“Miss Peters May Have Had A Bad Night, But The Paris Opera Has Had A Bad Century”

The Grand Staircase (and I believe such is the correct proper name) of Palais Garnier, whose interior I saw for the first time yesterday.

Performance quality notwithstanding (and there was perhaps more wit than truth in Rudolf Bing’s famous rejoinder, a dose of acid flung at Paris’s music critics), the Paris Opera is a remarkable institution simply because Palais Garnier is one of its two homes (the other is L'Opéra Bastille, where we caught Tuesday night’s performance of “Khovanshchina”). The building makes a “statement”, inside and out, wherever one looks.

In fact, the entire city of Paris makes a “statement”.