In later years, I have had occasion to sit in orchestra and box seats, and to see what I had only briefly glimpsed when accompanying my father: the full play of emotion on the faces of the singers. The Dress Circle was what we could afford and where we belonged. I don’t recall that we resented our seats and wished for better ones, any more than we resented the riches of rich people and longed to be rich ourselves. You could only make out their expressions with the aid of opera glasses.
They came into better view on the Dress Circle level, but were still too far away to register as the characters they were representing. I once sat in the vertiginous top tier the voices of the singers carried, though they were themselves barely visible, tiny doll-like figures ridiculously gesticulating. Our seats were not in the Grand Tier-which was the third level of seats, above the orchestra and boxes-but on the fourth level, called the Dress Circle, above which rose two more tiers, the Balcony and the Family Circle. On rare occasions he would set down a happenstance of the evening, for example: “In the intermission drinks with Janet in the Grand Tier lobby (Scotch for me, Tom Collins for Janet). He would cite the names of the operas and the singers and the conductors, and give a terse, usually highly favorable opinion (“excellent,” “beautiful,” “outstanding”), though here and there he found something to criticize, such as the length of a “Figaro” (“interminable, from 8 to 11:45”). A regular feature of my father’s pocket diaries of the nineteen-fifties are his entries about the performances he attended at the old, wantonly destroyed Metropolitan Opera House on Thirty-ninth Street, usually with one or another family member.
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