OK, it wasn’t actually opera. Which is how we planned it. Opera requires lots of patience and an appreciation for le danse I will never develop.

We were more interested in seeing the inside of the Paris Opera house than seeing an opera staged at the building now sometimes known as the Palais Garnier. (Though the nearby Metro stop is still named “Opera,” the national opera moved its operations to the new opera house over by Bastille more than 20 years ago. The house nearly everyone considers hideous.)

The old opera house is the building that inspired the “Phantom of the Opera” Gothic novel and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of the same name. Apparently, a counterweight for the enormous chandelier once fell and killed a man, and that was enough to let imaginations run riot.

What we saw were not the spiritual successors to Nijinsky and Nureyev, but two fairly small ensembles playing unfamiliar music.

The architectural style of the building, which opened in 1875 is described as “neo-Baroque” — which is a classy way to say “totally over the top.”

The whole place is gilded. Even the gild is gilded. Except where it is all crushed velvety or marble.

Greek gods gambol in statuary and paintings, particularly in the foyer.  The ceiling of the performance hall is one big Marc Chagall, a nod toward modernity and a prompt for generic puzzlement by tourists craning their necks beneath the dome.

But if you appreciate 19th century symmetry and sumptuous, this is the place for you. And for many architects, as well, who hardly bothered to hide their “borrowing” of Charles Garnier’s design for many subsequent government buildings around the world.

Luckily, we were there just to be inside the place for a performance. The performance itself was secondary … and sometimes painful.

After a string quartet performed a four-part work by Schumann, which I didn’t recognize (but I will take the blame for that) … we had most of an hour of aural torture from the pen of one Paul Hindemith,  a German composer who lived most of his life in the 20th century and seemed determined to make us remember the first half of it, anyway, as a time of jarring dissonance.

Eight musicians honked and tweeted and blatted for the duration of the five-part piece, and if the bassoon/horn/clarinet/strings ensemble blundered into a major chord, I missed it.

If Hindemith is a genius than I am glad to be sunk in ignorance. The idea of a melody still strikes me as an important concept, but Hindemith might punch me in the face for saying that, had he not died in 1963.

Anyway, Hindemith was not going to interfere with our enjoyment of an historical setting, our appreciation of the craftsmanship and skill that went into the building of the place, and just being inside the Paris Opera.

Middle-brow art consumer that I am, I was just happy to see the chandelier and wonder how the Phantom moved around the place.