A Theatregoer's Guide to Attending the Metropolitan Opera

Table Of Content

• Review: Dizzying Night at the Met with Grigorian's Splendiferous BUTTERFLY in House Debut
• Everything you need to know about the 2024 Met Gala
• What is the Met Gala dress code?
• Metropolitan Opera
• Metropolitan Opera House
• Lindemann Young Artist Development Program
• The Metropolitan Opera’s 2024 Summer Recital Series features five free concerts throughout New York City
• The New York Hotels Where A-Listers Get Ready for the Met Gala

Mrs. Paran Stevens was cautious and went to both the Metropolitan and the Academy that night. “There was a big crowd Monday night at the Metropolitan Opera House,” he wrote. The Goulds and Vanderbilts and people of that ilk perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks. When someone remarked that the house looked as bright as a new dollar, the appropriate character of the assemblage became apparent. To a refined eye, the decorations of the edifice seemed in extremely bad taste.” Nevertheless, the Academy of Music was doomed. Faced with this ultimatum, the Queen of Society, thinking only of the happiness of her daughter, surrendered.

Review: Dizzying Night at the Met with Grigorian's Splendiferous BUTTERFLY in House Debut

Planning for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera began as early as the mid-1920s, when the backstage facilities of the former house were becoming vastly inadequate for growing repertory and advancing stagecraft. As part of the development of the present-day Rockefeller Center site, there was to be a development with a new 4,000-seat opera house at its center. Financial problems and the following stock market crash of 1929 postponed the relocation of the Metropolitan Opera, and the complex became more commercial-based.

Everything you need to know about the 2024 Met Gala

While Secretary of the Interior Stewart Lee Udall had determined the Metropolitan Opera House eligible for National Historic Landmark designation in December 1962—and despite the best efforts of “Save the Met”—the Metropolitan Opera Association, Inc. declined Landmark designation due to its plans to replace the opera house. Ultimately, it demolished the “Old Met” in 1967 as part of its construction of the current Metropolitan Opera House in the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts, which had opened the previous year, permanently preventing Landmark designation. Logan, in her third year with the program, made her Met debut as Clotilde in Bellini’s Norma, and sang the roles of Priestess in Verdi’s Aida during the 2022–23 season and Anna in Verdi’s Nabucco earlier this season. Cairns, in his second year of the program, was also a 2022 Grand Finals Winner of the Met’s Laffont Competition and made his company debut last season as the Messenger in Aida. Jones, who joins the program this fall, is also a member of the Denyce Graves Foundation’s inaugural Shared Voices program. Deborah Robertson, in her first year of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, will join the singers at the piano.

What is the Met Gala dress code?

On May 25, PBS’s Great Performances television program, better known for filming and presenting what happens onstage at the Met, this time delves into the story of the building itself. It’s a documentary, by Susan Froemke—an editor of the legendary 1975 Grey Gardens—about the Met Opera as edifice, as cultural factory, as a force for social endorsement and upheaval. But even for those who don’t give a fig for the endless debate over whether Maria Callas was the greatest Carmen, the history of the Met Opera house is a compelling story. It’s full of egos so big— divas, operatic and otherwise, like city planner Robert Moses, John D. Rockefeller III, Philip Johnson, Leontyne Price—that it’s a wonder they could all fit on the Upper West Side. Many great conductors have helped shape the Met, beginning with Wagner’s disciple Anton Seidl in the 1880s and 1890s and Arturo Toscanini, who made his debut in 1908.

Metropolitan Opera

As network radio waned, the Met founded its own Metropolitan Opera Radio Network which is now heard on radio stations around the world. In Canada the live broadcasts have been heard since December 1933 first on the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission[93] and, since 1934, on its successor, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where they are currently heard on CBC Music. Gelb began outlining his plans in April 2006; these included more new productions each year, ideas for shaving staging costs, and attracting new audiences without deterring existing opera-lovers. Gelb saw these issues as crucial for an organization which is dependent on private financing.

The Metropolitan Opera has always engaged many of the world’s most important artists. Christine Nilsson and Marcella Sembrich shared leading roles during the opening season. In the German seasons that followed, Lilli Lehmann dominated the Wagnerian repertory and anything else she chose to sing. In the 1890s, Nellie Melba and Emma Calvé shared the spotlight with the De Reszke brothers, Jean and Edouard, and two American sopranos, Emma Eames and Lillian Nordica. Enrico Caruso arrived in 1903, and by the time of his death 18 years later had sung more performances with the Met than with all the world’s other opera companies combined.

Lindemann Young Artist Development Program

In designing the auditorium, Harrison and his team needed to allow for more seats than the old house while achieving better sightlines and equally good acoustics. On May 14, 1959, President Eisenhower turned over the first shovel of earth on the site of Lincoln Center as part of a groundbreaking ceremony that featured representatives of the Met, the New York Philharmonic (including Leonard Bernstein), the Juilliard School, and the New York city and state governments. Although west–east roads do not run through Lincoln Center itself, the Metropolitan Opera House is parallel to the block from West 63rd Street to West 64th Street.

The Met Opera Puts On a Malcolm X Marathon - The New York Times

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Posted: Tue, 07 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Everything is observed by “Dame Shirley”, the pen name of Louise Clappe, a doctor’s wife from Massachusetts who spent 18 months in the California mining camps and brought that world vividly and wittily to life in her letters home. Grigorian, along with an always-reliable Elizabeth DeShong as Suzuki, easily projected above the enormous sound of the Met orchestra, although Grigorian had some early slight wails in her upper register that mostly faded as she warmed into the performance. On the opening night, October 22, 1883, Christine Nilsson played the role of Marguerite in Faust before Iselins, Bakers, Goelets, Whitneys, Drexels, Morgans, Goulds, and Vanderbilts.

The New York Hotels Where A-Listers Get Ready for the Met Gala

When the opera company is on hiatus, the Opera House is annually home to the spring season of American Ballet Theatre. The theater was noted for its elegance and excellent acoustics and it provided a glamorous home for the company. Its stage facilities, however, were found to be severely inadequate from its earliest days.

The all-star principal quartet also features Ailyn Pérez as Micaëla and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green as Escamillo, with Diego Matheuz on the podium. Sponsorship of the Met broadcasts during the Depression years of the 1930s was sporadic. Early sponsors included the American Tobacco Company, and the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, but frequently the broadcasts were presented by NBC itself with no commercial sponsor.[94] Sponsorship of the Saturday afternoon broadcasts by The Texas Company (Texaco) began on December 7, 1940, with Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro.

The first network broadcast was heard on December 25, 1931, a performance of Engelbert Humperdinck'sHänsel und Gretel. The series came about as the Met, financially endangered in the early years of the Great Depression, sought to enlarge its audience and support through national exposure on network radio. Initially, those broadcasts featured only parts of operas, being limited to selected acts.