissioned to build a new Paris opera house in 1861, his job was to impress, not only his patron Napoleon III and elitist operagoers but also ordinary Parisians who could sense the power of France through the giant building's extravagant facade. Yet in recent decades, the Palais Garnier, as it is known, has impressed mainly with its dark and grimy appearance.

Now, long after most Paris museums and monuments have been given face-lifts, the Palais Garnier's turn has finally come. After a 12-month cleaning and restoration, its facade was formally reopened today by the minister of culture, Catherine Tasca, exposing a dozen gilded busts and statues, multicolored marble pillars, delicate mosaics and almost shockingly white stone. It looks as good -- or as strange -- as the day it was inaugurated in 1875.

In truth, the building has not always been universally loved. Garnier, an unknown 35-year-old architect when he began work on the theater, diplomatically described it as "Napoleon III style," although it is unlike any other building of the era, with its polychromatic facade showing a strong Italian influence.

It was this mixture of styles that brought criticism from some late-19th-century purists. Debussy, for one, said it resembled a Turkish bathhouse.

On the other hand, Hitler, that infamous former Viennese art student, is said to have considered it the world's most beautiful building. Certainly, he made a point of touring it before dawn on the only occasion that he visited Paris just weeks after the city was occupied by German troops in June 1940. From there he went to the Trocadéro, where photographs show him looking at the Eiffel Tower, but the opera house was apparently the city's main attraction for him.

More recently, the Palais Garnier has had to compete for attention with the ultramodern and larger Bastille Opera. Indeed, for five years after the new house opened in 1990, it presented all opera productions, while the Palais Garnier became the home of ballet.

But then the Palais Garnier was remembered. Once its auditorium was restored and its backstage modernized in 1995, it again -- like the Bastille Opera -- combined opera and ballet. And finally $7.7 million was assigned for cleaning its exterior. The building's facade, which still carries the letters E and N for the Emperor Napoleon, was completed in 1867 to coincide with France's first Universal Exhibition.

"I consider the facade to be the most typical and most personal part of the entire project," Garnier wrote. Indeed, he and his wife, Louise, spent months traveling around Italy studying gilding techniques and searching for the 10 different types and colors of marble eventually used on the facade.

But the facade was also the only part of the building that the Emperor would ever see. Construction was halted in 1870 when Prussian troops occupied Paris and Napoleon III fled into exile. The following year, even greater chaos erupted during the popular uprising known as the Commune of Paris.

Yet when Garnier resumed work in 1873, he changed nothing of his plans: the grandiose western entrance, now closed, remained the imperial entrance, while the eastern entrance, also now closed, still shows where the wealthy were supposedly to drive up in their carriages.

Indeed, the entire building was designed for people who went principally to the opera to be seen. Its Italian-style horseshoe auditorium, with some 2,200 seats, was no larger than, say, La Scala or Covent Garden. But the area between the entrance and the auditorium was palatial, dominated by a huge marble staircase and filled with gilded and stone statues scattered through wide corridors and galleries. The Grand Foyer, heavy with neo-baroque statuary and frescoes, was where people gathered in their finery: the intermission was more important than the opera itself.

For the building's restoration, the team of architects, headed by Alain-Charles Perrot, chief architect of France's historic monuments, turned the clock back to Garnier's day.

In some cases, they were able to obtain marble and tesserae for mosaics from the same places and even the same family firms that supplied Garnier 130 or more years earlier. As significantly, they also found French artisans who were able to work gold, bronze and stone in the traditional manner.

A modern sandblasting machine was used to clean the western, northern and eastern sides of the buildings, gradually revealing the stone busts of 24 prominent French musicians and thinkers as well as 38 stone theater masks. But the southern facade had to be worked by hand. Known in French as "Renomées," two groups of large statues presiding over the building and representing Harmony and Poetry had to be entirely dismantled and repaired before they could be regilded.

Above the open-air terrace that looks over the Place de l'Opéra, nine busts of famous composers and librettists of the day, long rendered invisible by pollution, are also now covered with gold leaf. Today, Garnier's choice of who should be so honored seems a tad strange. Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini are there, but so also are Spontini, Meyerbeer, Halévy, Auber, Quinault and Scribe, not exactly creators whose works are featured in the Palais Garnier these days.

The recovery of the terrace, known as the loggia, is one of the achievements of the restoration. In 1977, it was closed for security reasons when pieces of mosaic from its ceiling came unstuck.

Now it has reopened, its multicolored marble floors clean and shiny, its mosaics restored.

To re-enter the opera house from the loggia, though, still presents something of a shock: the Grand Foyer remains murky, its rococo design still carrying the soot of the city.

So the cleanup of the Palais Garnier is not over yet. If it took Garnier 14 years to build the opera house, it will have taken 13 years to fix it up by the time the Grand Foyer, other public spaces and numerous bronze statues at the western and eastern entrances are restored in 2007 at a cost of $40 million more.

This time, though, the authorities have pledged not to let the house fall into disrepair. They can do little about the city's air pollution, but at least they have concluded that maintenance is cheaper than starting afresh a decade or two hence.

[castelnou]

palais garnier

paris (france)

[cruger2984]

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE NORTH AMERICAN MARTYRS Feast Day: October 19

The eight North American martyrs, also known as the Canadian Martyrs, the Jesuit martyrs of North America or the Martyrs of France, included six priests and two lay brothers. They were heroic members of the Society of Jesus who were martyred in North America in order to bring the Faith that is necessary for salvation to the Huron, the Iroquois and the Mohawk Indians.

Five of the eight North American martyrs were put to death in what is now Canada, and three of them in New York State. There is a shrine to the United States' martyrs at Auriesville in New York, and there is a shrine to the Canadian martyrs at Fort Saint Mary near Midland, Ontario.

The names of the eight North American martyrs are:

St. René Goupil, a lay brother martyred in 1642 in New York State.

St. Isaac Jogues, a priest.

St. Jean de Lalande, a lay brother, martyred in 1646 in New York State.

St. Antoine Daniel, a priest, martyred in Canada in 1648.

St. Jean de Brébeuf, St. Charles Garnier, St. Noël Chabanel and St. Gabriel Lalemant, all priests, and all martyred in Canada in 1649.

Isaac Jogues, after thirteen months' imprisonment by the Mohawks, had several fingers cut off of his hand. He went back to Europe, but returned again to North America and was killed by tomahawk blows at Ossernenon, now called Auriesville, in New York State.

Jean de Brébeuf declared before he died, "I have a strong desire to suffer for Jesus Christ."

He was tortured terribly, and a burning torch was put into his mouth, which strangled him.

René Goupil, thirty-five, was the youngest of the martyrs, and cried "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!" as he died. Noël Chabanel was thirty-six, and Isaac Jogues and Gabriel Lalemant were thirty-nine. The oldest of the eight North American martyrs, Jean de Brébeuf, was fifty-six when the Indians killed him.

They were canonized June 29 of 1930 by Pope Pius XI. Their memorial is October 19, and September 26 in Canada.

Source: Catholic News Agency

[lucygold95]

POTO Monaco in 'Salle Garnier'❣❣ (From Earl Carpenter's Instagram)

Fan of the Opera

And finally... the cast for the Italian production!

[rolloroberson]

The Palais Garnier

The Palais Garner, Garnier Palace, or Opéra Garnier is a 1,979-seat opera house at the Place de l'Opéra in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, France. It was built for the Paris Opera from 1861 to 1875 at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III.

The Palais Garnier was planned and designed by the architect, Charles Garnier, for whom it was eventually named after initially being known as the Opera House of Paris. The Palais Garnier is also famous as the setting for Gaston Leroux’s novel “The Phantom of the Opera.” I am awestruck by its beauty and architecture.

[netlex]

L’Opéra Garnier - Paris 1937

De haut en bas, du grand lustre principal, aux réservoirs construits en 1861 sous les ordres de Charles Garnier, afin  de canaliser les eaux d'infiltration tout en stabilisant l'édifice.