5 Of The World's Most Iconic Opera Houses

An opera house, done right, is as much an engineering situation as an artistic one—acoustics, fire safety, the physics of sound bouncing off a horseshoe-shaped hall, all wrapped in enough marble and gilt to make the engineering invisible. Some of the world's most celebrated houses were finished only after their architects died mid-project, paid for in unrest and bombing and decades of delay. Here is a list of five of the most iconic opera houses that have earned their reputations the hard way.

Charles Garnier was 35 and largely unknown when he beat 170 other entrants, including Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, to win the 1861 competition for Napoleon III's new opera house. When Empress Eugénie reportedly asked what architectural style his design was—it was neither Greek nor Louis XVI—Garnier is said to have answered that it was simply "Napoleon III." Construction of Palais Garnier ran fourteen years and survived the Franco-Prussian War, the fall of the Second Empire, and the discovery of an underground lake beneath the foundations, which had to be drained with steam pumps running for eight months before work could continue. The cistern that resulted from the drainage still exists beneath the building and inspired the underground lake in Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. The auditorium seats 1,979 people and is capped by a ceiling painted by Marc Chagall in 1964, commissioned by the then Culture Minister André Malraux, replacing the original.

La Scala opened on August 3, 1778, commissioned by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria after the city's previous opera house burned down in a fire following a carnival gala. It was built on the site of a deconsecrated church, Santa Maria alla Scala, from which it takes its name, and was designed by the neoclassical architect Giuseppe Piermarini. The opening night performance was Antonio Salieri's L'Europa riconosciuta, composed specifically for the occasion. La Scala's history runs through Italian opera's biggest names: Bellini's Norma premiered there in 1831, Verdi had a notoriously fraught relationship with the house before eventually staging Otello in 1887, and Arturo Toscanini, who had played cello in the orchestra at Otello's premiere, went on to become its most influential music director. The theatre was severely damaged by Allied bombing in 1943 and rebuilt by 1946, reopening with a concert conducted by Toscanini himself.

Danish architect Jørn Utzon was 38, working out of a modest office north of Copenhagen, when he submitted his competition entry for Sydney's new opera house in 1956—one of 233 entries from 28 countries. He had never had a building under his name when he won. The roof's now-iconic sail-like shells were originally drawn with no defined geometry, and it took the design team until 1961, after twelve failed iterations involving parabolas and ellipsoids, to realise that every shell could be cut from sections of a single sphere, a solution that finally made the structure buildable. Costs rose from an estimated 7 million to 102 million Australian dollars, and the timeline stretched from four years to fourteen. Utzon resigned from the project in 1966 amid disputes with the New South Wales government and left Australia, never to return and see the completed building. It was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973, later declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

Neither of the Vienna State Opera's two architects, August Sicard von Sicardsburg and Eduard van der Nüll, lived to see it open. Public criticism over the building's appearance, including the nickname "the sunken treasure chest," is widely believed to have contributed to van der Nüll taking his own life in April 1868; Sicardsburg died of tuberculosis ten weeks later. The opera house finally opened in May 1869 with Mozart's Don Giovanni, in the presence of Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth. Gustav Mahler later served as its director from 1897 to 1907, modernising its repertoire and stagecraft. On March 12, 1945, an American bombing raid set the building alight, destroying the auditorium and stage; only the facade, grand staircase, and the Schwind Foyer survived. It reopened a decade later, in November 1955, with Beethoven's Fidelio, a performance that many in Austria regarded as a symbol of the country regaining its independence.

The Teatro Colón took nearly twenty years to build and outlived two of its architects in the process. Italian architect Francesco Tamburini laid the first stone in 1890 and died the following year; his successor, Victor Meano, was murdered by his own servant in 1904 after being caught in a love triangle. Belgian architect Julio Dormal eventually completed the building, layering French Beaux-Arts detailing over the original Italian Renaissance design. It finally opened on May 25, 1908 with Verdi's Aida, substituted at the last minute when the tenor scheduled for Otello fell ill. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium seats 2,487 people, with standing room for another thousand, beneath a chandelier carrying 700 bulbs. Acoustics expert Leo Beranek's survey of international opera and orchestra directors ranked the Colón's hall as having the best acoustics for opera anywhere in the world. Luciano Pavarotti once said the sound was so precise it made him nervous to perform, since any mistake would be just as audible as every note done right.