The company's annual budget is in the order of 200 million euros, of which €100M come from the French state and €70M from box office receipts.

[1] With this money, the company runs the two houses and supports a large permanent staff, which includes the orchestra of 170, a chorus of 110 and the corps de ballet of 150.

Seventeenth-century France offered Perrin essentially two types of organization for realizing his vision: a royal academy or a public theater.

[5] On 28 June 1669, Louis XIV signed the Privilège accordé au Sieur Perrin pour l'établissement d'une Académie d'Opéra en musique, & Vers François (Privilege granted to Sir Perrin for the establishment of an Academy of Opera in music, & French Verse).

The monopoly, originally intended to protect the enterprise from competition during its formative phase, was renewed for subsequent recipients of the privilege up to the early French Revolution.

As Victoria Johnson points out, "the Opera was an organization by nature so luxurious and expensive in its productions that its very survival depended on financial protection and privilege.

Within one month Lully had convinced the king to expand the privilege by restricting the French and Italian comedians to using two singers rather than six, and six instrumentalists, rather than twelve.

[9] Later, Lully and his successors bitterly negotiated the concession of the privilege, in whole or in part, from the entrepreneurs in the provinces: in 1684 Pierre Gautier bought the authorisation to open a music academy in Marseille, then the towns of Lyon, Rouen, Lille and Bordeaux followed suit in the following years.

To mitigate the damage, Louis XIV arranged for new works to be premiered at the court, usually at the Chateau Vieux of the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

[12] In 1661 Louis XIV, who was a dancer himself and one of the great architects of baroque ballet (the art form which would one day evolve into classical ballet), established the Académie Royale de Danse, intended to codify court and character dances and to certify dance teachers by examination.

[13] From 1680 until Lully's death, it was under the direction of the great dancing master Pierre Beauchamp, the man who codified the five positions of the feet.

[23] Past principal conductors and music directors of the Opéra have included Myung-whun Chung, James Conlon and Philippe Jordan.

In April 2021, the Opéra announced the appointment of Gustavo Dudamel as its next music director, effective 1 August 2021, with an initial contract of 6 seasons.

The initial release consisted of 80 titles, including videos of operas, ballets, documentaries, and master classes.

[26][27] Video is watched with a web browser: Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge Chromium, and Safari are supported.

Some of the new theatres that appeared during this period include:[60] After about 1870, the situation was simpler with regard to opera, with primarily the Opéra and the Opéra-Comique in operation.

The naming situation became somewhat confusing after the Opéra-Comique's theater (the second Salle Favart) burned on 25 May 1887, since the company began performing in other locations.