Royal Opera House

The Royal Opera House is in London, in a part of the city called Covent Garden.

It is a theater. Singers and dancers put on shows there.

The Royal Opera House stands in Covent Garden, in London, with its main front on Bow Street. It is a theater for opera, where the story is sung, and for ballet, where the story is danced.

The opera house says it is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, and that over one million people come through its doors each year.

The Survey of London places the Royal Opera House on the site of the theater John Rich built in 1731–2, with its entrance front facing Bow Street. It is the third theater there: Edward Shepherd's first building burned in 1808, and Sir Robert Smirke's second was destroyed in 1856.

Today the building is home to The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House; the organization reports more than one million visitors a year, with many more watching through cinema relays, broadcasts and live streams.

The front of the opera house has six tall stone columns. Their tops are carved like leaves.

A long carved stone picture runs behind the columns. It came from the old theater!

The front on Bow Street has a portico: a porch held up by six tall columns of Portland stone, each 36 feet (about 11 meters) high. Their tops are in the Corinthian style, carved with leaves, and above them is a triangle-shaped gable called a pediment.

Behind the columns runs a long carved stone panel made from designs by the sculptor John Flaxman. It was saved from the theater that burned in 1856, and so were the two statues in the niches at the ends of the front.

The Bow Street front is dominated by a Corinthian portico of six plain-shafted Portland stone columns, 36 feet high and 3 ft 8 in across at the foot, rising from pedestals joined by open balustrades to a pediment with a plain tympanum. The portico was ordered only on 27 March 1858; its last stone was fixed on 8 May, one week before the opening.

Within the portico, John Flaxman's twin bas-reliefs, salvaged from Smirke's theater, are combined in one long panel, and round carvings between the arches hold busts of the playwrights Shakespeare, Jonson, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, carved by James Tolmie. Statues by Rossi, also saved from the earlier theater, stand in the end niches.

In this photo it is night, and lights shine on the opera house. Can you count the tall columns?

This photo was taken at night in August 2009. Lights shine on the portico's columns and their leafy tops, and on the long carved panel behind them. Below, you can see big lit windows and a stone railing with short, rounded posts called balusters.

On the left, a statue stands in a niche in the wall.

The photograph (August 2009, by Peter Suranyi) shows the Bow Street portico lit at night: the Corinthian capitals, the pediment, small round windows within the portico, the Flaxman panel above large glazed windows, and the balustrades between the column pedestals. A statue stands in the niche of the end bay on the left.

After the Second World War the opera house began a new chapter: its first post-war performance, on 20 February 1946, was The Sleeping Beauty, danced by the Sadler's Wells Ballet.