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.

Financial problems and the following stock market crash of 1929 postponed the relocation of the Metropolitan Opera, and the complex became more commercially based.

Young Rockefeller Center architect Wallace Harrison would be approached some 20 years later by officers of the New York Philharmonic Society and the Met to develop a new home for both institutions.

As chief architect again for the development of Lincoln Center, Harrison was chosen to design the new opera house, to be built as the centerpiece of the new performing arts complex- a twenty-five acre, eighteen block site on the Upper West Side, chosen by Robert Moses as a major urban renewal and slum clearance project.

After a long process of redesigns, revisions and opposing interests (provided by the Met wanting a more traditional design for its home, and the conflicting wishes of the architects of the other Lincoln Center venues), construction of Harrison's forty-third design of the Metropolitan Opera House began in the winter of 1963, the last of the three major Lincoln Center venues to be completed.

The production was attended by 3,000 high school students, and began with the playing of the National Anthem and a series of sound tests that included a loud chord from the orchestra and a blast from a shotgun.

[6] The opera house has been featured in a number of movies and television programs, including the climax of Norman Jewison's 1987 film Moonstruck.

[9] Situated at the western end of Lincoln Center Plaza, the Metropolitan Opera House faces Columbus Avenue and Broadway and forms an axis with Philip Johnson's David Koch Theater (formerly the New York State Theater) and David Geffen Hall (formerly Avery Fisher Hall), designed by Max Abramovitz, with the plaza's fountain at the center.

The chandeliers were donated by the government of Austria[14] as repayment for American help during the Marshall Plan following World War II,[12][failed verification] and were designed by Dr. Hans Harald Rath of J.

Twelve of the chandeliers in the auditorium are on motorized winches, and raised to the ceiling prior to performances so as not to obstruct sight lines of the audience on the upper levels.

[16] A restaurant known as "Top of the Met", which occupied a balcony overlooking the plaza and lobbies below was a success upon opening, but closed after low attendance in the mid-1970s.

Other public spaces in the Opera House were decorated by such interior designers of the time as Angelo Donghia, William Baldwin, and L. Garth Huxtable, husband of then-New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who upon the opening of the building would famously write, "There is a strong temptation to close the eyes.

The large and highly mechanized stage and support space smoothly facilitates the rotating presentation of up to four different opera productions each week.

The auditorium occupies a fourth of the building's interior area; massive storage spaces below the stage allow for production storage within the opera house, and large workshops for scenery construction, costumes, wigs and electric equipment, as well as kitchens, offices, an employee canteen and dressing room spaces for the principals, chorus, supernumeraries, ballet and children's chorus surround the stage complex on multiple floors.