The new opera house opened to great fanfare on the fine and mild night of October 22, 1883, featuring soprano Christine Nilsson singing Faust. The symbolism of this particular soprano singing this particular opera would be enshrined in literature when Edith Wharton began her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the Gilded Age, The Age of Innocence, with the line “On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.” No more symbolic reference to the sweeping away of the old guard could Wharton imagine.
