★ Metropolitan Opera Opening Night

01Perché è rilevante

The Met is the largest repertory opera company in the world by budget and by house size, and its opening night is the fixed point at which the American cultural season begins. That gives it a role no single European opening quite has: New York's museum galas, the auction season and the art fairs all take their bearings from the same fortnight. Its significance is also financial in a way that European houses' openings are not - the Met receives no meaningful government subsidy and depends on philanthropy for a large share of its budget, so the gala dinner attached to opening night is not decoration but a working part of the company's finances. In our reading, the evening's real interest is the contrast it holds: a house that has spent two decades trying to widen its audience, through cinema relay, cheaper rush tickets and free simulcasts, staging one night a year that is unapologetically formal. Both things are true and the Met has been careful to keep them so.

02La settimana intorno all'evento

Late September is the densest fortnight in the New York cultural year. The Met's opening usually falls within days of the New York Philharmonic's and New York City Ballet's season openings in the same complex, of the United Nations General Assembly's high-level week, which closes streets across Midtown and fills the hotels, and of the tail of the autumn fashion and art calendars. Lincoln Center itself is at its busiest, with the plaza, the David Geffen Hall and the David H. Koch Theater all in use; the plaza is public and the fountain is a fixture of the Upper West Side evening. The Columbus Circle and Broadway corridor above 59th Street runs at capacity, and traffic on Columbus Avenue is managed on the night. For a visitor with no ticket, the week is a good one: the museums have opened their autumn shows, the weather is at its best, and the plaza is free.

03Quando arrivare

Ticket holders should be on the plaza by half past five for a performance that begins at about half past six - the arrivals are the point, and the house seats late-comers only at intervals. Two or three nights covers the trip comfortably; September in New York is worth more than one evening. If you are going to the opera but not the gala, arriving from the Broadway side and walking across the plaza gives you the whole scene without a ticket to the dinner. Leave the following morning free: the performance and its intervals run late.

04Dove alloggiare

The Upper West Side between Columbus Circle and 72nd Street puts you within a ten-minute walk of Lincoln Center and among neighbourhood restaurants rather than tourist ones; the hotels around Columbus Circle and along Broadway are the practical block. Midtown West around 57th Street is fifteen minutes on foot and has far more rooms, at the cost of Times Square traffic. The Upper East Side across the park is twenty minutes by taxi and is where the museums are. In UN General Assembly week, Midtown East and the streets around the United Nations should be avoided entirely - the security closures make them unusable - and that is exactly the week the Met opens.

05Accesso e ospitalità

Two things are sold and they are quite different. Seats for the opening-night performance go on public sale with the rest of the Met's season, through the company's own box office and website, at premium prices for that date; anyone can buy one. The Opening Night Gala - the dinner, the reception and the associated prime seating - is a benefit sold through the Met's development office at charitable prices, and is the closed part of the evening. The company also publishes rush tickets, standing room and student programmes across the season, though not typically for opening night. Live in HD cinema relays and, in some seasons, free plaza and Times Square simulcasts are the wholly public routes to the same performances. No prices are quoted here because the Met's own pages could not be read directly.

06Dove si svolge l'attività sociale

The Lincoln Center plaza is the public stage and it is genuinely open: the fountain, the arcade and the steps are a New York gathering place on any evening and the barriers on opening night keep a crowd rather than clear one. Inside, the Grand Tier and Dress Circle lobbies, the Grand Tier Restaurant and the bars on each level are where the intervals happen. Afterward, the restaurants of the Upper West Side around Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues and the bars around Columbus Circle take the crowd; the Met's own gala dinner is a closed function. Nothing in this calendar is easier to watch from the outside than a Lincoln Center opening.

07Come arrivare

08Aspetti pratici

09Storia

The Metropolitan Opera was founded in 1883 by a group of New York businessmen who could not obtain boxes at the older Academy of Music, and the company's opening nights have been social occasions since that first season on Broadway at 39th Street. The house moved to Lincoln Center in 1966, into a building by Wallace K. Harrison with a plaza and glass front designed to be looked into from the street. Opening night's modern form - a new production, a red carpet, a benefit dinner in a tent or in the house's own spaces - developed over the following decades. The company's outward-facing programmes are more recent: the Live in HD cinema relays began in 2006 and are now shown in thousands of cinemas worldwide, and free plaza and Times Square simulcasts of opening night have been staged in a number of seasons since. The Met's finances have been publicly strained more than once in the past fifteen years, which is part of why the gala matters.

10Chi è presente

The Metropolitan Opera's own subscribers and patrons, who are the core of the house on any night; the company's donors and board, concentrated in the gala; New York's cultural and philanthropic institutions, which cross-attend one another's openings in the same weeks; the international opera profession, in town for the season's start; the American and international press; and a broad general audience, since the performance itself is publicly sold. The plaza crowd outside is anyone who happens to be on the Upper West Side.