Metropolitan Opera - Wikipedia. Coordinates: 4. 0. The company is operated by the non- profit Metropolitan Opera Association, with Peter Gelb as general manager. The music director position is in transition as of 2. The music director designate is Yannick N. It presents about 2.
September through May. The operas are presented in a rotating repertory schedule with up to seven performances of four different works staged each week. Moving to the new Lincoln Center location in 1. Monday through Saturday with a matin. Several operas are presented in new productions each season. Sometimes these are borrowed from or shared with other opera houses. The rest of the year's operas are given in revivals of productions from previous seasons. The 2. 01. 5- 1. 6 season comprised 2. ![]() 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- sized 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, such as Ren. The subscribers to the Academy's limited number of private boxes represented the highest stratum in New York society. By 1. 88. 0, these . 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. They elected officers and established subscriptions for ownership in the new company. With Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Carrie Fisher, Bruno Kirby. Harry and Sally have known each other for years, and are very good friends, but they fear sex would ruin the. ![]() The first Met 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 2. The Academy of Music's opera season folded just three years after the Met opened. Inaugural season. Henry Abbey served as manager for the inaugural season, 1. Charles Gounod's Faust starring the brilliant Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson. ![]() ![]() They gave 1. 50 performances of 2. 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 tenor Italo's brother). 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 1. The Metropolitan Opera, commonly referred to as "The Met", is a company based in New York City, resident at the Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center for the. Met presented opera in theaters in Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia (see below), 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. The special program consisted not only of various scenes from opera, but also offered Mme. 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. The Met in Philadelphia. The company's first Philadelphia performance was of Faust (with Christina Nilsson) on January 1. 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 close to 9. Met's regular visits ceased. On April 2. 6, 1. 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 1. 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 1. The final performance of that last season was on March 2. 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 1. German seasons. The following year the Met's directors turned to Leopold Damrosch as General Manager for its second season. 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. Sadly Damrosch died only months into his first season at the Met. Edmund Stanton replaced Damrosch the following year and served as General Manager through the 1. German repertory. 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. Abbey and Grau. Abbey, John B. After missing a season to rebuild the opera house following a fire in August 1. Abbey and Grau continued as co- managers along with John Schoeffel as the business partner, initiating the so- called . Most of the greatest operatic artists in the world then graced the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in Italian as well as German and French repertory. Notable among them were the brothers Jean and . Henry Abbey died in 1. This division of the company's forces faded after World War II when solo artists spent less time engaged at any one company. Mapleson Cylinders. Mapleson was employed by the Met as a violinist and music librarian. He used an Edisoncylinderphonograph that he 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 2. National Recording Registry. 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. The Met's national tours continued until 1. He was also instrumental in hiring conductor Arturo Vigna. Conried was followed by the 2. Giulio Gatti- Casazza. Gatti- Casazza had been lured by the Met from a celebrated tenure as director of Milan's La Scala Opera House. His model planning, authoritative organizational skills and brilliant casts raised the Metropolitan Opera to a prolonged era of artistic innovation and musical excellence. Gatti- Casazza brought with him the fiery and brilliant conductor Arturo Toscanini, the music director from his seasons at La Scala. The Viennese composer Gustav Mahler also was a Met conductor during Gatti- Casazza's first two seasons and in later years conductors Tullio Serafin and Artur Bodanzky led the company in the Italian and German repertories respectively. The 1. 93. 0s, however, brought new financial and organizational challenges for the company. In 1. 93. 1, Otto Kahn, the noted financier, resigned as head of the Met's board of directors and president of the Metropolitan Opera Company. He had been responsible for engaging Gatti- Casazza and had held the position of president since the beginning of Gatti- Casazza's term as manager. The new chair, prominent lawyer Paul Cravath, had served as the board's legal counsel. Between 1. 92. 9 and 1. Met's wealthy supporters had significantly declined. Cravath also engineered a reorganization of the management company by which it was transformed from a corporation, in which all participants were stockholders, to an association, whose members need not have a financial interest in operations. Apart from this change, the new Metropolitan Opera Association was virtually identical to the old Metropolitan Opera Company. It was hoped the association would be able to save money as it renegotiated contracts which the company had made. It remained in the hands of the society families who owned its stock, yet the subsidies that the house and its owners had given the producing company fell off. In March 1. 93. 2, Cravath found that income resulting from the broadcasts and savings from both salary cuts and reorganization were not sufficient to cover the company's deficits. A plan was floated to move the opera from the building on 3. Street to Rockefeller Center, but it was dropped when it became apparent that it would produce no savings and, instead, representatives of the opera house, the producing company, and the artists formed a committee for fundraising among the public at large. Mainly though appeals made to radio audiences during the weekly broadcasts, the committee was able to obtain enough money to assure continuation of opera for the 1. Bori not only led the committee, but also personally carried out much of its work and within a few months her fundraising efforts produced the $3. His immediate successor, the former Met bass Herbert Witherspoon, died of a heart attack barely six weeks into his term of office. This opened the way for the Canadian tenor and former Met artist Edward Johnson to be appointed general manager. Johnson served the company for the next 1. Met through the remaining years of the depression and the World War II era. The producing company's financial difficulties continued in the years immediately following the desperate season of 1. Entertainment News.
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