Opéra de Marseille, Opera house in 1st district of Marseille, France

The Opéra de Marseille is an opera house in the 1st arrondissement with neoclassical columns and stone reliefs decorating its facade. Inside, the theater accommodates roughly 1,800 spectators across multiple levels and serves as a venue for regular performances throughout the season.

Monsieur de La Tour, intendant of Provence, laid the first stone of the Grand-Théâtre on 14 July 1786, on ground freed when the galley arsenal moved to Toulon; the architect was Charles Joachim Bénard and it opened on 31 October 1787. On 13 November 1919 a fire after a rehearsal of Meyerbeer's L'Africaine left only the colonnade and load-bearing walls. Gaston Castel led the reconstruction, inaugurated on 3 December 1924 with Reyer's Sigurd, and the house has been a classified monument historique since 13 February 1997.

The house has a reputation for a critical audience, especially the top-gallery regulars known as "the gods". Since 31 July 1945 it has been run directly by the municipality, and from November 2014 the city has paired it with the 800-seat Théâtre de l'Odéon for operetta and young-audience shows.

The opera stands near the Vieux-Port in the 1st arrondissement, on a site freed when the galley arsenal moved to Toulon; the main facade with its six-column colonnade faces the street. The house seats 1,800 on an urn-shaped plan with three rings of boxes, two balconies and a gallery. A rehabilitation project begun in 2026 is scheduled to run until 2033, so check which spaces are open before a visit.

The 1919 fire left only the exterior stone colonnade and the main walls of the Grand-Théâtre. Architect Gaston Castel kept the pre-Revolutionary columns in the new facade, and the surviving original box office stands in the centre of the entrance hall, with two staircases rising from it to the foyer.