The Met

Every evening - and on many afternoons - more than a million people, in all corners of the world, are getting ready. Some are rushing home from work, hoping to grab a shower and a quick bite to eat before the scheduled start. Some are hailing a taxi, or running to catch the crosstown bus to the performance site. Others are disembarking from a chartered plane, or an Amtrak train, or a Greyhound bus, after traveling hundreds of miles just to be there. Some paid hundreds of dollars for their tickets. Others clutch a 20-dollar stub allowing them the privilege of standing, behind the last row of the balcony. And while those folks are filing into the auditorium, waiting for the lights to dim, others are at home, settling into comfortable chairs by the radio; or checking their watches, and switching on their walkmans, so they can listen on the job; or quickly finishing their mess hall dinners so they can hurry back to their cells to catch the broadcast. What sort of entertainment - what form of artistic expression - can cut across so many economic, social, and language barriers, to unite people of all beliefs and backgrounds for a few hours, in a way no peace treaty can ever do?

It would almost have to be an art form that combines all the others: words, music, singing, acting, dance…even painting and sculpture. It would have to be an kind of artistic expression that can run the gamut of emotions - from knowing titters to raucus laughter, from quiet tears to unashamed sobbing, from pleasant satisfaction to naked fear - and all in a single evening. Like opera, for example.

Now, if you think opera is an arcain entertainment that you can’t understand without years of indoctrination, or that opera productions are really just an opportunity for the upper classes to flaunt expensive furs … well, get over it! Actually, if you thought that way you probably wouldn’t be here, reading this page. And we think that stereotypical opinion of opera isn’t so widely-held as non-believers might imagine. If it was, do you think could opera have survived on the radio for 60 years?!

That’s right. It was six decades ago that a radio broadcast sponsored by people who sell gasoline changed the way Americans think about opera. And before long, the notion that opera is an elitist entertainment, admired and understood only by those with deep pockets and blue blood, was history. By the time the first live broadcast of a performance from the Metropolitan Opera was over, millions of Americans from all walks of life - rich and poor, rough and genteel, native and immigrant alike - had come down with a disease that they hoped could never be cured: opera fever. If you don’t have it yet, tune in At the Opera, and we’ll help you catch it.

On this week’s show, host Lou Santacroce will explore not just the way opera has influenced people in the 60 years of Metropolitan broadcasts, but also opera’s future. We’ll hear from a number of operatic luminaries about the current state of operatic affairs, as well as what coming seasons might hold; we’ll hear about an ingenius edcuational program that teaches children how to write and produce operas of their own; and we’ll even hear about rock stars who sacrificed concert bookings, and risked their rebellious reputations, all for the love of opera. It’s all by way of introducing the special Season Preview show from the Metropolitan, celebrating the Met’s 60 years of on-air opera.

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