This knock on Boston--“not an opera town”--has a history that goes back at least a century. Of course there’s opera in Boston--there’s too much musical energy and talent passing through the city for there not to be. Boston Lyric Opera still perseveres; the Boston Early Music Festival has embraced fully staged opera in recent years; conservatories, colleges, and a small community of chamber-opera collectives mount productions. But the grandest of opera--the sort of repertory-based, civic-institution grand opera companies found in so many American cities, New York’s Metropolitan, Chicago’s Lyric, Houston’s Grand--has never taken hold here. That absence is the root of Boston’s “not an opera town” reputation, a reputation that goes back to another operatic scheme that burned bright and then abruptly burned out: the Boston Opera Company.
The Boston Opera Company, founded in 1908, was the city’s original attempt to host opera on the highest and grandest level. Launched by a wealthy civic booster, it brought touring stars to magnificent productions in a new, purpose-built Opera House not far from Symphony Hall. But for all its ambition, it lasted only six seasons. Officially, what ended its run was World War I, a cataclysmic disruption to an enterprise dependent on overseas talent. But the war, adjudged Boston Globe critic Penfield Roberts, “accelerated a collapse which had, perhaps, been inevitable.”
What made it so inevitable? Beyond finances, the Boston Opera Company fell victim to something more subtle. The story of its collapse--and the larger failure of Boston ever to become an “opera town”--offers a window into a set of attitudes and divisions peculiar to the city.
At the turn of the 20th century, Boston’s prominence in the arts was anchored in the sobriety of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The MFA was soon to move into its palatial new home on Huntington Avenue; the BSO, widely regarded as America’s finest orchestra, had moved into its own palace, Symphony Hall, in 1900.
