The Metropolitan Opera is a vibrant home for the most creative and talented singers, conductors, composers, musicians, stage directors, designers, visual artists, choreographers, and dancers from around the world.
Since the summer of 2006, Peter Gelb has been the Met’s general manager—the 16th in company history. Under his leadership, the Met has elevated its theatrical standards by significantly increasing the number of new productions, staged by the most imaginative directors working in theater and opera, and has launched a series of initiatives to broaden its reach internationally. These efforts to win new audiences prominently include the successful Live in HD series of high-definition performance transmissions to movie theaters around the world. To revitalize its repertoire, the Met regularly presents modern masterpieces alongside the classics. Starting with the 2018–19 season, Yannick Nézet-Séguin took the musical helm of the company as the Met’s Jeannette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director.
The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883, with its first opera house built on Broadway and 39th Street by a group of wealthy businessmen who wanted their own theater. In the company’s early years, the management changed course several times, first performing everything in Italian (even Carmen and Lohengrin), then everything in German (even Aida and Faust), before finally settling into a policy of performing most works in their original language, with some notable exceptions.
The Metropolitan Opera has always engaged many of the world’s most important artists. Christine Nilsson and Marcella Sembrich shared leading roles during the opening season. In the German seasons that followed, Lilli Lehmann dominated the Wagnerian repertory and anything else she chose to sing. In the 1890s, Nellie Melba and Emma Calvé shared the spotlight with the De Reszke brothers, Jean and Edouard, and two American sopranos, Emma Eames and Lillian Nordica. Enrico Caruso arrived in 1903, and by the time of his death 18 years later had sung more performances with the Met than with all the world’s other opera companies combined. American singers acquired even greater prominence with Geraldine Farrar and Rosa Ponselle becoming important members of the company. In the 1920s, Lawrence Tibbett became the first in a distinguished line of American baritones for whom the Met was home. Today, the Met continues to present the best available talent from around the world and also discovers and trains artists through its National Council Auditions and Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.
Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the opera house on 39th Street did not have adequate stage facilities. But it was not until the Met joined with other New York institutions in forming Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts that a new home became possible. The new Metropolitan Opera House, which opened at Lincoln Center in September 1966, was equipped with the finest technical facilities.
Many great conductors have helped shape the Met, beginning with Wagner’s disciple Anton Seidl in the 1880s and 1890s and Arturo Toscanini, who made his debut in 1908. There were two seasons with both Toscanini and Gustav Mahler on the conducting roster. Later, Artur Bodanzky, Bruno Walter, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, and Dimitri Mitropoulos contributed powerful musical direction. Former Met Music Director James Levine was responsible for shaping the Met Orchestra and Chorus into the finest in the world, as well as expanding the Met repertoire. He led more than 2,500 Met performances over the course of his four-and-a-half decades with the company. When Yannick Nézet-Séguin assumed the role of Music Director in September 2018, he became just the third maestro to occupy this position in company history.
The Met has given the U.S. premieres of some of the most important operas in the repertory. Among Wagner’s works, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal were first performed in this country by the Met. Other American premieres have included Boris Godunov, Der Rosenkavalier, Turandot, Simon Boccanegra, and Arabella. The Met’s 32 world premieres include Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West and Il Trittico, Humperdinck’s Königskinder, and five recent works—John Corigliano and William Hoffman’s The Ghosts of Versailles (1991), Philip Glass’s The Voyage (1992), John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby (1999), Tobias Picker’s An American Tragedy (2005), Tan Dun’s The First Emperor (2006), and the Baroque pastiche The Enchanted Island (2011), devised by Jeremy Sams, with music by Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, and others. An additional 78 operas have had their Met premieres since the opera house at Lincoln Center opened in 1966.
Hänsel und Gretel was the first complete opera broadcast from the Met on Christmas Day 1931. Regular Saturday afternoon live broadcasts quickly made the Met a permanent presence in communities throughout the United States and Canada.
In 1977, the Met began a regular series of televised productions with a performance of La Bohème, viewed by more than four million people on public television. Over the following decades, more than 70 complete Met performances have been made available to a huge audience around the world. Many of these performances have been issued on video, laserdisc, and DVD.
In 1995, the Met introduced Met Titles, a unique system of real-time translation. Met Titles appear on individual screens mounted on the back of each row of seats, for those members of the audience who wish to utilize them, but with minimum distraction for those who do not. Titles are provided for all Met performances in English, Spanish, and German. Titles are also provided in Italian for Italian-language operas.
Each season, the Met stages more than 200 opera performances in New York. More than 800,000 people attend the performances in the opera house during the season, and millions more experience the Met through new media distribution initiatives and state-of-the-art technology.
The Met continues its hugely successful radio broadcast series—entering its 88th year this fall—the longest-running classical music series in American broadcast history. It is heard around the world on the Toll Brothers–Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network.
In December 2006, the company launched The Met: Live in HD, a series of performance transmissions shown live in high definition in movie theaters around the world. The series expanded from an initial six transmissions to 10 in the 2014–15 season and today reaches more than 2,000 venues in 73 countries across six continents. The Live in HD performances are later also shown on public television, and a number of them have been released on DVD. In partnership with the New York City Department of Education and the Metropolitan Opera Guild, the Met has developed a nationwide program for students to attend Live in HD transmissions for free in their schools.
Other media offerings include Metropolitan Opera Radio on SiriusXM Satellite Radio, a subscription-based audio service broadcasting both live and historical performances, commercial-free and round the clock. Met Opera on Demand (formerly called Met Player), a subscription-based online streaming service available at metoperaondemand.org, was launched in November 2008. It offers more than 550 Met performances, including Live in HD productions, classic telecasts, and archival broadcast recordings, for high-quality viewing and listening on any computer or iPad. The Met also provides free live audio streaming of performances on its website once every week during the opera season.
In 2006, the Met launched a groundbreaking commissioning program in partnership with New York’s Lincoln Center Theater to provide renowned composers and playwrights the resources to create and develop new works at the Met and at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater. The first of these to reach the stage was Nico Muhly’s Two Boys, with a libretto by Craig Lucas, which opened at the Met in the fall of 2013.
Other initiatives include annual holiday entertainment offerings; a Rush Ticket Program offering discounted orchestra seats for $25; expanded editorial offerings in Met publications, on the web, and through broadcasts; and new public programs that provide greater access to the Met.
