Theater
Theatro Municipal de São Paulo
Belle Époque opera house whose curved corner panels and adjustable acoustic shell shift its sound between opera and symphony.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo opens with an old contradiction in theater design: an opera house needs a dry, quick sound for sung words, while a concert hall needs a long, warm bloom of reverberation for an orchestra. It follows engineer Ramos de Azevedo and architects Claudio and Domiziano Rossi as they broke ground in 1903 and modeled the hall on the Paris Opera, working mostly on instinct. Look for the four curved corner panels tucked into the corners above, called tympana.
This audio guide was created using AI.