Toxic Lead Levels in Paris’s Palais Garnier Opera Delay Renovation

The discovery of lead during renovation work at Paris’s historic Palais Garnier—opened in 1875 and summoned as inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera (and even more famously for Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical adaptation)—has “throw[n] a tight schedule of venue closures and the projected budget into disarray,” according to a report in Le Figaro.

Planned restoration work that was supposed to take two years is now projected for five, with evaluation for the best method to extract the lead to be undertaken this summer. “Depending on the method chosen, the duration of the Palais Garnier stage’s closure will be determined this fall,” Le Figaro reports. “Barring any unpleasant surprises, management can already announce that the work will extend from at least 2027 to 2032, leading the Paris Opera to offer an off-site program during this period.”

Alexander Neef, the Paris Opera’s artistic director, told Le Figaro in the spring that he regarded the previously projected pause as a “hiatus” rather than a closure, with plans to keep one of the Palais Garnier’s two venues—the historic Palais Garnier and the more modern Opéra Bastille—open while the other is restored, and vice-versa. “We’re starting the work at Garnier because its closure, in terms of revenue and operations, will have a much smaller impact than that of Bastille,” Neef said at the time. “If I close Bastille while the Garnier stage isn’t functioning perfectly, I’m taking a risk.”

If Garnier closes from 2027 to 2032, renovation work on Bastille will begin during the 2033–34 season. But plans are now in flux, as is the budget. According to Le Figaro, the total cost of the work had been estimated at 670 million euros (around $765.8 million).