Academy of Music (New York City)
The Academy of Music was a New York City opera house, located on the northeast corner of East 14th Street and Irving Place in Manhattan. The 4,000-seat hall opened on October 2, 1854. The review in The New York Times declared it to be an acoustical "triumph", but "In every other aspect ... a decided failure," complaining about the architecture, interior design and the closeness of the seating;[1] although a follow-up several days later relented a bit, saying that the theater "looked more cheerful, and in every way more effective" than it had on opening night.[2]
This article is about the 1854 opera house. For the 1927 movie theater, see Palladium (New York City).General information
The Academy's opera season became the center of social life for New York's elite, with the oldest and most prominent families owning seats in the theater's boxes. The opera house was destroyed by fire in 1866[3] and subsequently rebuilt, but it was supplanted as the city's premier opera venue in 1883 by the Metropolitan Opera House at 1411 Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets – created by the nouveaux riches who had been frozen out of the Academy – and ceased presenting opera in 1886, turning instead to vaudeville. It was demolished in 1926 to make way for the Consolidated Edison Building.
In literature and popular culture[edit]
The second paragraph of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence reads: "On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection 'above the forties' of a new Opera House which would compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the 'new people' whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music." The Academy and so called opera war of the early 1880s are a significant part of the plot in season two of the HBO series The Gilded Age.
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