Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [850]
Vanderbilt embarked on a grand flanking movement. First he gathered together a formidably monied strike force, including many of the most powerful figures in the emerging corporate economy—his sons William Kissam and Cornelius II, J. P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, Jay Gould, William C. Whitney, George F. Baker—as well as some older patricians like Ogden Goelet, Adrian Iselin, and William Rhinelander. Then Vanderbilt announced they would construct a new opera house, as grand as those of Milan and Vienna, and eclipse the 14th Street bastion forevermore.
Belmont and company panicked and offered to add twenty-six boxes to the Academy’s existing eighteen, but it was too late. Way uptown, at Broadway and 39th Street, a mammoth edifice slowly took shape, the grandly named Metropolitan Opera House, capable of seating over thirty-six hundred people, and accommodating wealthy patrons in seventy opulent boxes. On opening night, October 22, 1883, with Faust as the inaugural performance, these were packed with opera lovers whose collective worth was estimated at $540 million. “The Goulds and the Vanderbilts and people of that ilk,” wrote the New York Dramatic Mirror, “perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks.”
The Metropolitan was an instant triumph. The doomed Academy of Music hung on gamely a few more years, then folded with an announcement from its manager that “I cannot fight Wall Street.” Musically its early years were somewhat shakier. To fill the huge hall, the Metropolitan called on Leopold Damrosch, a devout Wagnerian. Damrosch devoted the 1884 season almost entirely to German opera. Singers were imported from Bayreuth. This appealed to the city’s massive German population, but boxholders loathed the new music, couldn’t see one another’s finery in the Wagnerian gloom, and bustled and gabbled throughout the performances. When rebuked by the Germans below, the directors maintained that the stockholders had a perfect right to disturb whomever they wished. Conductor Anton Seidl, who had assisted Wagner at Bayreuth, replaced Damrosch on his death in 1885 and maintained the German program for several more years, until a full-scale revolt brought back Italian and French opera.
In the symphonic world, musically inclined industrialists and financiers were having problems of a different sort with the New York Philharmonic. The old German cooperative presented only half a dozen concerts each year. As the orchestra couldn’t guarantee members full time work, they spent most of their time playing at balls and dances; hence their performances were less than highly polished, though much improved after Theodore Thomas was taken on as conductor. Neither their less than professional standards nor traditional repertoire bothered old-fashioned elites, but both failed to satisfy new tycoons. A capitalist combine including Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie underwrote a rival, the New York Symphony Orchestra (1878), another Leopold Damrosch project. Orchestra war ensued. In one notable sally Damrosch stole the American premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony from under Thomas’s nose.
On Leopold’s death in 1885, his son Walter succeeded to Symphony leadership, and the younger Damrosch convinced Andrew Carnegie that what the group needed was a permanent home—the Metropolitan Opera House being inadequate for orchestral performances. Carnegie agreed to support construction of a first-class concert hall. On May 5, 1891, a vaguely Italian Renaissance structure—including the velvet-lined, acoustically superb Music Hall, as it was then known—opened at another untraditionally uptown venue, Seventh Avenue and 57th Street. Nestled in their boxes, subscribers Whitney, Rockefeller, Frick, and, of course, Carnegie himself heard Episcopal Bishop Henry Codman Potter say that while in European countries culture often depended on state patronage, “it is a happy omen for New York that a single individual can do so princely a thing.” Then they and their guest of honor, Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky—the symphonic