Opera Bastille at Night

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This is a night photograph of the Opera Bastille in Paris, taken from the boulevard Beaumarchais just half an hour before a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

This was taken without a tripod, so it’s not ideal. I’ll try to do better in the future. The photograph is not tilted; the street actually rises slightly up to the right.

Note that the small building next to the opera house on the left is actually part of the opera house; it communicates with the rest of the opera house, in fact, and there are stories of people wandering from the restaurant on the ground floor in this building onto the stage of the opera while looking for the restrooms (sounds a bit like urban legend to me, but who knows?). Anyway, this incongruous extra wing of the opera house duplicates another building that had to be torn down when the opera house was built. It holds a FNAC music store and a restaurant today, mainly.

Photographed on January 19, 2000.