Founding the Metropolitan Opera

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Founding the Metropolitan Opera

An Age of Opulence. The story of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City unfolds amid privilege and desire. During the late nineteenth century a coterie of moneyed families, their fortunes swelled by post-Civil War speculation, set new standards for conspicuous consumption. Yet despite their cash and their flash, the nouveaux riches of New York remained excluded from the inner circles of the old Knickerbocker gentry. In the 1870s and early 1880s New York boasted an adequate opera house: the Academy of Music, founded in 1849 and located downtown on Fourteenth Street. Edith Wharton (1862-1937), novelist of New York manners, opened her Age of Innocence (1920) at the academy: “the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to.” The old families controlled the “sociable old Academy”; the “new people” angled for acceptance. One evening in 1880 the balance of social power shifted. German soprano Lilli Lehmann (1848-1929) recalled the fateful moment in her memoir, My Path Through Life (1914): “As one evening [at the Academy] one of the millionairesses did not receive the box in which she intended to shine because another woman had anticipated her, the husband of the former took prompt action and caused the Metropolitan Opera House to rise.”

Under Construction. The snubbing of the “millionairess”—a Vanderbilt, as fate would have it—inflamed the “new money” set. These “upstarts” pooled their resources and designated a site for a new opera house on Broadway between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. Construction began in 1881 and proceeded slightly behind schedule. By spring 1883 the building was finished, and the choicest boxes were apportioned among the shareholders. On 22 October the Metropolitan staged its first opera: Charles Gounod’s Faust (1859), featuring the soprano Christine Nilsson in the role of Margherita.

Rank and Ruckus. Architect Josiah Cleveland Cady (1837-1919) had designed several other New York landmarks, among them the Museum of Naturai History. The Met, however, was Cady’s only theater, and connoisseurs complained about poor acoustics and a small backstage area. More problematic than the architectural design, however, was the behavior of society patrons. For many people, the ritual of operagoing had next to nothing to do with music. With three full tiers of private boxes, the Met more than doubled the luxury capacity of the old Academy. All told, boxes accounted for nearly 25 percent of the three-thousand-odd seats at the Met. For many who owned or rented “box” seats, a night at the opera meant a chance to display one’s wardrobe and chat with one’s friends. Upper-class patrons ignored a notice posted in January 1891 by the Met’s board of directors: “Many complaints having been made to the directors of the Opera House of the annoyance produced by the talking in the boxes during the performance, the Board requests that it be discontinued.” A few people, of course, attended the Met to listen to opera. One middle-class

music lover complained that the incessant chatter from the private boxes drowned out his favorite arias. A response in the New York press dismissed the complaint and confirmed the social order: “It is very certain that these magnificent music-dramas are only made possible for him by the more ornate portion of the community.”

Experimentation. A parade of respected performers — including Lehmann, Marcella Sembrich, Italo Campanini, Adelina Patti, Etelka Gerster, Albert Niemann, Lillian Norton-Gower, Marianne Brandt, Max Alvary, and Julius Perotti—graced the Met stage during its first decade. Backstage, however, chaos reigned. Under the direction of the theatrical entrepreneur Henry E. Abbey (1846-1896), the Met lost some $600,000 during the 1883-1884 season. Under Abbey’s replacement, Leopold Damrosch (1832-1885), the company performed only German opera. Critics raved but audiences dozed. Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), a leading humorist of the era, satirized the reputation of Germanic opera:

“That’s Wagner,” she says. “Tis th’ music iv the future,” she says. “Yes,” says Donahue, “but I don’t want me hell on earth. I can wait f’ r it.”

After Damrosch died in 1885, his son Walter (1862-1950) succeeded him and continued to stage German opera through the fall of 1891. At this juncture, however, Damrosch’s contract expired, and the Met reverted to more crowd-friendly Italian and French fare. (The first Met performance of an American opera, Frederick Shepherd Converse’s The Pipe of Desire, occurred in 1910.) By the turn of the century the Met had finally achieved a level of stability in its finances and artistic philosophy, but before it became a repository of “high culture,” it had traversed some exceptionally low terrain.