The Met opera was born because old money snubbed new money
In 1880 New York's newly rich industrial families could not get boxes at the Academy of Music, so 22 men met at Delmonico's and planned a rival house. The Metropolitan Opera opened three years later, and within three more the old Academy had given up its opera season.
The Academy's few private boxes belonged to families at the very top of New York society, and by 1880 they had no wish to share them with upstart industrialists. On April 28 of that year, 22 frustrated outsiders gathered at Delmonico's restaurant, elected officers and sold ownership subscriptions. Their theatre at 39th and Broadway had three tiers of private boxes where Morgans, Roosevelts and Vanderbilts could put their fortunes on show. It opened on October 22, 1883, to social and artistic acclaim.
At first the Met hired impresarios rather than producing its own seasons. Henry Abbey managed the opening 1883–84 season, which began with Gounod's Faust starring the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson and offered 150 performances of 20 operas, all sung in Italian. It also toured to Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and other cities, and ended with heavy losses. For season two, the conductor Leopold Damrosch switched the company to German, scoring triumphs in Wagner, but he died only months in.
Touring became a habit. The company visited Philadelphia for nearly eighty years, giving close to 900 performances there by 1961, and from 1898 it made a six-week spring tour to American cities that mostly lacked opera companies. Between 1900 and 1904 the violinist and librarian Lionel Mapleson recorded fragments of performances on an Edison cylinder phonograph near the stage, preserving the only known sound of some singers. Its first European trip, to Paris, came in 1910.
In 1966 the company moved to Lincoln Center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Now the largest classical music organization in North America, it stages about 18 operas a year between late September and early June in rotating repertory, with up to seven performances a week; the 2015–16 season held 227 performances of 25 operas. Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been music director since 2018.
Source: Metropolitan Opera
