Metropolitan Opera

The Metropolitan Opera enters the diary as a place of performance and social observation, not as the subject of an institutional portrait. In one recorded visit, Andy Warhol judged the opera and its audience against the standards of rock and roll, leaving a compact but pointed impression of the institution as he encountered it.

A Recorded Visit

John and Kimiko picked Warhol up for a trip to the Metropolitan Opera. The performance was Wagner’s Tannhàuser. The diary supplies no broader account of the outing or the opera house; its focus is Warhol’s immediate reaction, recorded within the sequence of everyday activities that made up his personal diary.

Performance and Audience

Warhol found the performance boring and judged that it had no great singers. He speculated that the strongest singers were going into rock and roll, placing opera and popular music in direct competition for vocal talent. The comparison makes the opera visit more than a report of attendance: it captures his tendency to assess established cultural forms through the contemporary popular culture that occupied his attention.

His observation also turns from the stage to the auditorium. He described the audience as boys with older men, with the younger men learning about what he called the finer things in life. In this account, attendance at the opera appears both as cultural instruction and as a social encounter. That impression belongs to Warhol’s diary perspective; the entry does not establish it as a general description of the Metropolitan Opera’s audience.

The Diary as Record

The visit survives in a diary whose method joined personal observation to routine accounting. From the fall of 1976, Pat Hackett and Warhol spoke by telephone on weekday mornings so she could record his activities and cash expenses. What began as a log became, in Hackett’s description, Warhol’s own personal narrative, though the need to satisfy tax auditors remained part of its purpose.

The system was unusually attentive to small details: Warhol recorded even ten-cent calls, while Hackett typed the daily entries and generally attached the loose cab and restaurant receipts to their pages before storing them in letter boxes. This combination of precise recordkeeping and subjective judgment shapes the Metropolitan Opera episode. The diary preserves not an official assessment of the institution, but the particular encounter that mattered enough to Warhol to be recounted.