Following it, The New York Times described the theater as "magnificently gorgeous, brilliantly lighted, solidly constructed, finely located, beautifully ornamented" but went on to lament "all that lacks is a few singers to render it 'the thing'.

"[7] The theatre had its first opera production, and what was billed as its formal opening, a month later on February 25, 1857, with a performance by the Max Maretzek Italian Opera Company of Verdi's Il trovatore starring Marietta Gazzaniga as Leonora, Alessandro Amodio as Count di Luna, Pasquale Brignoli as Manrico, and Max Maretzek conducting.

The Academy has been in continuous use since 1857, hosting many world-famous performers, conductors and composers, and a significant number of American premieres of works in the standard operatic and classical repertoire.

Noted operas that had their American premieres there include Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, Gounod's Faust, and Wagner's The Flying Dutchman.

[10] The list of artists who have performed at the Academy of Music, from the 20th century, includes such figures as Marian Anderson, Maria Callas, Enrico Caruso, Aaron Copland, Vladimir Horowitz, Gustav Mahler, Anna Pavlova, Edith Piaf, Luciano Pavarotti, Tony Bennett (in 1962), Itzhak Perlman, Leontyne Price, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, Richard Strauss, Igor Stravinsky, Joan Sutherland, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and others.

Managed today by The Philadelphia Orchestra and Ensemble Arts, the space is used for a myriad of events, including Broadway, comedy, dance, family, jazz, and much more.

The ornate auditorium has an "open horseshoe" shape and proscenium columns with elliptical cross-sections in order to provide more direct sight lines from the seats in the side balconies.

The auditorium is enclosed by a solid three-foot brick wall with studding and pine boards lining the inner sides to prevent echoes and absorb sound.

An 1860 account by Runge mentioned that the full auditorium, then nearly 3,000 persons, could be emptied in four minutes in "great calmness and order" owing to the wide corridors and stairways.

[12] The heat produced by the original gas fixtures helped to ventilate the hall by causing air to rise to various vents along the back walls and in the center of the ceiling.

The elaborate carvings and gilded wood sculpture decorations throughout the auditorium are the work of Charles Bushor and Joseph A. Bailly and the ceiling murals of allegorical figures were completed by Karl Hermann Schmolze.

The original front stage curtain was a painted representation of draped crimson fabric with heavy golden fringe, ropes, tassels, etc.

[citation needed] Some have found the Academy's sound problematic for orchestra: "The Academy of Music in Philadelphia is a beautiful, historic, charming building with wholly unsuitable acoustics for orchestra...The dry, unreverberant acoustics results from the roughly 2,900 audience members, who completely surround the volume of the auditorium, soaking up sound as they sit.

[18] After some remodeling in the mid-1950s that included concrete under the stage to support a pipe organ, Ormandy refused to make recordings with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Academy.