His grand operas were a masterful potpourri of components. Salieri was hailed as the natural successor to Gluck, the main force at the opera in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and was greatly influenced by his music.īut perhaps it was Meyerbeer who reigned supreme. Indeed, Mozart was not performed at the Paris Opera until the early 1800s and then only in a severely adapted form. It is interesting that Mozart began to work with Da Ponte after the latter’s huge success with Salieri in France. Salieri had his greatest triumphs in Paris with Les Danaides (1787) and Tarare (1784). Unquestionably among the most performed composers at that time was Salieri, whose music remained in the repertoire at the time of Leroux’s novel. After the Revolution it was restored to its leading position in Paris by Napoleon in the reforms of 1807.
The Paris Opera House rose to pre-eminence in the eighteenth century. Even today, it employs over a thousand people and contains two permanent ballet schools within the building. At the time in which the novel is set, the Opera House boasted over fifteen hundred employees and had its own stables of white horses for the opera troupe underneath the forecourt.
From prima donna to stage-hand, the Opera House was governed by intrigue and rumor everyone jostling for position, defending their own territory and scrabbling for new. It was a hotbed of politics and factions. The huge building was constructed to designs by Charles Garnier from 1861-1875. Anyone familiar with a large opera house would testify that it is an extraordinary labyrinth of people and passageways, but the Paris Opera House of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in which Gaston Leroux set The Phantom of the Opera, was remarkable by any standards.
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