Metropolitan Opera

• 1. Introduction

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  The Metropolitan Opera opened on the 22nd of October 1883, not because New York needed another opera house, but because the city's newly wealthy industrialists had been turned away from the old one. A group of 22 men gathered at Delmonico's restaurant on the 28th of April 1880, angry at being excluded from the Academy of Music's exclusive boxes. They decided to build something better. What followed was not simply a new theater, but an institution that would become the largest classical music organization in North America, shaping how opera is heard, broadcast, and experienced for well over a century. The questions worth asking are not just what the Met has staged, but who built it, who it shut out, who it eventually embraced, and what it has nearly lost along the way.

• 2. Born from Exclusion

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  The men who founded the Metropolitan Opera were not old money. By 1880, the entrenched families who controlled the Academy of Music's private boxes refused to make room for New York's new industrial titans. Members of the Morgan, Roosevelt, and Vanderbilt families were among those who had been turned away. Their response was not to petition for entry but to construct a rival house that would dwarf the Academy entirely.

  The new theater on 39th and Broadway was designed from the start as a declaration of social arrival. Three tiers of private boxes gave the founding subscribers not just seats but platforms for public display. The Metropolitan Opera House opened on the 22nd of October 1883, and the Academy of Music's own opera season folded just three years later.

  Henry Abbey managed the inaugural season of 1883-84, opening with Charles Gounod's Faust featuring the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson. Abbey assembled an ensemble that gave 150 performances of 20 different operas that first season, with all performances sung in Italian. The season was celebrated artistically but left very large financial deficits, a tension between artistic ambition and financial reality that would never fully leave the company.

• 3. The German Experiment

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  For its second season, the Met's directors made a sharp turn. They hired Leopold Damrosch, conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra, to run the company in an all-German language repertory. European singers from German-language opera houses filled the roster, and the company found both popular and critical success in Wagner and other composers.

  Damrosch died only months into his first season. Edmund C. Stanton replaced him and served through the 1890-91 season. What lasted from those six German seasons was the influence of the conductor Anton Seidl, whose Wagner interpretations were described as carrying an almost mystical intensity. Leopold's son, Walter Damrosch, also began a long relationship with the Met during this period, one that stretched into the early twentieth century.

  The German era gave way to a new phase when Italian opera returned in 1891 under Henry E. Abbey, John B. Schoeffel, and Maurice Grau. A fire in August 1892 destroyed most of the theater, forcing a season away while it was rebuilt. When the company resumed, critics began calling the era that followed the Golden Age of Opera. The roster during those years included Nellie Melba, Lilli Lehmann, Emma Calvé, and the brothers Jean and Edouard de Reszke, among many others.

• 4. The Voice on the Wire

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  Before recording technology matured enough to capture what happened on the Met's stage reliably, a librarian did it himself. From 1900 to 1904, Lionel Mapleson, the Met's violinist and music librarian, used an Edison cylinder phonograph set up near the stage to record short fragments of live performances. The recordings, known as the Mapleson Cylinders, run from one to five minutes each.

  Mapleson was the nephew of opera impresario James Henry Mapleson. His recordings are the only known surviving documentation of certain performers, including the tenor Jean de Reszke and the dramatic soprano Milka Ternina. In 2002, the cylinders were added to the National Recording Registry.

  The Met's relationship with broadcast technology deepened in January 1910, when radio pioneer Lee de Forest experimentally transmitted two live performances from the Met's stage, with a signal reportedly heard as far as Newark, New Jersey. The first full network broadcast followed on the 25th of December 1931, with Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel on NBC Radio. The broadcasts began as a survival strategy during the Great Depression, when the company needed to widen its audience to stay solvent. Milton Cross served as the Saturday matinee announcer from that inaugural 1931 broadcast until his death in 1975, a tenure of more than four decades.

• 5. Depression, Crisis, and Survival

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  Giulio Gatti-Casazza served as the Met's general manager for 27 years, from 1908 to 1935, a tenure of sustained artistic ambition built around conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, who led the company from 1908 to 1915, and Gustav Mahler, who conducted during Gatti-Casazza's first two seasons. The roster Gatti-Casazza assembled included Rosa Ponselle, Enrico Caruso, Feodor Chaliapin, and Lauritz Melchior, among many others.

  The Wall Street Crash of 1929 cut deeply. Between 1929 and 1931, ticket sales held, but subsidies from the Met's wealthy supporters fell sharply. Otto Kahn, the financier who had helped bring Gatti-Casazza to the company and had served as board president since the start of his tenure, resigned in 1931. His successor, lawyer Paul Cravath, secured a contract with the National Broadcasting Company for the weekly radio broadcasts and negotiated a ten percent pay cut across all salaried employees.

  By March 1932, those measures still were not enough. A committee called to Save Metropolitan Opera was formed, led by the soprano Lucrezia Bori. Bori personally carried out much of the fundraising work and within a few months raised the $300,000 needed to ensure opera continued for the 1933-34 season. That effort also led to the formation of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and its magazine, Opera News, which extended the company's reach to its national radio audience.

• 6. Opening the Roster

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  Rudolf Bing, Austrian-born and most recently the founder of the Edinburgh Festival, succeeded Edward Johnson in 1950 and served until 1972. Among the most consequential changes of his tenure was the opening of the Met's artistic roster to singers of color. Marian Anderson made her historic debut at the Met in 1955. She was followed by a generation of African American artists including Leontyne Price, who inaugurated the new house at Lincoln Center, as well as Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett, Martina Arroyo, George Shirley, and Robert McFerrin.

  Bing also oversaw the company's move from the theater on 39th Street to the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, which opened on the 16th of September 1966, with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. The old house, which had a seating capacity of 3,625, had been plagued by inadequate stage facilities since its earliest days. A lavish farewell gala was held on the 16th of April 1966, before the building was demolished in 1967.

  The new house, designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison, seats approximately 3,732 with standing room for an additional 245. Its lobby holds two murals by Marc Chagall, The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music, each measuring 30 by 36 feet. Bing's tenure also saw the Met debut of Maria Callas, who later had a bitter falling out with Bing over repertoire, as well as Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, and Placido Domingo.

• 7. Broadcasting to the World

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  Peter Gelb, who had worked as a record producer before succeeding Joseph Volpe as general manager in 2006, made cinema transmission a centerpiece of his strategy. Beginning on the 30th of December 2006, the company began broadcasting live performances in high definition to movie theaters worldwide under the title Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD. The first broadcast was a 110-minute version of Julie Taymor's production of The Magic Flute.

  By the end of the 2007-08 season, the eight transmissions had been seen by 920,000 people, exceeding the total attendance at live performances in the opera house that same season. The gross from those eight screenings was $13.3 million from North America and $5 million from overseas, with each simulcast costing between $850,000 and $1 million to produce. By 2011, the total HD audience had reached 3 million people in 1,600 theaters worldwide.

  The company had also been experimenting with per-seat titling technology since 1995, when the $2.7 million Met Titles system was installed under general manager Joseph Volpe. Because the height of the Met's proscenium made above-stage surtitles impractical, each seat was fitted with its own small screen carrying the opera text in English, with options for German and Spanish, and a privacy filter so neighboring viewers were not disturbed. Individual scripts cost up to $10,000 apiece to commission.

• 8. Financial Strain and Saudi Collapse

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  In 2025, general manager Peter Gelb announced that the Met would begin an annual winter residency at the Royal Diriyah Opera House in Riyadh for five years, in exchange for more than $200 million over eight years from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The announcement came after the company had already withdrawn more than a third of the money in its endowment fund to cover operating costs.

  In 2026, Gelb reported that the Saudi contribution had been delayed, prompting the Met to reduce the number of productions in its next season and lay off twenty-two employees. The company also began considering selling the Marc Chagall murals that had been commissioned for the Lincoln Center lobby.

  On the 23rd of April 2026, Gelb announced that the Saudi funding had been cancelled entirely, attributed to damage caused to the Saudi economy by the 2026 Iran war and the oil blockade at the Strait of Hormuz. The Met now faces a $30 million deficit that it needs to fill by the end of the 31st of July 2025. The Chagall murals, The Triumph of Music and The Sources of Music, which have hung in the lobby since the house opened in 1966, remain a possible sale.