In the last half of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th, the Old French Opera House seen here at Bourbon and Toulouse streets stood as the cultural center for the city’s French-speaking Creoles. In its day, it ranked among the most important opera houses in the nation where great European composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saens often premiered their latest operas in America.
As Brian Altobello notes in his 2021 book, “Whiskey, Women and War,” the French Opera House was the “soul” and “high church” of New Orleans Creole French culture. “The city’s Opera House,” he continues, “defined old New Orleans, underscored its distinction from the rest of America’s cities, and stood as the primary proof that New Orleans remained unsevered from its European roots.”
Designed in 1859 in the Italianate style by New Orleans architects James Gallier Jr. and George Esterbrook, the opera house with its grand elliptical ceiling opened in December 1859 with a performance of Rossini’s “Guillaume Tell.” Over the years, it hosted Carnival balls, extravagant galas, and performances by many of the most important opera singers in the world, including one in 1861 by the acclaimed Italian soprano Adelina Patti. By the early 20th century, however, the building, like the rest of the French Quarter, had steadily declined. To save it from demolition, New Orleans benefactor and preservationist William Ratcliffe Irby purchased the structure in 1913 and donated it to Tulane University.
Then came the great tragedy. On Dec. 4, 1919, the French Opera House burned to the ground. According to a report in the next day’s Times-Picayune, the fire started at 2:50 a.m. Raising the alarm was concert master Giulio Bramucci who was walking home to his apartment in the opera house when he and a friend noticed smoke billowing from the windows. It was too late. Within hours the building was completely destroyed.
The next day New Orleans writer Lyle Saxon penned this eulogy to the grand old opera house in the Times-Picayune: “Gone is all the glory which has marked the building for more than a half-century – gone in a blaze of burning gauze and tinsel, a blaze more splendid and more terrible than Walpurgis Night, that long-famous Brocken of the Opera ‘Faust.’ And into the hearts of the people of New Orleans there has come a great sorrow, a great mourning. For there are few women here who have not tender memories of their vanished youth. . . There are few men who have loved or been loved, who have not recollections of the nights when they sat in the dreamy darkness of the old building, listening to the voices of great singers blending with the orchestra, and thrilling at the touch of a bit of gauze, as it brushed their cheeks.”
Opera fans had hoped the opera house would rise again on Bourbon, but that was not to be. Instead, the city built the Municipal Auditorium on North Rampart St. in 1930. As to the old opera house property on Bourbon, it remained a vacant lot until the mid-1960s when investors constructed on the site the Downtown Motor Inn (now Four Points by Sheraton Hotel).
