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22-589: The Westin Paris – Vendôme is a historic hotel in Paris, France at 3 rue de Castiglione on the corner of the rue de Rivoli , facing the Tuileries Garden . The hotel opened on June 6, 1878, as the Hôtel Continental , It was designed by Charles Garnier 's son-in-law Henri Blondel and was intended to be the most luxurious hotel in Paris at the time. It occupied a full block, the former premises of

44-405: A religious nature found a special place in the mystery plays performed on cathedral squares. As before, they dealt with sacred subjects, but they were not about worship per se. Secular musical theater also existed, but had a more popular and intimate aspect (see, for example, Adam de la Halle 's Jeu de Robin et Marion ("Play of Robin and Marion"), in the 13th century). At the beginning of

66-551: A single façade plan. The result was a pleasing uniformity, and Napoleon's planners extended a similar program, which resulted in the arcades and facades that extend for almost a mile along the street. The restored Bourbon King Charles X continued the Rue de Rivoli eastwards from the Louvre, as did King Louis-Philippe . Finally, Emperor Napoleon III extended it into the 17th-century quarter of Le Marais (see: Right Bank ). Beneath

88-526: The Opernhaus vorm Salztor in Naumburg in 1701. With the rise of bourgeois and capitalist social forms in the 19th century, European culture moved away from its patronage system to a publicly supported system. Early United States opera houses served a variety of functions in towns and cities, hosting community dances, fairs, plays, and vaudeville shows as well as operas and other musical events. In

110-473: The 2024 Paris Olympics . Rue de Rivoli The Rue de Rivoli is an example of a transitional compromise between an environment of prestigious monuments and aristocratic squares, and the results of modern town-planning by municipal authorities. The new street that Napoleon developed through the heart of Paris includes on one side the north wing of the Louvre Palace , (which Napoleon extended) and

132-522: The Church abandoned spectacles as practiced in Antiquity. Histrions , representative of Greco-Roman civilization , gradually disappeared. The Middle Ages saw the abandonment of ancient theaters, which were transformed into gigantic stone quarries , like many other ancient buildings, both public or private. Music still had its place in worship. It continued to bring audiences together, but its content

154-697: The Tuileries Gardens . Upon completion, it was the first time that a wide, well designed and aesthetically pleasing street bound the north wing of the Louvre Palace. Napoleon's original section of the street opened up eastward from the Place de la Concorde . Builders on the north side of the Place Louis XV, (as it then was named) between the Rue de Mondovi and Rue Saint-Florentin, had been constrained by letters patent in 1757 and 1758 to follow

176-679: The 17th and 18th centuries, opera houses were often financed by rulers, nobles, and wealthy people who used patronage of the arts to endorse their political ambition and social position. There was no opera house in London when Henry Purcell was composing and the first opera house in Germany, the Oper am Gänsemarkt , was built in Hamburg in 1678, followed by the Oper am Brühl in Leipzig in 1693, and

198-895: The 17th century, in Italy, singing underwent yet another renewal, with the emergence of Baroque art at the height of the Renaissance . Italy continues to have many working opera houses, such as the Teatro Massimo in Palermo (the biggest in the country), the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan . The Teatro San Cassiano in Venice was the world's first public opera house, inaugurated as such in 1637. In

220-483: The 2000s, most opera and theatre companies are supported by funds from a combination of government and institutional grants , ticket sales, and private donations. In the 19th-century United States, many theaters were given the name "opera house", even ones where opera was seldom if ever performed. Opera was viewed as a more respectable art form than theater ; calling a local theater an "opera house" therefore served to elevate it and overcome objections from those who found

242-768: The Ministry of Finance, ( burned in 1871 ) which had been designed by François-Hippolyte Destailleur in 1817, following the Bourbon Restoration . During the first World War the hotel was used as a military hospital by the French. The Hôtel Continental remained the largest hotel in Paris for decades; the Russian Grand Dukes habitually stayed there; at the Liberation of Paris , bedsheets were hung from its windows as cheerful flags of surrender. The hotel

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264-559: The Rue de Rivoli runs one of the main brick-vaulted, oval-sectioned sewers of Paris' much-imitated system, with its sidewalks for the sewer workers. In 1852, opposite the wing of the Louvre, Baron Haussmann enlarged the Place du Palais-Royal that is centred on the Baroque Palais Royal , built for Cardinal Richelieu in 1624 and willed to the royal family, with its garden surrounded by fashionable commercial arcades. At

286-554: The Rue de Rivoli, at the Place des Pyramides , is the gilded statue of Joan of Arc , situated close to where she was wounded at the Saint-Honoré Gate in her unsuccessful attack on English -held Paris, on September 8, 1429. A little further along, towards the Place de la Concorde , the Rue de Castiglione leads to the Place Vendôme , with its Vendôme Column surmounted by the effigy of Napoleon Bonaparte. He began

308-593: The building of the street in 1802; it was completed in 1865. A plaque at no. 144 commemorates the assassination there of the Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny , in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572. Opera house An opera house is a theater building used for performances of opera . Like many theaters, it usually includes a stage , an orchestra pit , audience seating, backstage facilities for costumes and building sets, as well as offices for

330-476: The ideal acoustics of theaters. He explained the use of brazen vases that Mummius had brought to Rome after having had the theater of Corinth demolished, and as they were probably used in the Theater of Pompey . As wooden theaters were naturally sonorous, these vases, placed between the seats on the stands, served as resonators in the stone buildings: "By means of this arrangement, the voice, which will come from

352-455: The institution's administration. While some venues are constructed specifically for operas, other opera houses are part of larger performing arts centers. Indeed, the term opera house is often used as a term of prestige for any large performing arts center. Based on Aristoxenus 's musical system, and paying homage to the architects of ancient Greek theater , Vitruvius described, in the 1st century BC, in his treatise De architectura ,

374-415: The jury to audition musicians competing for a prize. Ancient theaters provided the ideal conditions, but it was not yet time for opera: the aim was to worship the deities, not to venerate the muses . The subject was religious, it was accompanied by singing and instrumental music. Worship was public, and the audience was made up of citizens as well as other categories of the population. Four centuries later,

396-581: The personal investment portfolio of Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum , bought a minority stake in the hotel. Henderson Park put the hotel up for sale in February 2022, for €800 million. However, in March 2023, Dubai Holding bought out Henderson Park's controlling stake in the hotel for €650 million. It was announced that the hotel would remain under Westin management at least through

418-787: The rear of the garden is the older branch of the Bibliothèque Nationale , in the Rue Richelieu. North of the Rue de Rivoli, at the point where the Grands Boulevards crossed an enormous new square, the new opera house was built. The Opera Garnier is a monument to the construction of the Second Empire . Just behind the opera house can be found the largest department stores , such as the Galeries Lafayette and Printemps . East along

440-539: The stage as from a center, will extend in circles, will strike in the cavities of the vases, and will be made stronger and clearer, according to the relationship of consonance that it will have with one of these vases." The odeon built by Pericles near the Theater of Dionysus in Athens was, according to the Suda , intended for the rehearsal of music that was to be sung in the grand theater or, according to Plutarch , for

462-523: Was completely renewed. The Jeu de Daniel ("Play of Daniel") was a sung play, characteristic of the medieval Renaissance of the 12th century . The subject, taken from the biblical Book of Daniel , deals with Israel's captivity in Babylon . The play was written and performed by students of the Episcopal School of Beauvais , located in northern France. In the 15th century, sung theater of

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484-598: Was renamed the Inter-Continental Paris in 1969, and then became The Westin Paris in 2005, adding the suffix Vendôme to its name in 2010. The hotel was sold by Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund GIC to London-based Henderson Park Capital in 2017 for €550 million. The new owners announced that the hotel would be renovated at a cost of $ 350 million by designer Tristan Auer and would become part of Jumeirah Hotels & Resorts in 2022. The renovation and reflagging did not happen. In 2018, Dubai Holding ,

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