Verdi au metropolitan opéra - 16 CD

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Verdi at the Metropolitan Opera For decades, for every opera singer, “having sung at the Met” seemed indispensable on the calling card of a renowned vocalist, as the crowning achievement of a career, even if it had already taken them to La Scala in Milan, Covent Garden in London, the Vienna Opera, and, of course, the Teatro Colòn in Buenos Aires, the “Colon” plain and simple, an abbreviation that, like the “Met,” quickly replaced the full name of this theater. But what was it that, from its inauguration in 1883, set this theater apart from the others, whetting the appetite of the greatest artists? It was that, although New York had other opera venues, including the Park Theater where Rossini’s Barber was performed in 1828—the first opera ever staged in Italian—and Verdi’s Ernani three years after its creation, the Opera House and especially the Academy of Music, which hosted, before the “Met,” Verdi’s main operas, the small size of these halls, unable to satisfy opera lovers, prompted a group of businessmen to launch a subscription that raised some $800,000 to build, on Broadway, a first theater with 3,615 seats, which opened on October 22, 1883 (with Faust, sung in Italian) and, within the first month, undertook to premiere Verdi’s “popular trilogy,” namely Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. This theater of a new kind, since it did not depend on the City but was privately run, saw its first season end in a colossal deficit; its director, Henry Abbey, was dismissed, and the reins were handed over to the “consortium” of father and son Damrosch, who, from 1884 to 1891, gave broad priority to the German repertoire—and of course Wagnerian, including Rienzi—but performing Faust, Carmen, and Hamlet to Aida (already given in New York in 1873) entirely in German—created at the Met in that language on November 12, 1886—as well as the other rare Italian operas, and Meyerbeer, widely introduced in his native language! Roland Mancini