The theatre that housed the Paris Opera until it burned down in 1873. Its stage, rehearsal rooms and subscribers' foyer are the world behind Degas's dancers — and he went on painting it from memory long after it was ash.
For most of the nineteenth century the Paris Opera performed here, on the rue Le Peletier, in a theatre that had been put up as a temporary measure and lasted half a century. It was the centre of a whole social machine: the performances, the ballet school, the rehearsal rooms, and the foyer de la danse where wealthy male subscribers were permitted to mix with the dancers before and after they went on.
That machine is Edgar Degas's subject. The dancers he painted are usually at work rather than in performance — at the barre, waiting, adjusting a shoe, being corrected — and the men in black at the edges of those pictures are the subscribers. It is a body of work about labour, and about who was watching, and it is set in this building.
The theatre burned in October 1873. The Opera moved into the Palais Garnier when it opened in 1875, and Degas went there too. But the rooms in many of his later compositions are still recognisably the ones on the rue Le Peletier: he kept painting a theatre that no longer existed, from memory and from the studies he had already made.
Nothing of the building survives. The coordinate here approximates the historic address rather than marking anything a visitor can see.
The Salle Le Peletier is destroyed by fire.
The Palais Garnier opens and the Opera moves there.
No. It burned down in 1873 and was never rebuilt. Nothing of the theatre survives on the rue Le Peletier.
Both — but the interiors in many of his dance pictures are the Salle Le Peletier, which he continued to paint from memory and earlier studies after it burned and the Opera moved to the Palais Garnier.
A room where subscribers to the Opera were allowed to mingle with the dancers around performances. The men in evening dress at the edges of Degas's ballet scenes are these subscribers.
The Paris Opera occupied the Salle Le Peletier until it burned in 1873. Its stage, rehearsal rooms and subscribers' foyer are the setting of Degas's dance pictures, many of which he continued to compose from memory of these rooms after the building was gone.
Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery, where the second Impressionist exhibition was held in 1876 — the dealer who kept buying the group's work through the years when almost nobody else would.
Visit the placeThe Salle Favart, where Debussy's only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, was first performed on 30 April 1902 — after nearly a decade of work and a dress rehearsal that turned into a public row.
Visit the placeThe Boussod, Valadon gallery on the boulevard Montmartre, where Berthe Morisot was given her first solo exhibition in 1892 — at the age of fifty-one, and three years before her death.
Visit the placeThe house where Edgar Degas was born on 19 July 1834, on a quiet street in the 9th arrondissement — the district he would spend almost his entire life inside.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.