Great Opera Houses

An opera house is the most expensive building a city can decide it needs, and the decision is never only about music.

Some were built to make an argument about a state. The Paris Opéra was Napoleon III's, and Garnier gave it a staircase larger than the auditorium because the point was to be seen ascending it. Vienna built its house on the Ringstrasse where the city walls had stood, in the same decade the empire began to come apart. Sydney's was a competition entry the engineers could not initially build, and it took sixteen years, a resignation and a tenfold overrun to prove a young country could finish it.

Others were built by an audience rather than a ruler. La Scala's boxes were owned outright by Milanese families who furnished them and left; Parma's gallery is famous for booing tenors, and singers still describe it as the most frightening room in Italy. Where the audience paid, the audience judges.

And a few exist for a single body of work. Wagner designed Bayreuth himself — no boxes, so no seat is socially superior, wooden surfaces, the orchestra sunk under a hood — and it has played almost nothing else since 1876. Verona's Roman arena needs no amplification because a first-century ellipse was already an acoustic instrument.

The buildings differ because the reasons differ. Listen for whose money is in the room.