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The Paris Opera now uses the Palais Garnier mainly for ballet.
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Auguste passed on his love of eighteenth-century music to his son, whose favorite composer was Christoph Willibald Gluck. For years his father, Auguste De Gas, hosted weekly musical salons at which amateurs and professionals alike sang and played instruments. Neither a musician nor singer himself, he was raised in a family with a strong appreciation for musical performance.
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However, the settings of his opera scenes have more in common with the erstwhile Peletier than the Palais Garnier. At the Garnier he gained access to backstage spaces and observed the interactions of dancers and dark-suited season ticket holders. Degas mourned the loss of Le Peletier and never warmed to the extravagance of the Garnier theater, despite spending his most active years of opera attendance there. Designed by Charles Garnier, the new, resplendent opera house-still in operation today-was one of the major building projects initiated by Emperor Napoléon III (who was deposed before the building opened in 1875). In 1873, it too burned down, although its replacement had already been under construction for several years. Hastily erected as a temporary home for the Opéra in 1821 following a fire that destroyed a previous theater, it nevertheless boasted excellent acoustics and was the first French theater to use gaslight. The first, Le Peletier, was by all accounts neither grand nor beautiful. In Degas’s lifetime the Opéra performed in two different buildings.
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