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Tour of paris opera house1/8/2023 ![]() In 1907, a time capsule with 24 phonographic recordings of opera singers of the time was buried in the cellar of the opera house. Work on the building recommenced once the French Army had retaken the city. The group took over Paris with the National Guard following the Franco-Prussian War, and set up a base camp in the unfinished building because of its proximity to Place Vendôme, where the Guard was fighting the French Army. It also kept the water available in case of a fire.Īmong the other real-life events that served to inspire the novel (a chandelier really did fall and kill someone there) is the use of the unfinished opera house by the Paris Commune in 1871 to store food and ammunition. Garnier incorporated a cistern into his design to redistribute the water and relieve the water pressure on the basement walls. When the foundation was being built in 1862, a combination of wells and steam pumps operating 24 hours a day could not keep the groundwater away for long enough to lay the substructure. ![]() But originally, it was a purely practical part of Charles Garnier’s opera house design. In the book and hit musical that followed, the cellar serves as the tragic figure’s dark and eerie lair. ![]() ![]() That tank, which has been referred to as a lake and a lagoon, inspired Gaston Leroux, a crime reporter and theatre and opera critic, to use it as a setting in his classic novel. “The Phantom of the Opera” was based upon this place. Beneath the opera house, Palais Garnier, there sits a water tank, and some folks say that once a man lived there who had no face.
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