audiences. The Met, largely unscathed in the financial department over the years, also has recently begun to suffer due to the fickle nature of opera audiences as can be discerned from Fielder. Though the two companies in their modern forms, I believe, do represent opera for all audiences, there will likely always be an association between NYCO and the people, and the Met with the elite. Perhaps this will diminish further as the years pass on. However, in the present artistic landscape, it likely doesn’ t matter. Each institution represents a great deal of American operatic achievement and have inspired companies and performers nationwide. Perhaps that is the greatest contribution of opera and its institutions within New York to the domestic and global artistic world: they portray to different companies and audiences across the globe that opera is not only a European art form. New York has long served as the principal city in the United States on a global standpoint. Thus, by having such great domestic and international achievements from both institutions in the city itself, the United States can safely state its claim as a presence in the operatic world.
From more of an internal standpoint, these institutions and New York opera as a sub-genre have provided a great deal of artistic reprieve throughout the years. New York opera itself was a creative product of the WWII years and served to musically represent American and our country’ s popular opera on what would become a global scale. Both NYCO and the Met served to provide artistic and monetary aid to New York City itself in a time of great crisis surrounding the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. The city was able to cope with these events by means of art, which also provided the inherent mentality that the city and country would continue to press on. Thus, the operatic contributions of New York City cannot simply be boiled down into that of a
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