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Grand Opera: The Story of the Met
The Metropolitan has stood among the grandest of opera companies since its birth in 1883. Tracing the offstage/onstage workings of this famed New York institution, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron tell how the Met became and remains a powerful actor on the global cultural scene. In this first new history of the company in thirty years, each of the chronologically sequenced chapters surveys a composer or a slice of the repertoire and brings to life dominant personalities and memorable performances of the time. From the opening night Faust to the recent controversial production of Wagner’s “Ring,” Grand Opera is a remarkable account of management and audience response to the push and pull of tradition and reinvention. Spanning the decades between the Gilded Age and the age of new media, this story of the Met concludes by tipping its hat to the hugely successful “Live in HD” simulcasts and other twenty-first-century innovations. Grand Opera ’s appeal extends far beyond the large circle of opera enthusiasts. Drawing on unpublished documents from the Metropolitan Opera Archives, reviews, recordings, and much more, this richly detailed book looks at the Met in the broad context of national and international issues and events.
- GenresNonfictionMusicArt
472 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 12, 2015
If you’re interested in opera history I’d say this is definitely worth your time. It tells the story of how America at the end of the 19th century went from a cultural backwaters with only the barest of operatic offerings to being (currently) the #2 consumers of opera worldwide, and more importantly for the Met, holders of the premiere opera house that sets the bar for the rest of the world. There’s also a secondary story here about the birth of modern opera as we know it, and not modern music and creative stagings, but the modern operatic working environment where you are now expected to perform every opera in its original language by default and therefore where singers must know how to sing in multiple languages; where radio, television, and DVDs are a major part of the audience and singers must act not just for stage but for screen, and where public-appeal donation drives for the first time bring some actual financial democracy to this crazy, messy, fantastic animal we call opera. And that’s a good story!
However, I think one of the more serious faults in the books lies with its over-reliance on telling the story of the Met in a hoary “Great Men of The Metropolitan Opera” style. The book focuses very heavily on the directors and how they shaped the Met, gives occasional fair attention to conductors and singers, but skims over anyone else who might have had an influence or just doesn't mention them at all. And I think this does a great disservice to the story; in the grand scheme of things often the people who shaped art the most were the ones writing the checks, not the ones cashing them.
While the book opens with a good angle on the unabashedly status-symbol beginnings of the Met (which was founded because New York’s existing opera house wouldn't sell boxes to New Money, that opera house was then casually ground under the heels of the Met’s 70 boxholders’ industrialist tycoon boots and now you've never heard of it), and there’s also some really good stuff on how they tried to attract the various immigrant groups in NYC, first banking on the Italians, but they were too poor to come, then switching to German opera because the Germans actually had some money to spare. But once we hit the 20th century the focus on who’s actually paying for this loud nonsense fades away. For one of the biggest opera-supporters of modern times, Sybil B. Harrington, she gets I think one name drop, although I personally think her lasting influence on the Met will become abundantly clear in maybe 40 years time or so. If you want to look at the cementing of “museum-piece” opera in the later half of the 20th century look no further than Sybil B. Harrington and her unabashedly buying the Met audience the opera it wants, not the opera it needs.
As you can anticipate the book’s history-telling gets increasingly sketchy as it nears the present day. Everything up through the building of the new Met house in the 1960s is solid, but after that, tread lightly. The final stuff on Peter Gelb’s tenure at the end of the book is pretty safe to skip, we just can’t usefully analyse his influence on the Met at this time, and the manuscript was written before the most interesting events of 2014 which involved Gelb getting yelled at a fair amount, so that section was out of date before it hit bookstore shelves anyway.
Not a faultless book. but if you’re into opera history, or perhaps into New York history, it’s well-researched and worth reading.
However, I think one of the more serious faults in the books lies with its over-reliance on telling the story of the Met in a hoary “Great Men of The Metropolitan Opera” style. The book focuses very heavily on the directors and how they shaped the Met, gives occasional fair attention to conductors and singers, but skims over anyone else who might have had an influence or just doesn't mention them at all. And I think this does a great disservice to the story; in the grand scheme of things often the people who shaped art the most were the ones writing the checks, not the ones cashing them.
While the book opens with a good angle on the unabashedly status-symbol beginnings of the Met (which was founded because New York’s existing opera house wouldn't sell boxes to New Money, that opera house was then casually ground under the heels of the Met’s 70 boxholders’ industrialist tycoon boots and now you've never heard of it), and there’s also some really good stuff on how they tried to attract the various immigrant groups in NYC, first banking on the Italians, but they were too poor to come, then switching to German opera because the Germans actually had some money to spare. But once we hit the 20th century the focus on who’s actually paying for this loud nonsense fades away. For one of the biggest opera-supporters of modern times, Sybil B. Harrington, she gets I think one name drop, although I personally think her lasting influence on the Met will become abundantly clear in maybe 40 years time or so. If you want to look at the cementing of “museum-piece” opera in the later half of the 20th century look no further than Sybil B. Harrington and her unabashedly buying the Met audience the opera it wants, not the opera it needs.
As you can anticipate the book’s history-telling gets increasingly sketchy as it nears the present day. Everything up through the building of the new Met house in the 1960s is solid, but after that, tread lightly. The final stuff on Peter Gelb’s tenure at the end of the book is pretty safe to skip, we just can’t usefully analyse his influence on the Met at this time, and the manuscript was written before the most interesting events of 2014 which involved Gelb getting yelled at a fair amount, so that section was out of date before it hit bookstore shelves anyway.
Not a faultless book. but if you’re into opera history, or perhaps into New York history, it’s well-researched and worth reading.
January 19, 2019
Chock full of details, reviewers’ quotes, personality tidbits, and descriptions of productions - most presented as disastrous, few coming out unscathed - this was a delight to read, if a very critical and sometimes stinging history of the Met and the people who have filled it. The book serves also as a bit of a history of New York and the arts there, let alone the history of opera in America. Indispensable for anyone who loves opera, and particularly, the Metropolitan Opera.
June 9, 2015
A well researched and insightful history of the Metropolitan Opera from its beginnings to 2013.
September 18, 2022
Much better for a research book than a read from cover to cover.
January 8, 2026
Useful. But as others have said it has significant limitations and it is better as a research text.
There are already numerous books covering the earlier years of the Metropolitan opera in better detail than this, and the challenge perhaps is trying to pack 130 years into one book. There's lots of useful information here but unless you're already across the singers and the works particularly, you'll struggle with the speed with which we rush through this. Joanna Fiedler's Molto Agitato is a better primer for the 1970s through 1990s at the Met, a very significant time. Joseph Volpe's memoir is also a good primer for that era through to the mid-2000s.
The Affrons' strengths are in their operatic understanding, which neither Fiedler or (in a particular way) Volpe choose to focus on. They're most useful for statistics and broad information on the trends and directions that the company has taken. Most interesting to me was the post-2005 business, as the Peter Gelb era (still ongoing as I write this) has been pivotal for how the house responds to the changes in present-day culture.
I took away hundreds of little details from this book, so it's highly useful. At the same time, the rushed pace of discussing individual productions and seasons requires an 'insider' knowledge to follow it closely. More frustratingly, although I understand their bias, the Affrons reveal themselves as older, fairly conservative opera patrons. I don't think it's really appropriate of them to criticise so many of the more recent opera productions, and especially to do so in what is sometimes taken as an objective manner. (Their concern about the 'blasphemy' of letting Manon and Des Grieux have sex in a church seems particularly quaint, rejecting the complex interactions of sex and religion that goes back to time immemorial.) If they could more specifically tie experimental or period-altered productions to particular box office numbers, that might be interesting. But if it's just that they want to live in a cosseted American world where opera remains pretty stories from the 19th century... well, that's a lovely opinion but it's not particularly useful in a book that purports to tell the history of a house.
Useful all the same.
There are already numerous books covering the earlier years of the Metropolitan opera in better detail than this, and the challenge perhaps is trying to pack 130 years into one book. There's lots of useful information here but unless you're already across the singers and the works particularly, you'll struggle with the speed with which we rush through this. Joanna Fiedler's Molto Agitato is a better primer for the 1970s through 1990s at the Met, a very significant time. Joseph Volpe's memoir is also a good primer for that era through to the mid-2000s.
The Affrons' strengths are in their operatic understanding, which neither Fiedler or (in a particular way) Volpe choose to focus on. They're most useful for statistics and broad information on the trends and directions that the company has taken. Most interesting to me was the post-2005 business, as the Peter Gelb era (still ongoing as I write this) has been pivotal for how the house responds to the changes in present-day culture.
I took away hundreds of little details from this book, so it's highly useful. At the same time, the rushed pace of discussing individual productions and seasons requires an 'insider' knowledge to follow it closely. More frustratingly, although I understand their bias, the Affrons reveal themselves as older, fairly conservative opera patrons. I don't think it's really appropriate of them to criticise so many of the more recent opera productions, and especially to do so in what is sometimes taken as an objective manner. (Their concern about the 'blasphemy' of letting Manon and Des Grieux have sex in a church seems particularly quaint, rejecting the complex interactions of sex and religion that goes back to time immemorial.) If they could more specifically tie experimental or period-altered productions to particular box office numbers, that might be interesting. But if it's just that they want to live in a cosseted American world where opera remains pretty stories from the 19th century... well, that's a lovely opinion but it's not particularly useful in a book that purports to tell the history of a house.
Useful all the same.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews