Fittingly, episode one of The Gilded Age’s second season ends with a party. Mrs Russell (Carrie Coon’s character, who is not-so-loosely based on Alva Vanderbilt) invites the crème de la crème of New York to her Fifth Avenue mansion to discuss a cause of the utmost social importance: the building of a new opera house. Yet it’s not an event without its drama: Mrs Astor, the de facto ringleader of the old guard, threatens to leave so as not to jeopardise her relationship with the Academy of Music, the city’s current opera house. But, Mrs Russell reminds Mrs Astor, such an abrupt departure would only cause a scandal in the papers – surely that’s not what she wants?
Immediately, it becomes clear to the viewer that the major arc of season two will centre around the building… as well as the old-money-versus-new-money conflict that arises as a result.
Like much of The Gilded Age, it’s a plot point that is very much rooted in history. In the 1880s, the opera was the centre of the upper crust’s social scene: people would dress in their finest gowns and tiaras and then head to the arts centre for a night of live performance. Yet it wasn’t just the music they were interested in: unmarried members of the opposite sex were allowed to mingle at the opera, making it a great draw for moneyed young adults. Already-coupled ticket holders would take great care in inviting distinguished guests to provide stimulating conversation for the evening. Then there was the cultural cachet: opera boxes were expensive, and to have one was a physical manifestation of your wealth. Simply put: in Gilded Age America, it was the place to see and be seen.
The one problem? At the Academy of Music – Manhattan’s only opera house – there weren’t enough boxes for everyone who wanted them.
Members of New York City’s old guard – then known as Knickerbockers, as they were descended from the island’s original Dutch settlers who used to wear knickerbocker-style trousers – had secured their boxes back in the 1850s. And they were loath to give them up: “Beggarly as was the account of these boxes in a commercial sense, and freely as their owners grumbled about their possessions to the reporters with the advent of each successive season, they showed no willingness to part with them to any of the increasing number of New Yorkers who were entitled to aspire to the financial and social distinction of an opera box,” read an 1883 article in Harper’s Monthly. For New York’s nouveau riche – a class of millionaires who had made their fortunes in emerging industrial industries like railroads and oil – the velvet curtain was firmly closed. Harper’s found that in 1880 one socially aspirational (or perhaps desperate) individual offered to pay $30,000 for a box. Accounting for inflation, that would be around $1 million today.
Soon, it became clear that the Academy of Music could not accommodate all the representatives of the two elements in fashionable society who, for one reason or another, wished to own or occupy the boxes that were the visible sign of wealth and social position. Sick of the shutout, a new plan emerged that same year to build the Metropolitan Opera House: a bigger, better space for this new class of millionaires. Leading the charge? The Vanderbilt family, including William H, William K, and Cornelius. (According to an 1881 report in The New York Times, of the opera house’s 10,500 shares, the Vanderbilt family owned around 750.) Other now famous name families – like the Morgans, Rockefellers and Roosevelts – joined them.
When the deep pockets of the competition became clear, the trustees of the Academy of Music made a last-ditch effort to avoid social oblivion, offering the Vanderbilts, Morgans and Rockefellers boxes. But it was too late: in October 1883, the Metropolitan Opera House opened on 39th Street with a production of Faust. Its auditorium, with 3,045 seats, was the largest in the world. The stage was the third largest, after only the Imperial Opera House in St Petersburg and the New Opera in Paris. At the time, a critic for The Nation bemoaned how such a size dwarfed the acoustics. But he also made a more cutting (if not entirely untrue) remark: “But as the house was built avowedly for social purposes rather than artistic, it is useless to complain about this.”
Social it certainly was. In its opening coverage of the Metropolitan Opera House, the paper noted its pivotal role in New York high society: “The Temple of Wealth has been opened. The new opera house is what I mean. That concern has been formally dedicated to the worship and glorification of money,” wrote its correspondent. Emblematic of it all? Alva Vanderbilt herself, who “led the family in gorgeousness.”
She wore a white satin dress so embossed with pearls she seemed covered in them, as well as diamonds upon diamonds. The Washington Post surmised the jewels worn by the Vanderbilt women that night must have equalled a quarter of a million dollars – around $8 million today.
Within three years, the Temple of Wealth had won. The Academy of Music, dwarfed by the competition, closed its opera program and resorted to vaudeville shows instead. In 1926, it was demolished to make room for the Con Ed building.
This month, the Metropolitan Opera – now housed at Lincoln Center – celebrates its 140th anniversary. Alva Vanderbilt would be proud.
