Opéra National de Bordeaux - Grand-Théâtre

This guide to the Grand-Theatre in Bordeaux opens with a puzzle: seventeen hundred seats filled the auditorium when it opened in seventeen eighty, and today fewer than eleven hundred remain, quietly engineered away bench by bench. It follows architect Victor Louis, who built almost the entire house out of timber at a time when opera houses across Europe kept burning to the ground roughly once a generation. You'll hear how the twelve Corinthian columns on the facade above you solve a problem of stone, weight and angles that should not have held together, and how the land itself was sold off to pay for it all. Stand back from the facade to take in the full run of columns before you go inside.