The Academy of Music was a New York City opera house, located on the northeast corner of East 14th Street and Irving Place in Manhattan.

The review in The New York Times declared it to be an acoustical "triumph", but "In every other aspect ... a decided failure," complaining about the architecture, interior design and the closeness of the seating;[1] although a follow-up several days later relented a bit, saying that the theater "looked more cheerful, and in every way more effective" than it had on opening night.

[2] The Academy's opera season became the center of social life for New York's elite, with the oldest and most prominent families owning seats in the theater's boxes.

[1] It had a plush interior, and private boxes in the orchestra, but, perhaps due to newspaper editorials questioning the project's republican values,[16] was consciously somewhat less "aristocratized" than the Astor Opera House had been – there, general admissions were relegated to the benches of a "cockloft" reachable only by a narrow stairway, and otherwise isolated from the gentry below, while in the new theatre many of the regular seats were relatively inexpensive.

[23] The Academy hosted several American premieres, including Rigoletto (1855), Il trovatore (1855), La traviata (1856), Roméo et Juliette (1867), Aida (1873), Lohengrin (1874), Die Walküre (1877) and Carmen (1878).

[12] After the Civil War, an organization called the Cercle Français de l'Harmonie began using the Academy as a venue for masked balls, also called "French balls", in which the nouveau riche men of New York society would rub elbows – and other body parts – with semi-dressed prostitutes and courtesans, with little regard for public decorum or modesty.

One reporter wrote that women were thrown in the air and then sexually assaulted "amid the jeers and laughter of the other drunken wretches on the floor ... [with] not a whisper of shame in the crowd".

[26] Still, it was the opera season that made the Academy the mainstay of social life for New York's "uppertens", and the oldest and most prominent families owned seats in the theater's boxes.

The inability of New York's wealthy industrial and mercantile families, including the Vanderbilts, Goulds and Morgans, to gain access to this closed society inspired the creation of the new Metropolitan Opera Association in 1880.

[30] The second paragraph of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence reads: "On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the erection 'above the forties' of a new Opera House which would compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.