The Met, however, was Cady ’s only theater, and connoisseurs complained about poor acoustics and a small backstage area. Architect Josiah Cleveland Cady (1837-1919) had designed several other New York landmarks, among them the Museum of Naturai History. On 22 October the Metropolitan staged its first opera: Charles Gounod ’s Faust (1859), featuring the soprano Christine Nilsson in the role of Margherita. By spring 1883 the building was finished, and the choicest boxes were apportioned among the shareholders. Construction began in 1881 and proceeded slightly behind schedule. These “upstarts ” pooled their resources and designated a site for a new opera house on Broadway between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets. The snubbing of the “millionairess ” -a Vanderbilt, as fate would have it -inflamed the “new money ” set. German soprano Lilli Lehmann (1848-1929) recalled the fateful moment in her memoir, My Path Through Life (1914): “As one evening one of the millionairesses did not receive the box in which she intended to shine because another woman had anticipated her, the husband of the former took prompt action and caused the Metropolitan Opera House to rise. One evening in 1880 the balance of social power shifted. ” The old families controlled the “sociable old Academy ” the “new people ” angled for acceptance. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people ’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to. Edith Wharton (1862-1937), novelist of New York manners, opened her Age of Innocence (1920) at the academy: “the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
In the 1870s and early 1880s New York boasted an adequate opera house: the Academy of Music, founded in 1849 and located downtown on Fourteenth Street.
Yet despite their cash and their flash, the nouveaux riches of New York remained excluded from the inner circles of the old Knickerbocker gentry. During the late nineteenth century a coterie of moneyed families, their fortunes swelled by post- Civil War speculation, set new standards for conspicuous consumption. The story of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City unfolds amid privilege and desire.
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