When it opened its doors in 1909, the Boston Opera House boasted that it had the most spacious stage, the handsomest appointments, the most advanced stage machinery in the business. The curtain rose on a magnificent performance of Ponchielli's La Gioconda. "In the future," said one visiting New York critic, "Bostonians will no longer come to New York for opera; instead, New Yorkers will be coming to Boston." But Impresario Oscar Hammerstein, then staging grand opera at his Manhattan Opera House in successful competition with the Metropolitan, made another kind of prophecy. He...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
