Metropolitan Opera
The Metropolitan Opera is an American opera company based in New York City, currently resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, situated on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Referred to colloquially as the Met, the company is operated by the non-profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as the general manager. The company's music director has been Yannick Nézet-Séguin since 2018.
The Met was founded in 1883 as an alternative to the previously established Academy of Music opera house and debuted the same year in a new building on 39th and Broadway. It moved to the new Lincoln Center location in 1966.
The Metropolitan Opera is the largest classical music organization in North America. The company presents about 18 different operas each year from late September through early June. The operas are presented in a rotating repertory schedule, with up to seven performances of four different works staged each week. Performances are given in the evening Monday through Saturday with a matinée on Saturday. Matinées are also offered on several Sundays. Several operas are presented in new productions each season. Sometimes these are borrowed, shared, or co-produced with other opera companies. The rest of the year's operas are given in revivals of productions from previous seasons. The 2015–16 season comprised 227 performances of 25 operas.
The operas in the Met's repertoire consist of a wide range of works, from 18th-century Baroque and 19th-century Bel canto to the Minimalism of the late 20th and 21st centuries. These operas are presented in staged productions that range in style from those with elaborate traditional decors to others that feature modern conceptual designs.
The Met's performing company consists of a large symphony orchestra, a chorus, children's choir, and many supporting and leading solo singers. The company also employs numerous free-lance dancers, actors, musicians and other performers throughout the season. The Met's roster of singers includes both international and American artists, some of whose careers have been developed through the Met's young artists programs. While many singers appear periodically as guests with the company, others maintain a close long-standing association with the Met, appearing many times each season until they retire.
History
Origins
The Metropolitan Opera Company was founded in 1883 as an alternative to New York's old established Academy of Music opera house. The subscribers to the academy's limited number of private boxes represented the highest stratum in New York society. By 1880, these "old money" families were loath to admit New York's newly wealthy industrialists into their long-established social circle. Frustrated with being excluded, the Metropolitan Opera's founding subscribers determined to build a new opera house that would outshine the old Academy in every way. A group of 22 men assembled at Delmonico's restaurant on April 28, 1880. They elected officers and established subscriptions for ownership in the new company. The new theater, built at 39th and Broadway, would include three tiers of private boxes in which the scions of New York's powerful new industrial families could display their wealth and establish their social prominence. The first subscribers included members of the Morgan, Roosevelt, and Vanderbilt families, all of whom had been excluded from the academy. The new Metropolitan Opera House opened on October 22, 1883, and was an immediate success, both socially and artistically. The Academy of Music's opera season folded just three years after the Met opened.Inaugural season
In its early decades the Met did not produce the opera performances itself but hired prominent manager/impresarios to stage a season of opera at the new Metropolitan Opera House. Henry Abbey served as manager for the inaugural season, 1883–84, which opened with a performance of Charles Gounod's Faust starring the brilliant Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson. Abbey's company that first season featured an ensemble of artists led by sopranos Nilsson and Marcella Sembrich; mezzo-soprano Sofia Scalchi; tenors Italo Campanini and Roberto Stagno; baritones Giuseppe Del Puente and Joseph Kaschmann; and bass Franco Novara. They gave 150 performances of 20 different operas by Gounod, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, Thomas, Bizet, Flotow, and Ponchielli. All performances were sung in Italian and were conducted either by music director Auguste Vianesi or Cleofonte Campanini.The company performed not only in the new Manhattan opera house, but also started a long tradition of touring throughout the country. In the winter and spring of 1884 the Met presented opera in theaters in Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Washington D.C., and Baltimore. Back in New York, the last night of the season featured a long gala performance to benefit Mr. Abbey. The special program consisted not only of various scenes from opera, but also offered Marcella Sembrich playing the violin and the piano, as well as the famed stage actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry in a scene from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. Abbey's inaugural season resulted in very large financial deficits.
''The Met in Philadelphia''
The Metropolitan Opera began a long history of performing in Philadelphia during its first season, presenting its entire repertoire in the city during January and April 1884. The company's first Philadelphia performance was of Faust on January 14, 1884, at the Chestnut Street Opera House. The Met continued to perform annually in Philadelphia for nearly eighty years, taking the entire company to the city on selected Tuesday nights throughout the opera season. Performances were usually held at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, with the company presenting close to 900 performances in the city by 1961 when the Met's regular visits ceased.On April 26, 1910, the Met purchased the Philadelphia Opera House from Oscar Hammerstein I. The company renamed the house the Metropolitan Opera House and performed all of their Philadelphia performances there until 1920, when the company sold the theater and resumed performing at the Academy of Music.
During the Met's early years, the company annually presented a dozen or more opera performances in Philadelphia throughout the season. Over the years the number of performances was gradually reduced until the final Philadelphia season in 1961 consisted of only four operas. The final performance of that last season was on March 21, 1961, with Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli in Turandot. After the Tuesday night visits were ended, the Met still returned to Philadelphia on its spring tours in 1967, 1968, 1978, and 1979.
German seasons
For its second season, the Met's directors turned to Leopold Damrosch as general manager. The revered conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra was engaged to lead the opera company in an all German language repertory and serve as its chief conductor. Under Damrosch, the company consisted of some the most celebrated singers from Europe's German-language opera houses. The new German Met found great popular and critical success in the works of Wagner and other German composers as well as in Italian and French operas sung in German. Damrosch died only months into his first season at the Met. Edmund C. Stanton replaced Damrosch the following year and served as general manager through the 1890–91 season. The Met's six German seasons were especially noted for performances by the celebrated conductor Anton Seidl whose Wagner interpretations were noted for their almost mystical intensity. The conductor Walter Damrosch, Leopold's son, also initiated a long relationship with the Met during this period.''Mapleson Cylinders''
From 1900 to 1904, Lionel Mapleson made a series of sound recordings at the Met. Mapleson, the nephew of the opera impresario James Henry Mapleson, was employed by the Met as a violinist and music librarian. He used an Edison cylinder phonograph set-up near the stage to capture short, one- to five-minute recordings of the soloists, chorus and orchestra during performances. These unique acoustic documents, known as the Mapleson Cylinders, preserve an audio picture of the early Met, and are the only known extant recordings of some performers, including the tenor Jean de Reszke and the dramatic soprano Milka Ternina. The recordings were later issued on a series of LPs and, in 2002, were included in the National Recording Registry.Touring
Beginning in 1898, the Metropolitan Opera company of singers and musicians undertook a six-week tour of American cities following its season in New York. These annual spring tours brought the company and its stars to cities throughout the U.S., most of which had no opera company of their own.In Cleveland, for example, Met stops were sporadic until 1924, when underwriting efforts spearheaded by Newton D. Baker led to 3 consecutive years of annual 8-engagement performances. This led to the formation of the Northern Ohio Opera Association led by future U.S. Senator Robert J. Bulkley with the express purpose of underwriting long-term touring contracts with the Met. Cleveland was a particular lucrative stop for the Met, which had no competition in the form of a local opera company, and performances were held in the enormous Public Auditorium, which sat well over 9,000 people. The Met's national tours continued until 1986.
The Met also has a long history of international tours, stretching back to its first European visit to Paris in 1910. More recently, the company made a noteworthy tour of Japan in 2011, marking its seventh tour of the country since 1975, in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster that resulted from a severe earthquake and subsequent tsunami. The company performed Puccini's La Bohème, Verdi's Don Carlo, and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
Beginning in 2023, the company reinstated tours of the Met Orchestra. The European tour in June and July 2023, with stops in London, Paris, and Baden-Baden, marked the orchestra's first tour to Europe in more than 20 years. The orchestra made its first-ever tour of Asia in the summer of 2024, performing in Seoul, Hyogo, Tokyo, and Taipei.
In 2025, director Peter Gelb announced that the Met would be beginning an annual winter residency at the Royal Diriyah Opera House in Riyadh for 5 years in exchange for more than $200 million over 8 years from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This donation was in the wake of financial difficulties that had led the Met to withdraw more than a third of the money in its endowment fund.
In 2026, Gelb stated that the contribution from the Saudis had been delayed and as a result, the Met would be reducing the number of productions in its next season, laying off 22 employees, and was considering selling the Chagall murals that had been commissioned for the opera house's lobby.