America's Greatest Opera House: The Story of the Met

America’s Greatest Opera House: The Story of the Met

BBC Four

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Susan Froemke

Documentaries

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

BBC Four - America's Greatest Opera House: The Story of the Met

A chronicle of the creation of the Metropolitan Opera's new home in 1966.

Documentary about the creation of the Metropolitan Opera's new home in 1966 at Lincoln Square, which replaced the original 1883 house on Broadway.

Documentary that surveys a remarkable period in the Metropolitan Opera's rich history and a time of great change for New York. Featuring rarely seen archival footage, stills, recent interviews and a soundtrack of extraordinary Met performances, the documentary chronicles the creation of the Met's storeyed home in 1966, which replaced the original 1883 house on Broadway, against a backdrop of the artists, architects and politicians who shaped the cultural life of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. 

Among the notable figures in the documentary are famed soprano Leontyne Price, who opened the new Met in 1966 with Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra, Rudolf Bing, the Met's imperious general manager who engineered the move from the old house to the new one, Robert Moses, the unstoppable city planner who bulldozed an entire neighbourhood to make room for the Lincoln Center, and Wallace Harrison, whose quest for architectural glory was never fully realised.

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