Metropolitan Opera
[9] The new theater, built at 39th and Broadway, would include three tiers of private boxes in which the scions of New York's powerful new industrial families could display their wealth and establish their social prominence.
Henry Abbey served as manager for the inaugural season, 1883–84, which opened with a performance of Charles Gounod's Faust starring the brilliant Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson.
[11] Abbey's company that first season featured an ensemble of artists led by sopranos Nilsson and Marcella Sembrich; mezzo-soprano Sofia Scalchi; tenors Italo Campanini and Roberto Stagno; baritone Giuseppe Del Puente; and bass Franco Novara.
[12] The Met continued to perform annually in Philadelphia for nearly eighty years, taking the entire company to the city on selected Tuesday nights throughout the opera season.
These unique acoustic documents, known as the Mapleson Cylinders, preserve an audio picture of the early Met, and are the only known extant recordings of some performers, including the tenor Jean de Reszke and the dramatic soprano Milka Ternina.
Cleveland was a particular lucrative stop for the Met, which had no competition in the form of a local opera company, and performances were held in the enormous Public Auditorium, which sat well over 9,000 people.
Notable among them were the brothers Jean and Édouard de Reszke, Lilli Lehmann, Emma Calvé, Lillian Nordica, Nellie Melba, Marcella Sembrich, Milka Ternina, Emma Eames, Sofia Scalchi, Ernestine Schumann-Heink, Francesco Tamagno, Francesc Viñas, Jean Lassalle, Mario Ancona, Victor Maurel, Antonio Scotti and Pol Plançon.
His model planning, authoritative organizational skills and brilliant casts raised the Metropolitan Opera to a prolonged era of artistic innovation and musical excellence.
Many of the most noted singers of the era appeared at the Met under Gatti-Casazza's leadership, including sopranos Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg, Maria Jeritza, Emmy Destinn, Frances Alda, Frida Leider, Amelita Galli-Curci, Bernice de Pasquali, and Lily Pons; tenors Jacques Urlus, Giovanni Martinelli, Beniamino Gigli, Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, and Lauritz Melchior; baritones Titta Ruffo, Giuseppe De Luca, Pasquale Amato, and Lawrence Tibbett; and basses Friedrich Schorr, Feodor Chaliapin, Jose Mardones, Tancredi Pasero and Ezio Pinza—among many others.
Still, on given nights the brilliant Wagner pairing of the Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad with the great heldentenor Lauritz Melchior proved irresistible to audiences even in such troubled times.
Eleanor Steber, Dorothy Kirsten, Helen Traubel (Flagstad's successor as Wagner's heroines), Jan Peerce, Richard Tucker, Leonard Warren and Robert Merrill were among the many home grown artists to become stars at the Met in the 1940s.
Other celebrated singers who debuted at the Met during Bing's tenure include: Roberta Peters, Victoria de los Ángeles, Renata Tebaldi, Maria Callas, who had a bitter falling out with Bing over repertoire,[citation needed], Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, Régine Crespin, Mirella Freni, Renata Scotto, Montserrat Caballé, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Anna Moffo, James McCracken, Carlo Bergonzi, Franco Corelli, Alfredo Kraus, Plácido Domingo, Nicolai Gedda, Luciano Pavarotti, Jon Vickers, Tito Gobbi, Sherrill Milnes, and Cesare Siepi.
[44] Bing publicly supported the organization, but privately detested the idea and actively worked to dismantle the company which he ultimately achieved in a vote of the board in December 1966.
[44] Several well known opera singers performed with the MONC, including sopranos Clarice Carson, Maralin Niska, Mary Beth Peil, Francesca Roberto, and Marilyn Zschau; mezzo-sopranos Joy Davidson, Sylvia Friederich, Dorothy Krebill, and Huguette Tourangeau; tenors Enrico Di Giuseppe, Chris Lachona, Nicholas di Virgilio, and Harry Theyard; baritones Ron Bottcher, John Fiorito, Thomas Jamerson, Julian Patrick, and Vern Shinall; bass-baritones Andrij Dobriansky, Ronald Hedlund, and Arnold Voketaitis; and bass Paul Plishka.
One critic described the period as "a quarter-century in which the notion of commissioned work reminded Met administrators of the emblematic failure of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra and the lukewarm reception of Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra.
Marcelo Álvarez, Gabriela Beňačková, Diana Damrau, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Juan Diego Flórez, Marcello Giordani, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Ben Heppner, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Salvatore Licitra, Anna Netrebko, René Pape, Neil Rosenshein, Bryn Terfel, and Deborah Voigt were among the artists first heard at the Met under his management.
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.
Minghella's highly theatrical concept featured vividly colored banners on a spare stage, allowing the focus to be on the detailed acting of the singers.
Robert Lepage, the Canadian director of Cirque du Soleil, was engaged by the Met to direct a revival of Der Ring des Nibelungen using hydraulic stage platforms and projected 3D imagery.
[78] In March 2022, Russian-born soprano Anna Netrebko made a public statement against the war but failed to explicitly denounce Putin, and was replaced by a Ukrainian singer.
[90] Called "Met Titles", the $2.7 million system provides the audience with a script of the opera's text in English on individual screens which face each seat.
This system was the first in the world to be placed in an opera house with "each screen (having) a switch to turn it on, a privacy filter to prevent the dim, yellow dot-matrix characters from disturbing nearby viewers and the option to display texts in multiple languages for all productions, (currently German and Spanish) except two by Philip Glass[citation needed].
The custom-designed system features rails of different heights for various sections of the house, individually designed displays for some box seats and commissioned scripts costing up to $10,000 apiece.
Tessitura uses a single database of information to record, track and manage all contacts with the Met's constituents, conduct targeted marketing and fund raising appeals, handle all ticketing and membership transactions, and provide detailed and flexible performance reports.
Today the annual Met broadcast season typically begins the first week of December and offers twenty live Saturday matinée performances through May.
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.
[100] The Met's experiments with television go back to 1948 when a complete performance of Verdi's Otello was broadcast live on ABC-TV with Ramón Vinay, Licia Albanese, and Leonard Warren.
[116] When people's movements were heavily restricted in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Met cancelled the season's remaining performances but live streamed free of charge an opera every day, normally available on paid subscription.
The stage facilities, state of the art when the theater was built, continue to be updated technically and are capable of handling multiple large complex opera productions simultaneously.
[37][38][39] On March 4, 1960, leading baritone Leonard Warren died of a heart attack onstage after completing the aria "Urna fatale" in act two of Verdi's La forza del destino.
