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Metropolitan Opera
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The Metropolitan Opera Association of New York City, founded in April 1880, is a major presenter of all types of opera including Grand Opera. Peter Gelb is the company's general manager and James Levine is music director.
The Metropolitan Opera is America's largest classical music organization, and annually presents some 220 opera performances. The home of the company, the Metropolitan Opera House, is considered by many to be one of the premier opera stages in the world, and is among the largest in the world.
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The Metropolitan Opera Association of New York City, founded in April 1880, is a major presenter of all types of opera including Grand Opera. Peter Gelb is the company's general manager and James Levine is music director.
The Metropolitan Opera is America's largest classical music organization, and annually presents some 220 opera performances. The home of the company, the Metropolitan Opera House, is considered by many to be one of the premier opera stages in the world, and is among the largest in the world. The Met, as it is commonly called, is one of the twelve resident organizations at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
The Met presents a wide array of about twenty-seven operas each year in a season which lasts from mid-September through May. The operas are presented in a rotating repertory schedule with seven performances of four different works presented each week. Performances are given in the evening Monday through Saturday with a matinée on Saturday. Several new opera productions are offered each season. Sometimes these are borrowed from or shared with other major opera houses. The rest are given in revivals of productions from previous seasons.
The Met's huge performing company consists of a large symphony-sized orchestra, a chorus, children's choir, ballet company, and many supporting and leading solo singers. The Met's roster of singers is drawn from the ranks of the world's most famous artists. Some of its singers' careers have been developed by the Met itself through its young artists programs. Others have been engaged from companies around the world. Many, such as Luciano Pavarotti, have achieved world fame while singing at the Met, and a number, such as Renée Fleming and Plácido Domingo, are longtime regular members of the Met's roster (Domingo has sung at the Met since the late 1960s).
The Met's artistic standards are considered to be among the highest in the world. The company's stage facilities and technical staff offer leading directors and designers a state of the art environment in which to create any kind of production. The Met's production designs range from elegant and traditional to highly innovative and avant-garde.
Beyond performing in the opera house in New York, the Met has gradually expanded its audience as new technologies have become available. It has broadcast live weekly on radio since 1931 and has regularly presented performances on television since 1977. In 2006, the Met further introduced the innovations of live satellite radio broadcasts four times a week and live high-definition video transmissions presented to audiences in cinemas throughout the world.
History of the company
The Metropolitan Opera Association was founded in 1880 to create an alternative to the Academy of Music. The Academy represented the highest social circle in New York society, and the board of directors were loath to admit members of new wealthy families into their circle. The initial group of subscribers included the Morgan, Roosevelt, Astor and Vanderbilt families. Their creation, The Metropolitan Opera, has long outlasted the Academy. Henry Abbey served as manager for the inaugural season 1883-84 which opened with a performance of Gounod's Faust on October 22, 1883 starring the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson.
Following Abbey's inaugural season, which had resulted in very large deficits, operas were given by a "pick-up" ensemble of relatively inexpensive German singers (which nevertheless included some of the most celebrated singers in Germany) who performed an international repertory, albeit in German.
This anomalous situation terminated at the time of the Great Fire, following which the Golden Age of Opera arrived at the Metropolitan under the celebrated management of Maurice Grau 1892-1903. The greatest (and most highly paid) operatic artists in the world then graced the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, notably the brothers Jean and Edouard de Reszke, Lilli Lehmann, Lillian Nordica, Nellie Melba, Milka Trnina, Emma Eames, Sofia Scalchi, Francesco Tamagno, Jean Lassalle, Mario Ancona, Victor Maurel, Antonio Scotti and Pol Plançon.
From 1898 to 1986, the Metropolitan Opera went on a six-week tour following its season in New York. These were cancelled because of financial losses.
Lionel Mapleson (1865–1937), a violinist and librarian of the Metropolitan, made the first recordings of live performances at the Metropolitan. From 1900 to 1904, Lionel Mapleson set up an Edison cylinder machine in the Metropolitan Opera House to record excerpts of performances. These cylinders, known as the Mapleson Cylinders, preserve an early audio glimpse of the Met and are the only known extant recordings of some performers, including Jean de Reszke. The recordings were later issued on a series of LPs and, in 2002, were included in the National Recording Registry. While many of the cylinders became greatly worn over the years, some still retain remarkable sound, particularly of choruses such as the waltz and "Soldier's Chorus" from Faust and the triumphal scene from Act 2 of Aida. Mapleson placed his machine in various locations, including the prompter's box, the side of the stage, and in the "flies", which enabled him to record the soloists, chorus, and orchestra, as well as the audience's applause. Many of the original cylinders are preserved in the Rodgers & Hammestein Archives of Recorded Sound at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
The administration of Heinrich Conried in 1903–1908, which saw the arrival of Enrico Caruso, unquestionably the most celebrated singer who ever appeared at the Old Metropolitan, was followed by the 25-year reign, 1908-1935 of the magisterial Giulio Gatti-Casazza, whose model planning, authoritative organizational skills and brilliant casts raised the level of Metropolitan Opera to a prolonged and unforgettable Silver Age. A prominent lawyer Paul Cravath became Chairman of the Met. in 1931.
Again, the greatest singers and conductors appeared at the Met. At one point, both Arturo Toscanini and Gustav Mahler were regular conductors at the Met.
The noted Canadian operatic tenor, Edward Johnson, was general manager between 1935 and 1950, successfully guiding the company through the dark years of the Depression and World War II. Zinka Milanov, Jussi Björling, Richard Tucker and Robert Merrill were first heard at the Met under his management. Sir Thomas Beecham, George Szell and Bruno Walter were among the great conductors of the Johnson era.
The Austrian-born Rudolf Bing, was the one of the Met's most influential leaders. His tenure as general manager from 1950 to 1972 was, so far, the longest in Met history. Bing modernized the administration of the Company, ended an archaic ticket sales system, and ended the Company's weekly one-night stands in Philadelphia. He presided over an era of great singing and glittering new productions, and guided the company's move to a new home in Lincoln Center. Among the many great artists Sir Rudolf introduced to New York audiences were Maria Callas, Leonie Rysanek, Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi, Christa Ludwig, Renata Scotto, Dame Joan Sutherland, Lisa Della Casa, Victoria de los Ángeles, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Montserrat Caballé, Mirella Freni, Mario del Monaco, Franco Corelli, Carlo Bergonzi, Nicolai Gedda, Plácido Domingo, Jon Vickers, Sherrill Milnes, Giorgio Tozzi and Cesare Siepi. Critics of Bing complained of a lack of great conducting during his regime, but he did offer such fine conductors as Fritz Stiedry, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Pierre Monteux, Erich Leinsdorf, Fritz Reiner, Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan.
Among the achievements of Bing's tenure was the integration of the Met's artistic roster. Marian Anderson's historic 1955 debut was followed by the introduction of a whole generation of fine African-American artists led by Leontyne Price (who inaugurated the new house in Lincoln Center), Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett, George Shirley, and many others.
Following Bing's retirement in 1972, the Met's management was overseen by a succession of executives. Bing's intended successor, the Swedish opera manager Göran Gentele, tragically died in an auto accident before the start of his first season. Following Gentele, there were Schuyler Chapin, Anthony Bliss, Bruce Crawford and Hugh Southern. All of these men led the Met in partnership with Music Director James Levine, the Met's guiding artistic force through the last third of the 20th century.
Joseph Volpe was the Met's second-longest serving manager, 1990-2006. He was the first head of the Met to advance from within the ranks of the company, having started his career there as a carpenter in 1964. Volpe expanded the Met's international touring activities and inaugurated the orchestra's Carnegie Hall series. During his tenure the Met considerably expanded its repertory, offering four world premiers and 22 Met premiers, more new works than under any manager since Gatti-Casazza. Volpe named Valery Gergiev as Principal Guest Conductor in 1997 and broadened the Met's Russian repertory. Cecilia Bartoli, Diana Damrau, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Juan Diego Florez, Marcello Giordani, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Ben Heppner, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Salvatore Licitra, Anna Netrebko, Rene Pape, Bryn Terfel and Deborah Voigt were among the artists first heard at the Met under his management.
The current General Manager is Peter Gelb. He began outlining his plans for the future in April 2006; these included more new productions each year, ideas for shaving staging costs and attracting new audiences without deterring existing opera-lovers (whose average age at the Met is over 60). Gelb saw these issues as crucial for an organization which, to a far greater extent than any of the other great opera theatres of the world, is dependent on private financing.
Gelb began his tenure by opening the 2006-2007 season with a colorful and highly stylized new production of Madama Butterfly by the English director Anthony Minghella. 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. The abstract concept included casting the son of Cio-Cio-San as a bunraku-style puppet, operated in plain sight by three puppeteers clothed in black.
Until the late 1990s, the Metropolitan Opera was rather traditional in its new production designs. Recently, following the influence originating from Patrice Chéreau and trends already established in many other opera houses around the world (particularly those in Europe), that tradition seems to be changing and traditionally-designed operas are becoming rarer at the Met.
In the 1990s, only limited productions used a symbolic type of scenery (starting from Der Fliegende Holländer in 1989; then Samson et Dalila in 1998; and Tristan und Isolde). For The Rake's Progress in 1999 and Mefistofele in 2000, contemporary style business-like suits were used for the main characters (in operas which were supposed to be set centuries before). Similar things occurred in La Juive (2003)Salome (2004).
The trend towards "modernization" continued further under the new management in 2007 when a flushing toilet was used during the new production of Gianni Schicchi (for a work which is supposed to take place in the year 1299). Victorian era costumes and surroundings were adopted as the scenery for 17th century Scotland in Lucia di Lammermoor. Similarly, even greater contrast existed with the substitution of the original Scotland of the early Middle Ages for a mixture of 20th century items of clothing (including tuxedos, etc.) in a new production of Macbeth or such oddity as World War I outfit plus punching in anger on piano keyboard with fists (or open palms) during the recent (2008) production of La fille du régiment.
Technological innovations
Met Titles
In 1995, under general manager Joseph Volpe, the Met installed its own system of simultaneous translations of opera texts designed for the particular needs of the Met and its audiences. Called "Met Titles", the $2.7 million electronic libretto system provides the audience with a translation of the opera's text in English on individual screens mounted in front of 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 off, a filter to prevent the dim, yellow dot-matrix characters from disturbing nearby viewers and the option to display texts in multiple languages for newer productions (currently Spanish and German). Custom-designed, the system features rails of different heights for various sections of the house, individually designed displays for some box seats and commissioned translations costing up to $10,000 apiece." Due to the height of the Met's proscenium, it was not feasible to have titles displayed above the stage, as is done in most other opera houses. The idea of above-stage titles had been vehemently opposed by music director James Levine, but the "Met Titles" system has since been acknowledged as an ideal solution, offering texts to only those members of the Met audience that desire them.
Tessitura software
In 1998, Volpe initiated the development of a new software application, now called Tessitura. 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. Beginning in 2000, Tessitura was offered to other arts organizations under license, and it is now used by a cooperative network of more than 200 opera companies, symphony orchestras, ballet companies, theater companies, performing arts centers, and museums in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.
The Met on radio and TV, and in movie theaters
Radio broadcasts
Outside of New York the Met has been known to audiences in large measure through its many years of live radio broadcasts. The Met's broadcast history goes back to January 1910 when radio pioneer Lee De Forest broadcast experimentally, with erratic signal, two live performances from the stage of the Met that were reportedly heard as far away as Newark, New Jersey. Today the annual Met broadcast season typically begins the first week of December and offers twenty live Saturday matinée performances through May
The first network broadcast was heard on December 25, 1931, a performance
of Engelbert Humperdinck's
Hänsel und Gretel. 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. Initially, those broadcasts featured only parts of longer operas, being limited to selected acts. Regular broadcasts of complete operas began March 11, 1933, with the transmission of Tristan und Isolde with Frida Leider and Lauritz Melchior.
The live broadcasts were originally heard on NBC Radio's Blue Network and continued on the Blue Network's successor, ABC, into the 1960s. As network radio waned, the Met founded its own Metropolitan Opera Radio Network which is now heard on radio stations around the world. In Canada the live broadcasts have been heard since December 1933 first on the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission and, since 1934, on its successor, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where they are currently heard on CBC Radio 2.
Technical quality of the broadcasts steadily improved over the years. FM broadcasts were added in the 1950s, transmitted to stations via telephone lines. With the arrival of 1973/74 broadcasting season (December 1973), all broadcasts were offered in FM stereo. Satellite technology later allowed uniformly excellent broadcast sound to be sent live worldwide.
The first broadcasts were offered by NBC itself. Later, commercial sponsors included Colgate-Palmolive. Sponsorship of the Saturday afternoon broadcasts by The Texas Company (Texaco) began on December 7, 1940 with Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro. Texaco's support continued for 63 years, the longest continuous sponsorship in broadcast history and included the first PBS television broadcasts. After its merger with Chevron, however, the combined company ChevronTexaco ended its sponsorship of the Met's radio network in April 2004. Emergency grants allowed the broadcasts to continue through 2005 when the home building company Toll Brothers stepped in to become primary sponsor.
In the seven decades of its Saturday broadcasts, the Met has been introduced by the voices of only three permanent announcers. The legendary Milton Cross served from the inaugural broadcast until his death in 1975. He was succeeded by Peter Allen, who presided for 29 years through the 2003-2004 season. The present host of the broadcasts, Margaret Juntwait, began her tenure the following season. Since September 2006 she has also served as host for all of the live and recorded broadcasts on the Met's Sirius satellite radio channel. Other announcers have included Lloyd Moss who twice substituted for Cross and Deems Taylor who was heard briefly as co-host during the early years. In recent seasons William Berger and Ira Siff have been heard as co-hosts with Miss Juntwait.
Satellite radio
Metropolitan Opera Radio, is a 24 hour opera channel on Sirius Satellite Radio which presents three to four live opera broadcasts each week during the Met's performing season. During other hours it also offers past broadcasts from the Met's archives. It was created in September 2006 when the Met initiated a multi-year relationship with Sirius. Margaret Juntwait is the host and announcer.
Television
The Met's experiments with television go back to 1948 when Verdi's Otello, was broadcast complete live on ABC-TV with Ramon Vinay as Othello, Licia Albanese as Desdemona, and Leonard Warren as Iago. The 1949 season opening Rossenkavalier was also telecast and in the early 1950s there was a short-lived experiment with closed circuit telecasts to movie theaters. Beyond these experiments, however, and an occasional gala or special, the Met did not become a regular presence on television until 1977.
In that year the company began a series of live television broadcasts on public television with a wildly successful live telecast of La Bohème with Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavarotti. This new series of opera on PBS was called Live from the Met. This series remained on the air until the early 2000s, although the live broadcasts gave way to taped performances in the 1980s and its title became The Metropolitan Opera Presents. Many televised performances were broadcast including an historic complete telecast of Wagner's Ring Cycle in 1989. The Met returned to the air on PBS in 2007 in a new series called Great Performances @ The Met.
In addition to complete operas, television programs produced at the opera house have included:
An episode of Omnibus with Leonard Bernstein (NBC, 1958); "Danny Kaye's Look-In at the Metropolitan Opera" (CBS, 1975); "Sills and Burnett at the Met" (CBS, 1976); and the MTV Video Music Awards (1999 and 2001).
The Met in movie theaters
Beginning on December 30, 2006, as part of the company's effort to build revenues and attract new audiences, the Met (along with NCM Fathom) broadcast a series of six performances live via satellite into movie theaters called "Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD". The first broadcast was the Saturday matinee live performance of the 110-minute version of Julie Taymor's production of The Magic Flute. The series was carried in over 100 movie theaters across North America, Japan, Britain and several other European countries. During the 2006-07 season, the series included live HD transmissions of I Puritani, The First Emperor, Eugene Onegin, The Barber of Seville, and Il Trittico. In addition, limited repeat showings of the operas were offered in most of the presenting cities. Digital sound for the performances was provided by Sirius Satellite Radio.
These movie transmissions have received wide and generally favorable press coverage. The Met reports that 91% of available seats were sold for the HD performances. According to General Manager Peter Gelb, there were 60,000 people in cinemas around the world watching the March 24 transmission of The Barber of Seville. The New York Times reported that 324,000 tickets were sold worldwide for the 2006-07 season, while each simulcast cost $850,000 to $1 million to produce.
The 2007-08 season began on December 15, 2007 and featured eight of the Met's productions starting with Roméo et Juliette and ending with La fille du régiment on April 26, 2008. The Met planned to broadcast to double the number of theaters in the US as the previous season, as well as to additional countries such as Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The number of participating venues in the US, which includes movie theatre chains as well as independent theatres and some college campus venues, is 343. While "the scope of the series expands to include more than 700 locations across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia".
By the end of the season 920,000 people - exceeding the total number of people who attended live performances at the Met over the entire season - attended the 8 screenings bringing in a gross of $13.3 million from North America and $5 million from overseas.
Opera houses
The Met on 39th St.
The first Metropolitan Opera House opened on October 22, 1883, with a performance of Faust. It was located on 1411 Broadway, occupying the whole block between West 39th Street and West 40th Street on the west side of the street in the Garment District of Midtown. Nicknamed "The Yellow Brick Brewery" for its industrial looking exterior, the original Metropolitan Opera House was designed by J. Cleaveland Cady. On August 27, 1892 the nine-year-old theater was gutted by fire. The 1892-93 season was canceled while the opera house was rebuilt along its original lines.
In 1903 the interior of the opera house was extensively redesigned by the architects Carrère and Hastings. The familiar golden auditorium with its sunburst chandelier, and curved proscenium inscribed with the names of six composers (Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Gounod and Verdi), dates from this time. The first of the Met's signature gold damask stage curtains was installed in 1906, completing the look that the old Metropolitan Opera House maintained until its closing.
In 1940 ownership of the opera house shifted from the wealthy families who occupied the theater's boxes to the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association. At this time the last major change to the auditorium's interior was completed. The second tier of privately held boxes (the "grand tier") was converted into standard row seating. This enlarged the seating capacity and left only the first tier of boxes from the "golden horseshoe" of the opera house's origins as a showplace for New York society.
While the theater was noted for its excellent acoustics and elegant interior, as early as the turn of the century the backstage facilities were deemed to be severely inadequate for a large opera company. The Met's scenery and sets were a regular sight leaning against the building outside on 39th Street where they had to be shifted between performances. Various plans were put forward over the years to build a new home for the company and designs for new opera houses were created by various architects including Joseph Urban. Proposed new locations included Columbus Circle and what is now Rockefeller Center, but none of these plans came to fruition. Only with the development of Lincoln Center on New York's Upper West Side did the Met finally have the opportunity to build a modern opera house.
The old Met closed on April 16, 1966 with a sentimental gala farewell performance featuring nearly all of the company's current leading artists. Zinka Milanov made her last Met appearance that night, and among the many invited guests was soprano Anna Case who had made her debut at the house in 1906. The original building, having failed to obtain landmark status, was razed in 1967. It was replaced by a modern office building intended to provide a steady income for the opera company.
The Met at Lincoln Center
The present Metropolitan Opera House, with approximately 3,800 seats, is located at Lincoln Center at Lincoln Square in the Upper West Side and was designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison. Although west-east roads do not run through Lincoln Center itself, the Metropolitan Opera House is parallel to the block from West 63rd Street to West 64th Street. The rear of the House meets Amsterdam Avenue and the entrance to the Opera House is at Lincoln Center Plaza which begins at Columbus Avenue. The building is clad in white travertine and the east facade is graced with a distinctive series of five arches. On display in the lobby, and visible to the outside plaza, are two murals created for the space by Marc Chagall. The square gold proscenium is 54' wide and 54' high. The main curtain of custom-woven gold damask is the largest tab curtain in the world.
The new building opened on September 16, 1966, with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. The large and highly mechanized stage and support space smoothly facilitates the rotating presentation of up to four different opera productions each week. There are 7 full stage elevators, (60' wide, with double decks) and three slipstages, the upstage one containing a 60' diameter revolve (turntable). There are 103 motorized battens (linesets) for overhead lifting and there are two 100' tall fully-enveloping cycloramas.
While the Met Opera Company is on hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera House is home to the annual Spring season of American Ballet Theatre. It is also regularly the location for touring opera and ballet companies including the Kirov, Bolshoi, and La Scala. In addition, the Met has presented recitals by Vladimir Horowitz, Kathleen Battle and others. Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach was staged independently at the Met in 1976.
Principal conductors
Although no conductor was officially titled "Music Director" until Rafael Kubelík, a number of conductors had ongoing influence on the quality and performance style of the orchestra throughout the Met's history. The Met has also had a great many celebrated guest conductors who are not listed here.
Deaths at the Met
On March 4, 1960, Leonard Warren died of a stroke onstage after completing the aria "Urna fatale" in act two of Verdi's La forza del destino.
On April 30, 1977, Betty Stone, a member of the Met chorus, was killed in an accident offstage during a tour performance of Il Trovatore in Cleveland.
On July 23, 1980, Helen Hagnes Mintiks, a Canadian-born violinist, was found dead at the bottom of an air shaft at the Met, murdered by a stagehand, Craig Crimmins, during a performance of the Berlin Ballet.
On January 5, 1996, tenor Richard Versalle died while playing the role of Vitek in Leoš Janácek's The Makropulos Case. Versalle was climbing a ladder in the opening scene when he suffered a heart attack and fell to the stage.
In addition, several audience members have died at the Met. The most well-known incident was the suicide of operagoer Bantcho Bantchevsky on January 23, 1988 during an intermission of Verdi's Macbeth.
See also
Further reading
- Meyer, Martin The Met: One Hundred Years of Grand Opera, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983. ISBN 0-671-47087-6
- Robinson, Francis, Celebration: The Metropolitan Opera, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1979. ISBN 0-385-12975-0
- Wasserman, Adam, "Sirius Business", Opera News, December 2006
External links
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