Opéra de Monaco

The Salle Garnier is the opera house of Monte-Carlo, built onto the Casino and named after its architect, Charles Garnier, who had just finished the Paris Opéra. It went up in eight and a half months and opened on 25 January 1879 with Sarah Bernhardt on stage, dressed as a nymph; the first opera, Robert Planquette's Le Chevalier Gaston, followed on 8 February. Several artists of the Paris house worked on it too, Gustave Boulanger among them, and the hall seats 524.

Henri Schmit remodelled the stage for opera in 1898–99. Under Raoul Gunsbourg, director from 1892 for sixty years, it became a house of premieres – Berlioz's La Damnation de Faust staged in 1893, Massenet's Don Quichotte with Chaliapin in 1910, Puccini's La Rondine in 1917 – some forty-five world premieres in all. The hall closed for renovation in 2004–05, when the season moved to the Grimaldi Forum.