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The Metropolitan Opera House (colloquially The Met) is an opera house located on Broadway at Lincoln Square in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Part of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the theater opened in 1966. It replaced the former Metropolitan Opera House opened in 1883 and located at Broadway and 39th St. and is the home of the Metropolitan Opera. At nearly 4,000 seats, it is the largest purpose-built opera house in the world. ==History== Planning for a new home for the Metropolitan Opera began as early as the mid-1920s, when the backstage facilities of the former house were becoming vastly inadequate for growing repertory and advancing stagecraft. The development that what would become today's Rockefeller Center was originally to have a new 4,000-seat opera house at its center, but financial problems and the following stock market crash of 1929 postponed the relocation of the Metropolitan Opera, and the complex became more commercial-based. With the development moving forward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. replaced the opera house with a 70-story skyscraper, opened as the RCA Building in 1933. Young Rockefeller Center architect Wallace Harrison would be approached some 20 years later by officers of the New York Philharmonic Society and the Met to develop a new home for both institutions. As chief architect again for the development of Lincoln Center, Harrison was chosen to design the new opera house- to be built as the centerpiece of the new performing arts complex. After a long process of redesigns, revisions and opposing interests (provided by the Met wanting a more traditional design for its home, and the conflicting wishes of the architects of the other Lincoln Center venues), construction of Harrison's forty-third design of the Metropolitan Opera House began in the winter of 1963. The opera house was the last of the three major Lincoln Center venues to be completed. Although the house would not officially open for several more months, the first public performance at the new Metropolitan Opera House was a performance of Giacomo Puccini's ''La Fanciulla del West'' on April 11, 1966 with Beverly Bower as Minnie, Gaetano Bardini as Dick Johnson, and Cesare Bardelli as Jack Rance. The production was attended by 3,000 high school students, and began with the playing of the National Anthem and a series of sound tests that included a loud chord from the orchestra and a blast from a shotgun. The new building officially opened on September 16, 1966, with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's ''Antony and Cleopatra''. The Met is one the most technologically advanced stages in the world. Its vast array of hydraulic elevators, motorized stages and rigging systems have made possible the massive staging requirements of grand opera in repertory and have made possible complex productions such as Franco Zeffirelli's 1981 production of ''La bohème'', as well as productions of mammoth operas, including Prokofiev's ''War and Peace'', Verdi's ''Aida'' and Wagner's four-part, 16-hour ''Der Ring Des Nibelungen''. The Met stage has also been home to several world premieres of operas, including John Corigliano's ''The Ghost of Versailles'', Phillip Glass's ''The Voyage'' and the US premiere of Nico Muhly's ''Two Boys'' in 2013. When the Metropolitan Opera is on hiatus, the Opera House is home to the annual Spring season of American Ballet Theatre (ABT). It regularly hosts touring opera and ballet companies including the Kirov, Bolshoi, and the La Scala companies. In addition, the Met has presented recitals by Vladimir Horowitz, Renée Fleming, Kathleen Battle and others. Philip Glass's ''Einstein on the Beach'' was staged independently at the Met in 1976. Concerts by Barbra Streisand, The Who, Paul McCartney and others have been massively successful as well. Several notable non-operatic performances occurred in 1986. On July 8, a gala fund raiser performance to benefit ABT and Paris Opera Ballet saw the first joint performance in over ten years of ABT artistic director Mikhail Baryshnikov and Paris Opera Ballet Director Rudolf Nureyev. On August 9 and 10, comedian Robin Williams recorded performances that were shown on HBO and released on compact disc under the title ''Robin Williams Live at the Met''. On October 19, 1986, the Opera House hosted Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic during their North American tour. The opera house has been featured in a number of movies and television programs, including the climax of Norman Jewison's 1987 film ''Moonstruck''. In addition to regular Metropolitan Opera radio and television broadcasts, several other television programs have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera House including ''Danny Kaye's Look-In at the Metropolitan Opera'' (CBS, 1975) and ''Sills and Burnett at the Met'' (CBS, 1976). In 1999 and 2001, the Opera House was the venue for the ''MTV Video Music Awards''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Metropolitan Opera House (Lincoln Center)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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