Opéra Bastille

This guide to the Opéra Bastille in Paris starts with a scandal: six months before the 1989 opening, star conductor Daniel Barenboim was fired by board chairman Pierre Bergé over pay and programming, prompting protest letters from Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti and a resignation from Pierre Boulez. It also traces the building's own strange origin, a blind architecture competition among 756 entrants that a jury assumed had been won by a famous American, only to reveal a near-unknown thirty-six-year-old instead. Listen for how both controversies played out before the curtain ever rose.