Monday, November 30, 2009
Socially Exclusive Entertainment
The November 28th, 2009 issue of the Financial Times recommends a book called The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera by Daniel Snowman. The capsule review refers to opera's "role as a socially exclusive entertainment in democratic New York." Having been to The Met several times this year & witnessed, & even participated in, much unseemly merriment therein, I think they will in fact let just about anyone in.
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My reading of the full sentence from which that quote was extracted is that the author did not intend it to be in the present tense but, rather, one of the stages in the development of opera's social history. Indeed, there was a time when New York had two opera houses, one for each of two elite classes (old rich and new rich)! When I first became a Met subscriber there was a normative dress code. That code was relaxed progressively from the cheap seats to the expensive ones. The boxes were the last to go; but it is not hard to find jeans there these days (although I do not think I have seen T-shirts).
Sometimes it's fun to dress up for the opera. I was in a private donor room at the Met during an intermission this summer, & there was at least one person in jeans. He told us he was challenged when he tried to gain entry, even though he was a perfectly legitimate donor.
I can also attest that I saw a patron wearing a quite flamboyant t-shirt in the Grand Tier Restaurant at a fall performance.
There really was an unseemly amount of merriment at the Met this year. Did I tell you I was photographed whilst dining with Belgians at the Grand Tier restaurant a few weeks ago? My, my.
Let us hope those photos surface somewhere for us to see! I guess standards are quite lax in that restaurant.
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