Inside the Paris Opera House: Every Room a Visit Covers

A visit ticket opens eight named spaces and they come in a fixed order, because the building was designed as a sequence rather than as a set of rooms. This page takes them one at a time, says what is in each and what most people walk past, and ends with the one room nobody is promised. Paris Opera House guided tours include the entrance to all of it.

The order the rooms come in

You enter low, under the ramp where the carriages once pulled up, and the building lifts you through three changes of light before it lets you near the theatre. Everything below is walkable in ninety minutes at a steady pace.

Those timings add up to about eighty-five minutes, which is why ninety is the number both the ticket and the shortest guided departure work to.

La Rotonde des Abonnés, and the Pythia at the foot of the ramp

Subscribers arrived by carriage under the building and stepped out here, out of the weather and out of sight of everyone arriving on foot. It is a low, cool, circular room in dark marble, and it is the only part of the sequence designed to feel like a basement.

The bronze at the centre is a Pythia — the oracle of Delphi — coiled with snakes above her basin. Most visitors take three steps past her towards the light. She is worth a minute, partly because she is the last thing you see before the building starts showing off.

The Grand Staircase — 30 metres of nave, and a room that watches itself arrive

White marble, a balustrade of red and green marble, and a well of open air 30 metres high above your head. The stair splits into two flights that curve away and rejoin, which is a structurally awkward way to get to the first floor and a perfect way to be looked at while you do it.

That was the point. Nineteenth-century Paris came to the opera to be seen at least as much as to listen, and Charles Garnier built the arrival into the architecture. Stand on the first landing and look back down: everybody below is in a shallow bowl, and the lamps are placed to light faces rather than the floor.

The avant-foyer, and its gold mosaics

A low, vaulted room between the staircase and the foyer proper, and the compression is deliberate. The ceiling is worked in gold mosaic and sits close enough overhead to read without straining, which is not true of anything else in the building.

It exists to make the next room feel bigger. Architects call that a compression and release sequence; Garnier simply built it and never explained himself.

The Grand Foyer — 54 metres long, and a ceiling somebody spent years on

54 metres long, 13 metres wide and 18 metres high, gilded from the skirting to the vault, with mirrors down one side and windows down the other so the light doubles. Paul Baudry painted the ceiling panels, and they run the history of music end to end.

It was built as a promenade for the interval, which is to say it was built for walking slowly in evening dress. It still rewards that. Walk the length of it once looking up and once looking along, and you will notice that the two experiences share very little.

The Sun and Moon salons

Two round rooms, one at each end of the foyer, and they are a matched pair with opposite tempers. The Salon du Soleil is worked in warm gold and mosaic and reads as morning. The Salon de la Lune is cold silver and mirror and reads as very late at night.

They are small and easy to miss because the foyer pulls the eye straight through the middle. Turn left and right at the ends.

La Rotonde du Glacier, and its tapestries

The ice-cream rotunda, and it was exactly that: a round room where the audience took sorbets. It is hung with tapestries and painted with drinks, fishing and hunting, which makes it the least formal room in the sequence and the one that most obviously belongs to a particular century.

It is also the room the light is best in, on a bright morning, for anyone photographing.

The auditorium, Chagall's ceiling and the seven tonnes chandelier

The horseshoe seats 1,979 and the Opera puts its capacity at 2,101, both of which are correct and measure different things. Above it hangs seven tonnes of bronze and crystal, and above that is the canvas Marc Chagall painted in 1964, carrying scenes from the operas of fourteen composers. The original ceiling is still there, underneath his.

The Library-Museum, in the Emperor's pavilion

The west pavilion was built so that Napoleon III could drive in under armed guard, which was a reasonable precaution given what had happened outside the old opera house. He never used it: the empire fell before the building opened. The pavilion now holds the Opera's library and museum, run by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

Close to 600,000 items are in there, including 100,000 books, 10,000 programmes and 100,000 photographs, and a rotating exhibition. It is on the same ticket and most people walk past the door. The exhibitions page has what is on.

The tank under the building, and what is actually down there

Digging the foundations in 1862 hit groundwater that took five months to pump out and kept coming back. Garnier stopped fighting it and built a double foundation with a sealed concrete tank between the two, reaching 10.13 metres below ground, so that the water had somewhere to be.

It is still there and it is still full. The Paris fire brigade uses it for diving practice. It is not a lake with a boat on it and there is no chandelier hanging over it, but it is the reason Gaston Leroux had somewhere to put a phantom.

What is not on a visit ticket

• The stage and the wings. No captured departure goes behind the proscenium. The stage takes up to 450 performers and none of them are visitors during the day.
• Dressing rooms and workshops. Not on the ticket, not on a guided tour, and one traveller's review says plainly that there is no backstage element whatever a title implies.
• The Foyer de la Danse. Closed to visitors. The Opera's multimedia tablet, at €8 on site, €7 booked ahead, layers it over the room you are standing in, which is the nearest anyone gets.
• A guaranteed look into the auditorium. See above.

Paris Opera House Tours sets out every departure with its meeting point and what its fare covers, and the facts page has the measurements in one table.