Architecture as Allegory

Towering above the center of Paris, a monumental statue of Apollo crowns a 19th-century theater whose architecture and decoration are an opulent tribute to the performing arts. The theater's official title is "L'Académie National de Musique." Unofficially it has long been known as the Paris Opéra, or the Palais Garnier. And, in keeping with the theater's balance of decoration and visionary technology, Apollo, holding aloft his golden lyre, is actually the building's lightning rod.

The Palais Garnier is the masterpiece of architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898), who called his work "the architecture of illustration." The theater's statuary, allegorical ceiling and wall paintings, mosaic inlay and tapestries were designed as a harmonious and moving backdrop to the performances on stage.

For all its glory, the theater owes its existence to an attempted regicide. In 1858, Paris's Opéra was in the Rue Le Pelletier, near a dark alley—a security nightmare. On Jan. 14, as Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie drove to a gala performance there, an Italian conspirator, Felice Orsini, hiding in that alley, tossed three bombs into the street, killing 150 people. Napoléon and Eugénie escaped, but the emperor ordered the construction of a new Opéra as soon as possible—well isolated to prevent lurking assassins.

A design competition opened in December 1860 with a month's deadline; it drew 171 submissions. The winning architect, Garnier, was a blacksmith's son who had studied at the École des Beaux Arts, taking its Grand Prix de Rome for architecture in 1848.

Work commenced in July 1861 on the site of what is now the spacious Place de l'Opera. Almost immediately an underground stream flooded the foundations, so Garnier reworked his plans, erecting his theater on a double concrete vat containing the water—hence the notorious Opéra Lake. Though his flamboyant architecture was rooted in the Renaissance and Baroque styles, Garnier innovatively built it over a fireproof iron skeleton.

By the end of 1863 Garnier had chosen the artists and sculptors to produce the iconographic interior decoration of the ceilings and walls, among whom were the painters Paul Baudry, Jules Lenepveu and Isidore Pils, and the sculptors Aimé Millet and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. All École des Beaux Arts alumni and Prix de Rome laureates, their academic finesse stood them in good stead when producing the vast neo-Baroque allegories that Garnier commissioned.

The Franco-Prussian War in 1870 stopped construction on the opera house and resulted in France's defeat and Napoléon III's abdication. But when the old Opéra Le Pelletier burned in 1873, the government quickly appropriated money for Garnier's Paris Opéra, and it was inaugurated by President Patrice Macmahon on Jan. 15, 1875. Due to a government slight, however, Garnier had to pay 120 francs to attend the opening gala, which included hugely popular scenes from Giacomo Meyerbeer's "Les Huguenots" and Fromental Halévy's "La Juive."

The Palais Garnier is visible down the entire length of the wide Avenue de l'Opéra running southward to the Louvre. In fact, the paired columns of the theater's main facade were intended to complement those of Claude Perrault's East Front of the Louvre, completed in 1670. Garnier persuaded the civic planner Georges Haussmann not to plant trees along the avenue to preserve the unobstructed view between the two.

Today, Garnier's "architecture of illustration" can be read like a book. Viewing it from across the Place de l'Opéra, your eyes move from the solid ground-floor entry, its repeated arches sheltering the entrance doors, upward to the main floor with its massive paired columns, its balconies and its row of round bull's-eye windows each containing the bronze bust of a composer. The busts reveal which departed masters were most important to 19th-century France: Rossini, Auber, Beethoven, Mozart, Spontini, Meyerbeer and Halévy.

At the roof level, defined by the elaborate cornice of sculpted masks of comedy and tragedy, the flattened green dome of the auditorium is crowned by Millet's immense "Apollo" and flanked by two gilt-bronze allegorical groups, "Harmony" on the left and "Poetry" on the right, by the sculptor Charles Guméry. And when this facade is viewed from just the right angle, the splendid domed roofline is further defined by the triangular gable of the stage housing behind it.

The main entrance arches are flanked by sculptural groups each representing a different art form. Deservedly, the most famous of these is Carpeaux's ebullient "La Danse," whose swirl of riotous male and female nudes initially scandalized critics. In 1964 a full-scale copy by Paul Belmondo was placed at the Garnier entrance—the precious original is now safely housed in the Musée d'Orsay. Inside the entrance vestibule, monumental marble statues of Gluck, Handel, Lully and Rameau represent opera's founding fathers according to 19th-century France.

In the great multistory stair foyer, the sinuous upward sweep of the broad staircase lifts the eye to Pils's four large ceiling paintings, whose luminous reds, yellows and seductive flesh tones shimmer in the light of a thousand incandescent lamps, which impart further texture to the rich settings of carved stone and gilt. For the banisters and balustrades, Garnier gave full vent to his love of rare stone in combination—pink granite, pink marble, onyx, scagliola and superb mosaic designs on the floors.

With its balconies and mirrors the stair foyer is a space not only to see but in which to be seen. Garnier wrote: "The sparkling lights, the resplendent dress, the lively and smiling faces, the greetings exchanged; all contribute to a festive air, and all enjoy it without realizing how much the architecture is responsible for this magical effect."

The dramatic main portal of the auditorium is flanked by massive bronze and polychrome marble figures representing "Comedy" and "Tragedy" by Gabriel-Jules Thomas. And as you enter, you are dazzled further by the resplendent trappings of crimson and gold. Eight paired Corinthian columns support the upper parts of the house, from which hangs the 6½-ton bronze chandelier made famous by novelist Gaston Leroux's phantom.

After savoring Garnier's rich neo-Baroque effects, the eye finally arrives at what should be the auditorium's harmonious apex, only to encounter a brash discord: Marc Chagall's mid-20th-century ceiling. Installed in 1964, it was the French government's attempt to soup up what modernist critics then deemed an eyesore. Painted on canvas, the ceiling was installed over Jules Eugène Lenepveu's original, "The Times of Day." Garnier intended Lenepveu's allegory, painted on fireproof copper panels, to sum up the allegorical works in the rest of the theatre, including Baudry's majestic designs in the Grand Foyer out front. Its model, preserved in the Musée d'Orsay, reveals a graceful composition of airborne deities in the manner of the 18th-century Venetian painter Tiepolo.

It is lamentable that during the extensive restoration of the Opéra Garnier, completed in 2007, Lenepveu's ceiling was not restored to its rightful place. Chagall deserves his due, but not here.

—Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.