AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The famous Paris opera house known as the Opera Garnier is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Emperor Napoleon III commissioned the building in the 1850s but would never see its completion. Its construction ran over schedule due to a few unexpected delays. As NPR's Eleanor Beardsley explains, there was a war, a revolution and some water issues.
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ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: There's a last call as a ballet begins at the Paris Opera, but you don't have to attend a performance to experience the splendor and history of this building. Any visitor will be awe-inspired upon entering and taking just a few steps up the marble staircase.
JEAN-JACQUES SERRES: The grand staircase - this is unique. You cannot compare this opera with another one.
BEARDSLEY: That's guide Jean-Jacques Serres. I follow him up to the multi-level marble-columned grand entrance hall that's bigger and higher than the opera auditorium itself. It's elaborately decorated with paintings, sculptures and carvings - a mix of baroque and classic-Renaissance styles that includes a mosaic ceiling with tiles of Venetian Murano glass that sparkle like gems.
SERRES: And it's a room that is meant like a theater. There's a kind of stage here, and this is a set, and you are like an actor.
BEARDSLEY: Serres says, in 1870s Belle Epoque Paris, people came to the opera to be seen.
SERRES: They would socialize. They would smoke cigars outside on the balcony. You could mingle. You could meet friends. You could criticize the other ladies, of course.
BEARDSLEY: It was a time in French history when you could change your birth status with money. The nouveau riche included industrialists and bankers. You could also move up in society with an education, which was the case for opera architect Charles Garnier.
CHRISTOPHER MEAD: His father was a blacksmith. His mother was a lacemaker. He was born into poverty.
BEARDSLEY: In one of Paris' worst slums, says urban architecture historian Christopher Mead - Garnier studied in France and Italy and became the first non-noble to receive such an architectural commission, says Mead.
MEAD: So he's creating a building that is really about celebrating the citizens of Paris - not those people born into wealth, but people who can strive and succeed in society. He made that stairhall a social theater.
BEARDSLEY: Garnier was brilliant, but he would encounter obstacles beyond his control.
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BEARDSLEY: One was 15 feet under the Paris streets.
Oh, my God, we're going down, down, down like a cave.
We stand on a floor platform built over a body of dark water. Jean-Jacques Serres.
SERRES: They started to dig, and then Charles Garnier told the ministers, we are not going to make it in seven years. That's impossible. There are many water tables underground. I have to solve this problem.
BEARDSLEY: They were losing time and money, so Garnier used water pumps.
SERRES: During nine months, night and day, water pumps were taking a huge volume of water out of the underground.
BEARDSLEY: He dried an area of 600 square yards and shored it up with wooden pylons, layers of concrete and tar, then refilled it with water to balance the pressure of the water tables, creating the lake that inspired theater critic Gaston Leroux to write his classic novel "Phantom Of The Opera" in 1910, which later inspired a Broadway musical.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character, singing) The phantom of the opera is there.
BEARDSLEY: Water wasn't the only problem. There was the Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon III was beaten in two months by Otto von Bismarck and fled to London. Then came a citizens' revolutionary uprising known as the Paris Commune. Historian Christopher Mead.
MEAD: Paris was put under siege. That's when they ate the elephants in the zoo and so on because they were blockaded. And it delayed the construction, the completion of the opera for effectively another two years.
BEARDSLEY: Garnier allowed his beloved opera to serve as a hospital during the Commune uprising to protect it. When it was finally inaugurated in 1875, seven years late, it was the world's largest opera house. Its stage slanted 5% so the dancers' feet could be seen from every row.
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BEARDSLEY: Guide Serres takes us backstage to a place called le foyer de la danse, where the ballerinas could warm up on a similarly slanted, much smaller stage.
SERRES: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: This was also the place where their patrons could meet them. Author Deirdre Kelly wrote "Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, And Suffering Behind The Symbol Of Perfection."
DEIRDRE KELLY: The opera houses of Paris became known as the brothels of Paris. There was no denying it. This was for patrons - if you want to call them this - to exercise their privilege.
BEARDSLEY: Kelly says the young ballerinas were dirt poor with low wages.
KELLY: If you were in dire financial straits or, you know, really just coming up from the gutter, this was a way up. So families would present their daughters at very young ages in order to rescue the lot of the entire family.
BEARDSLEY: The practice disappeared in the 1930s with the birth of workers' rights in France. In 1961, Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union while dancing at the Paris Opera. He went on to become its director and head choreographer.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing in non-English language).
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #2: (Singing in non-English language).
BEARDSLEY: This ornate opera house is also known as the Palais Garnier. Paris has another more modern opera at Bastille, which opened in 1989. But staging an opera at this place is special, says world-renowned director Peter Sellars.
PETER SELLARS: Because you're performing with the public and you're also performing with ghosts, and the ghosts in that building are incredible.
BEARDSLEY: Sellars calls being in dialogue with the ghosts of the Paris opera house haunting and inspiring.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTISTS: (Singing in non-English language).
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST #1: (Singing in non-English language). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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