The Metropolitan Opera opened in New York on October 22, 1883. The first performance was Gounod's Faust, and the house on Broadway between 39th and 40th streets was full of the city's new money. It was built out of spite and ambition.
The old Academy of Music held the boxes. The established families of New York kept the best seats for themselves, and the newly rich families, shut out, decided to build a house of their own. They put up the money, and the Metropolitan Opera House rose in a few years, larger and grander than the Academy.
The opening was a social event above all. The boxes were held by names like Vanderbilt and Morgan, and the audience came to be seen as much as to hear the music. The opera was almost secondary. The wealth in the tiers was the point.
The house made the Academy obsolete. Soon enough. Within a few years the Academy gave up on opera, and the Metropolitan became the place, drawing the great singers of the world and building a company that rivaled the houses of Europe. The spiteful gesture became an institution. It lasted.
The Met became one of the world's great opera companies. It moved to Lincoln Center in 1966, but the name and the tradition carried over, and the house that began as a display of new money became a temple of an art that had once belonged only to the old.