Why not? One possibility: Relations between the city’s old-money elite and immigrants were wary and suspicious. Yankee Boston had developed a strong anti-immigrant streak--Robert Treat Paine Jr. and Henry Parkman, Opera Company stockholders both, had also helped found the Immigration Restriction League--and regarded the Italians with particular trepidation. Already by 1896, the Globe could note that “The Italians and Portuguese seem to have aroused the ire of the Immigration Restriction League more than any other nationality.” Curley, in particular, would exploit that ire, widening the gap between immigrants and Brahmins. It might be impossible to draw a direct connection between the city’s attitudes and the perpetual transience of possible successors to the Boston Opera Company, but if Boston opera needed what the Met had--an environment where Brahmins and immigrants could come together in the interests of civic improvement--that may have simply been a bridge too far.
Why Boston is ‘not an opera town’
The Opera House that Jordan built was knocked down in 1958, leaving, as Globe critic Jeremy Eichler has put it, “a striking void in the cultural life of a city so rich in other dimensions.” Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston, founded the same year, found its grand-opera ambitions continually thwarted by the lack of a permanent venue; the group’s 1978 acquisition of the B. F. Keith Memorial Theater (now the new Boston Opera House) proved the straw that broke the company’s financial back. Opera shifted to more modest companies on the model of Boston Lyric Opera: four or five productions a year, perhaps, in rented halls. (By comparison, the original Boston Opera Company had planned 24 operas for its final, canceled season.)
The 1991 disintegration of Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston and Opera Boston’s demise last month might be divergent failures--too much fiscal chutzpah in the former case, perhaps not enough of it in the latter--but both fit all too well the narrative established a century ago: Like the razing of the Opera House, the end of Opera Boston could be seen as both unexpected and oddly inevitable. The discord might be long past, but the repercussions still echo. This town, after all, does treasure its curses.