An Age of Opulence.

The story of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City unfolds amid privilege and desire. During the late nineteenth century a coterie of moneyed families, their fortunes swelled by post-Civil War speculation, set new standards for conspicuous consumption. Yet despite their cash and their flash, the nouveaux riches of New York remained excluded from the inner circles of the old Knickerbocker gentry. In the 1870s and early 1880s New York boasted an adequate opera house: the Academy of Music, founded in 1849 and located downtown on Fourteenth Street. Edith Wharton (1862-1937), novelist of New York manners, opened her Age of Innocence (1920) at the academy: "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...