The Metropolitan Opera, now the largest performing arts institution in the United States, was founded by unpleasant people at a Wall Street steakhouse. Its first subscribers, robber barons mad to be excluded from the high society that gathered in the august boxes of the Academy of Music, sought a social scene where they could be treated like European aristocrats. Opera was, for this class, not a passion but, as Edith Wharton writes in the first paragraphs of The Age of Innocence, an ‘amusement’. Her hero Newland Archer arrives at the Academy after the beginning of the third of five acts of Gounaud’s Faust, and his response to the soprano’s performance is mostly couched in terms of a patronising apprehension of his bride-to-be in the opposite box. That soprano, Christina Nilsson, sang the same role to open the Met’s first season in 1883. The Academy abandoned its opera programme three years later.