Metropolitan Opera
International Radio Network Broadcast History

Classical music’s longest-running series of radio broadcasts began on December 25, 1931 with Hänsel und Gretel from The Metropolitan Opera. Since then, millions of people have enjoyed more than 1,400 Met radio broadcasts featuring the world’s leading operatic talent. With more than 60 awards - including nine George Foster Peabody awards, radio’s top honor - the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts are a part of musical and broadcasting history.

That Christmas Day matinée of Hänsel und Gretel was broadcast by more than one hundred stations of the National Broadcasting Company’s network in the United States and short-waved abroad; another twenty-four Metropolitan Opera broadcasts would follow that same season. Not only did the opera broadcasts provide NBC with visibility and prestige, they generated much-needed revenue for the opera company during the difficult years of The Great Depression. The listening audience of the 1930’s enjoyed world premieres of new operas, commentary by Geraldine Farrar, and Golden Age singers like Bori, Gigli, Leider, Ponselle, and Schipa. The broadcasts also featured Milton Cross as announcer, who would remain as the “voice of the Met” for more than 40 years.

Financing the Met broadcasts during the early 1930’s proved to be problematic, moving between NBC, the American Tobacco Company, the Lambert Pharmaceutical Company, and RCA (NBC’s parent company). The commercial sponsorship that began in 1940 would be pivotal to the stability of the broadcasts and initiate a relationship that would last more than six decades.

ChevronTexaco (then known as “The Texas Company”) sponsored its first Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast on December 7, 1940. The opera, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, featured Licia Albanese, Elisabeth Rethberg, and Ezio Pinza, with Ettore Panizza conducting. Henry Souvaine was hired to produce intermission features that included the “Opera Question Forum” – a perennial favorite intermission feature of the broadcasts.

The Texaco Company’s original agreement provided for just one year of opera broadcasts but its sponsorship, astoundingly, would continue until 2004. During the initial broadcast season some 2,500 letters a week poured into the company’s headquarters, praising the sponsorship. This response encouraged The Texas Company to continue its support of the Met broadcasts, which would move from NBC to the American Broadcasting Company (1944) before moving to the Columbia Broadcasting Company (1958); in 1960, the independent “Texaco-Metropolitan Opera Radio Network” was created. Borrowing from its practice of presenting radio broadcasts of live performances, Texaco began its support of live telecasts from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in 1977, when it aired Puccini’s La Bohème, conducted by James Levine and starring Luciano Pavarotti and Renata Scotto. This series of Metropolitan Opera telecasts was broadcast simultaneously by a television station and an FM stereo radio station in the same geographic area. Through these “simulcasts”, listeners were able to hear the operas in stereo, which was then unavailable on television.

Other technological innovations have augmented the Met broadcasts over the years. By 1984, all of the network’s U.S. and Canadian radio stations received high-quality sound via satellite. Six years later, satellite technology extended the broadcast family to Europe and Russia. By 1996, the network delivered its signals digitally and reached as far as New Zealand. In 2000, Met radio affiliates began streaming the broadcasts in real time over the World Wide Web. The broadcasts are currently heard on more than 350 stations in the United States, as well as in Canada, Europe, New Zealand, Australia, Latin America, China and Japan.

Since 1931 the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts have helped to popularize opera and many of today’s leading singers heard their first operas on the Met broadcasts. Listeners cherish the sense of continuity provided by just three announcers in the entire history of the broadcasts: Milton Cross (1931 -1975), Peter Allen (1975 - 2004) and on December 11, 2004, the new announcer of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts will be Margaret Juntwait. Regular intermission features over the years have included Opera News on the Air, the Singers’ Roundtable, and annual interviews with the Met’s General Managers. The Opera Quiz attracts thousands of questions each year from devoted listeners. Intermission personalities such as Edward Downes, Boris Goldovsky, and Alberta Masiello were as beloved as the great singers heard on the broadcasts. It is now up to the support of opera lovers everywhere to keep the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on the air and to ensure their continuation for future generations.