Scarlet Masque Theatre Journal New Beginnings and Fond Farewells Vol. 1 | Page 40

the city’s more prolific exports. This is important to include in order to portray that New
York does not or did not simply serve as the performance center. Rather, the city also
has, and continues to serve as a center for compositional and creative development. In
the case of New York opera, the city served as the site for the compositional evolution of
traditional opera. As you will see later, this is a common theme seen also in
performance institutions: taking what exists, and making it the city’s own.
Moving from genres to institutions and the more traditional view of what opera
represents, the Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1880 and finally assumed a
permanent location in 1883 at 1423 Broadway, New York City (Kolodin, 1966). In this
case, unlike New York opera which wouldn’t come about until nearly a century later,
opera was extremely traditional. Rather than perform in English, which was becoming
quite popular in English speaking countries, the Met chose to perform in the original
language of the libretto (Kolodin, 1966). As a whole, the earliest examples of the Met
tend to be quite stuffy. Though many of the original patrons did in fact care about opera,
making one’s wealth visible to the public was very much an important event in attending
the performance itself (Mayer, 1983). However, the audiences themselves were likely
very educated in their music. Mayer writes,
“But the fact was that the great majority of both plutocrats and commoners came
to the opera house because they cared about opera—and knew something about
it too. Many members of the board of the real estate company were world
travelers, linked to Europe by business interests, informed to a degree about
what was going on in the opera houses of London, Berlin, Paris, Milan, and even
St. Petersburg.” (Mayer, 1983).
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