No Fish, Just Phantoms

Theatres are at their most ghostly during the daytime, when everything else seems supernaturally benign. In dark hours they are alive, bustling with the activity of a thousand evenings out, of gaiety and entertainment. They aren't meant to be frequented in the daylight. They wait when the sun is up, holding their breath in anticipation of the hour when they come to life, when electricity courses through their circuits to light them up and throw open their doors to welcome the masses. That may have explained why the Opera Garnier was so quiet that Sunday, even though crowds were filling its marble halls and chattering in its passageways. It was daytime. The theatre was still just sleeping.

The footsteps of the multitude who had come to celebrate one of the European Heritage Days by looking around the grand building must have echoed in the huge halls, but I don't think anybody could really hear them. The minute you stepped through the door you could tell that there was a spell on this place. The eerie half-light cast on gold leaf decoration and sumptuous painted ceilings created an atmosphere of quiet repose. Later on the orchestra would strike up and the artistes would take to the stage, but for now all was still. We could all look, but no matter how hard we tried, with our tourist desires for pictures and exploration, we could not wake the slumbering beast. She was silent. The black marble bust of Saint-Saens looked silently down from above the fireplace and surveyed nothing but silence, even amongst the throng.

These were the corridors that Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera was supposed to have walked amongst before descending into the depths below the stage. And what of those depths? I read once that there is water there, a river, canal or maybe a sewer even, filled with fish who are kept well fed by the scene shifters and stagehands. I was longing to know if this was true, but alas there was no access allowed to the bowels of the building. We could but glimpse the stage from afar, peering through the tastefully etched glass of small portholes in the doors of the plush velvet boxes. Otherwise we just walked the corridors like phantoms ourselves, climbing the ornate staircases and emerging from amongst the faint chandelier glow into the bright light of day on the front balcony, looking out at all the traffic and the people on the Place de l'Opera who were creating disorder amongst the ordered beauty of Haussman's town planning.

Who had stood on that balcony and looked out as we did now, but at the proper theatre-going hour, champagne glass in hand? What romantic assignations had been made there, or in the stillness of each marble impasse and velvet alcove within? Once this place had been filled with the sound of voices singing the bold tones of operatic notes. What stories could each gently flickering chandelier bulb tell of those days before the large scale productions decamped to the ultramodern grey steel of the Opera Bastille, leaving the Opera Garnier as the home of ballet? How is it different now that silk-shod feet tread the boards more often than robust tenors shake them? The building oozes history from each marble-clad brick but she only hints at answers to my questions. She isn't really talking, she's resting now, waiting for the night. So we leave the daytime spirits to their sleepwalking, turning back to see the gilded statues that crown the imposing edifice glowing golden against the darkening clouds, knowing that we have only heard a tiny whisper of the beating heart of the Opera Garnier. The true whole would only be revealed to those paying guests after dark, shrouded as it is in pure theatrical magic.