Metropolitan Finances

After a sensational tour that had taken it to Chicago and Cleveland, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera last week finished off its scheduled season, decided to keep playing its home town for at least another week. Riding a wartime spending wave that had lifted practically all U.S. show business, the Metropolitan (with subscription prices reduced to a $5 top) had packed in customers at a rate seldom exceeded even in the brave days of Enrico Caruso.

With great singers scarcer than ever because of the war, the Met had concentrated on great maestros. They gave its teamwork a polish seldom noticed in recent years. The season's biggest hits had been Conductors George Szell (Salome, Boris Godunoff), Bruno Walter (Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro) and Sir Thomas Beecham (Carmen, Louise, Faust, Manon).

The books showed that in Manhattan 450,000 operagoers had paid $899,000. The two-week run in Chicago had grossed $166,000, the week in Cleveland $185,000.

It looked as though the Met's annual deficit (about $200,000) might be considerably pared. One large expense still worried the directors (even causing some of them to talk huffily about moving permanently into the tax-free auditorium of Chicago's Opera House): the real estate tax of $150,000 a year that the Met pays the City of New York.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.