La Monnaie

Stand on the square for a moment and listen. Trams rattle somewhere behind you, shoppers drift toward the busy streets nearby, and a pigeon lifts off the steps. Then your eye settles on a pale stone front with tall columns and a carved triangle above them. This is La Monnaie, or De Munt in Dutch. It is the royal opera house of Brussels, and it is one of the few theatres anywhere that helped start a country.

The name sounds odd for an opera house. Monnaie means coins or money, and Munt means mint. The reason is simple. Long before there was any theatre here, this ground held a workshop that struck coins for the region. The mint disappeared centuries ago, but the name stayed. So every evening, Brussels goes to the opera at a place still called, in effect, the Mint.

A theatre first opened on this site around 1700. Brussels was then part of the Spanish Netherlands, and touring French and Italian companies brought opera and comedy to the city. Over the next century the stage became a centre of social life. Audiences came to see and to be seen, and the box you sat in said a great deal about who you were. That early building is gone. What you see today came later.

The present theatre was built in the early nineteenth century in a neoclassical style. Neoclassical means architecture that borrows from ancient Greece and Rome — columns, clean lines, a calm and orderly face. Look at the portico, the covered entrance with its row of columns. It was designed to look solemn and dignified, almost like a temple. In a way, that was the point. Opera was meant to feel like a serious civic ritual.

Now for the evening that changed everything. On 25 August 1830, the house staged an opera called La Muette de Portici, by the French composer Daniel Auber. Its story follows a revolt in Naples against foreign rule. Belgium at that time belonged to the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, and many people in Brussels resented rule from the north. The music landed in a room already full of tension.

During a duet that sings of sacred love for the fatherland, the mood in the hall shifted. Members of the audience reportedly rushed out into the streets, where crowds were already gathering. Protests spread across the city in the following days. Within weeks the unrest had become the Belgian Revolution, and the next year Belgium emerged as an independent kingdom. Few buildings can claim that a song performed inside them helped redraw the map of Europe.

The building did not survive unchanged. In the middle of the nineteenth century a fire gutted the theatre and left only the outer walls standing. Rebuilding came quickly. The architect Joseph Poelaert designed the new interior. He is the same man behind the enormous Palace of Justice that rises over the city's upper town. At La Monnaie, though, he worked on a more intimate scale, creating a richly decorated hall for music.

Inside, the auditorium follows the classic horseshoe shape of European opera houses. Tiers of balconies curve around the stage, layered one above another. The colours are deep red and gold, with painted ceilings and gilded ornament. The horseshoe was not only about beauty. It helped sound travel, and it let the audience watch each other almost as closely as the singers. If you attend a performance, notice how close even the upper seats feel to the stage.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. In the 1980s the opera house went through a major renovation, and its directors invited contemporary artists into this old building. The American painter Sam Francis created a colourful ceiling for one of the public spaces, and the artist Sol LeWitt designed a geometric marble floor. So beneath the nineteenth-century gilding, modern art waits for those who know to look for it.

That renovation came with a new artistic ambition. Under the director Gerard Mortier, during the 1980s, La Monnaie built a reputation for bold staging and challenging new productions. It became a house that critics from across Europe travelled to see. Before that, from the 1960s, the choreographer Maurice Béjart had based his famous ballet company here. His work made Brussels a name in modern dance, and the theatre a place of experiment as well as tradition.

The theatre is a federal institution, belonging to the whole of Belgium rather than one region. That is why it carries two names, one in French and one in Dutch, the two main languages of the city. You will hear both on the square around you. Productions often come with surtitles in several languages, projected above the stage. In a city full of European offices, the audience is often as mixed as the cast.

Step back now and look at the setting. The square in front of the theatre is open and busy, with shops and a modern shopping centre across the way. A short walk takes you to the main shopping street and toward the Grand-Place, the old market square of the city. The opera house sits right in the commercial heart of Brussels. Art and everyday trade share the same few streets, just as they did when coins were made here.

Before you go, look once more at the columns and the carved pediment above them. Think of that summer night in 1830, when people poured out of these doors and into history. Today the same doors open for quieter reasons — a premiere, a matinee, a school group. As you walk away, listen for the trams and the voices in two languages. They are part of the same story this building has told for centuries.